Chapter 723: Using The People

Kultai is walking outside his tent and from afar he could see builders.

Yan builders and beside them are Steppe builders.

Most of them are people who is not suitable to become a warrior.

They look at the Yan builders and they ask question

What are they building and what are they learning?

Siege weapons. The Khan captured many craftsmen from the land of Yan.

In the past, any chief who captured the Yan people would make them a slave to sell or slave for labour.

The Yan people always accused of the Hu people to treat them like a beast of burden and drive them to their deaths or make them slave labour to work in stone mines or back breaking labour work.

But they learned it from the empires around them. And for the Southern Great Steppe, they learned it from Yan.

Hundreds of years ago when it was the time of Xun dynasty, they win Shu with treachery and how did they treat the people that did not share their colours, share their culture and share their gods and share their governance system?

They label the governance primitive, they crafts words and anecdotes to degrade them and called them "barbarians" to justify killing the Hu children and innocent people and then enslave them

It is not only Yan empire that did this to the people of the Steppe. The Western Zhou did it and Roma did it

And the Steppe tribes learn this many times and so when the Steppe tribe gain power and raids the land of Yan and the lands of the empires around them, they did what the people of these empire did to them

But that is not all.

Because the Steppe people shows their likes and dislike honestly.

The people of Yan had been killing the people of the Steppe regardless of affiliation and whether they were soldiers or warriors and kill old people, children and innocent herders that have nothing to do with war

The Steppe was not always a land teeming with warriors.

But since the empires around them did not discriminate between them, whether their tribes are warlike or not, whether their tribes participated or not in the killing of their people, and the Yan people killed regardless of anything, it is that culture and that environment that made the people of Steppe all become a warrior.

All of them could become a warrior and fight. Because those who don’t would get killed by these crazed killers.

They spout all god words and said this and that, but in the end, they simply look down on them and wanted people to learn their culture

If their culture is superior, they did not need to promote it that much or kill the people that don’t want to assimilate to it.

Most of the culture in the world mixed with each other. Because they take what is good and remove the bad.

After some people had created the culture, the culture then become rigid.

But the people of Yan look down on them and believe they have nothing to learn from them

But the people of the Steppe find there is merit in learning from these enemies and so, they learned them but retained their cultures.

They are born on horseback and all of them unless they have some difficulties would be able to shoot an arrow and fight with a blade and sabre.

There is intrigues and there is plots and schemes when it is tribes against tribes but for the people of the Southern Great Steppe, when a Yan army dares to come to the Steppe, then regardless of ranks, of title of tribes, they all would unite and even a ten year old kid would ride a horse and shoot arrows.

Because they all had experienced the so called "benevolence" and "virtue" of the Yan people.

They captured their women and turn them into dancing girls, subjected to humiliation and sufferings.

And for their young boys these Yan people would do all kinds of evil to them

When the Steppe people came to Yan, they raid and plunder and rape the people of Yan. But did the Yan people did not do the same

They did the same and even worse.

It is because of this, that the later behaviour of the chief also change. Escalation of violence and escalation of torture, escalation of dwindling moral, then make all of the chief red in eyes when fighting Yan people

Other than taking the Yan people and turning them into slave, the other things they did would be to kill them and slaughter them

It has become a habit that sometimes, there is not even any Yan slave to sell because the chief would kill them first

In some tribes, they would even tear apart the skin of the Yan people and would make a trophy of it.

the reasons why the Steppe people did this is because everyone have suffered under the Yan dynasty.

They could write a thousand words praising their so called "pacifying" the barbarians in their stories. But the people of the steppe, the so called the one being pacified know exactly what that pacifying really means

It is nothing more than torturing them

Hence, the Khan approach is very different. The Khan had now control most of the Great Wall of Yan.

Not only he control it, everyone under the Khan land knows that the Great Wall is being dismantled.

How is it being dismantled? The Khan is taking the stones that made the Great Wall and using it to build the cities and the villages.

There is almost an inexhaustible supply of stones and soil on the wall. Of course, this could not have happened, if Nurshira had not been ravaged and the north is not in chaos.

But the north of Yan is in chaos with all kinds of warlords springing up

The Hu people there is also gathering and is competing against each other and against the warlords of the Yan people

One of the things that the Khan did after returning from the west was to send his men to secure the wall.

Before, the wall is maintained by the warbands and some tribes that lives near Nurshira

But when ten thousands horsemen is coming to that wall, ready to kill you if you disagree with their words, it is easy to see how that wall is easily conquered.

At that time, the wall was no longer under the Yan control.

The Yan dynasty has two lines of defence. Nurshira wall is a part of the Great Wall of Yan

Yan called it the Great Wall of Yan.

To many people of the Steppe, they simply called it the Wall of Yan

There is another section of the wall that is beyond the Nurshira rivers that is connected to the larger structure of the Wall.

But the wall of Yan that is on the side of the Southern Great Steppe is now being fully controlled by the Khan.

And the Khan has been transporting the soil to made clay, the stone to make his palace and cities.

And that route that controls the trade between Yan and the land beyond it now is controlled by the Khan.

And at the same time the Khan also captured many people of Yan.

From villages and from cities.

Some of them were captured directly, some of them were bought from those warbands that went raiding.

And some.....some were actually people of Nurshira themselves that went to the Steppe, selling themselves

It is said there is a famine going on in the north and there is many battles all over the north and people are being displaced.

Any other chief would have come out and kill the Yan people and slaughter them and built a mound of skull to commemorate the suffering of their ancestors.

After all when that Huo Qubing and his ilk come and kill the people of the Steppe at that time, how many mothers, how many child were killed by that butcher. The land of the Southern Great Steppe were drenched with the blood of the innocent

There were more heads of herders that is taken than the heads of warriors.

But the Khan did not do such a thing. Instead, he welcome these people yan or Hu and or nay other race.

Those with talents and those with expertise is housed in the House of Talent.

If their talent has a use then that would be the time for them to soar with great heights

The Khan did not care who you worship, what colour of your skin, what tongue you speak, what culture you practiced, what he cares about is whether you could help him do things.

As long as you could do things, then that is someone the Khan needs.

And those who the Khan needs are showered with riches.

Kultai daresay that the craftsmen of Yan is treated better in the Khan employ than they were in those manors of those aristocratic families

Craftsmen, artisans, blacksmith , armourers, all of these are in high demands.

These craftsmen for Yan is compensated heavily for teaching the people of the Steppe their methods.

And it is not the khan would abandon them after teaching the people of the Steppe.

The Khan allowed them to open forges and smiths and some of them are even given teaching jobs to nurture future blacksmith and some are taken by the Khan to research new methods of smithing or armouring or other inventions

It is some policies that the Khan made. Kultai did not know in detail of the organization and the inner working of that system

This is something Kultai heard in passing.

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