Hearing Guangling Knew No Cold, the Great Snow Dragon Cavalry Rode South to Jiangnan

["I'm in Liaoning, a Great Ming Dragon-Tiger General whose family has guarded Liaodong for generations. You've given this prince a hundred thousand cavalrymen, and in the late Ming at that. Once I enter the pass, I can make you all just one promise: no shaving your heads."]

There were two answers in the short video. One wanted to restore the Han imperial house, and the other wanted to strike out on his own and become emperor. Neither wanted to save the Great Ming.

The Ming emperors looked a little embarrassed.

Especially Zhu Yuanzhang. He had been so gratified just a moment ago!

Come to think of it, if someone really had a hundred thousand cavalrymen under his command, how many would remain loyal?

By rights, a founding emperor like Zhu Yuanzhang, who had fought his way out of mountains of corpses and seas of blood, would be wary of everyone. Unfortunately, he had watched too few short videos and was "too young." Misled by the title, he had thought that people of later generations truly cared about the Great Ming and wanted to save it.

A gratified expression could not vanish into thin air; it merely moved to someone else's face. Liu Bang said, "My Great Han is better than the Great Ming. Your granddaddy's sixty-sixth-generation descendant still wants to restore the Great Han!"

"A hundred thousand cavalrymen? People of later generations really dared to dream!"

"How would he feed and maintain a hundred thousand cavalrymen?"

[A hundred thousand cavalrymen? Have you calculated how many horses and how much grain that would take? What about weapons and equipment? Besides, getting on a horse doesn't make someone a cavalryman. A cavalryman has to be a good rider who can kill enemies from horseback. Otherwise, all you have is mounted infantry.]

[If I already have a hundred thousand cavalrymen, how could I not have grain? If I really don't have any, there's dried meat all over the place for me to seize.]

That comment made many common people go cold all over.

[Whether your hundred thousand cavalrymen can fight is another question. If you can't command them, ten thousand Eight Banners troops will charge in and wipe them out.]

Dorgon: It seems people of later generations know how formidable my Eight Banners warriors are.

The thought had barely crossed his mind when he saw the next comment, and Dorgon's expression changed at once.

[You think far too highly of the Manchu Qing Tatars! In real history, when the Manchu Qing entered the pass, the elite core of their forces consisted of just fifteen thousand Eight Banners troops. Those were their elites. Adding the Ming troops who defected to their side and soldiers of other ethnicities, they had only a hundred and eighty thousand soldiers altogether, though they called it two hundred thousand. With servants and logistics personnel added, the Manchu Qing proclaimed to the outside world that they had an army of a million.]

[If the Great Ming armies hadn't surrendered and defected, it wouldn't have been so easy for the Manchu Qing to fight their way through the pass.]

[At their peak, the Ming Dynasty's armies numbered three million. By the late Ming, they should still have had a million.

But if you count carefully, there really weren't that many. Subtract the men who had deserted and the nonexistent men whose pay was being pocketed. Then you have to subtract the soldiers who rarely trained and lacked complete armor and weapons, and so on, because the court was perpetually in arrears on military pay and military farmland had been seized.

By the late Ming, there weren't many soldiers who could actually fight! I can say with complete confidence that the entire Great Ming of the late Ming period didn't have a hundred thousand cavalrymen.]

[If Chongzhen had possessed a hundred thousand cavalrymen, he would have restored the realm long ago! In fact, the Great Ming of the late Ming period didn't even have fifty thousand cavalrymen.]

[The Ming Dynasty was rotten to the roots. Even if Chongzhen had five hundred thousand cavalrymen, he couldn't have saved it. At most, he could have overthrown it, founded a new dynasty, and established a new set of rules and order.]

[The Guanning Iron Cavalry numbered only three thousand. If they expanded further, the court couldn't afford to maintain them. Losing a hundred men from the Guanning Iron Cavalry was already a heartbreaking loss.]

Chongzhen: I truly lack the funds. It is hard to maintain them!

[The Great Ming had a total of a hundred and twenty thousand troops beyond the pass: eighty thousand in Liaodong and forty thousand at Shanhai Pass. Only ten thousand of them were cavalry.]

[Even if you had a hundred thousand cavalrymen in the late Ming, whether you could afford to maintain them would be another matter! Maintaining them to the highest possible standard, without even mentioning how much the men would eat in a day, each cavalryman would have three horses. Those three hundred thousand horses alone would consume an enormous amount of fodder every day.]

[I just looked it up. An ancient warhorse ate three to six times as much as a person. One horse ate at least as much as three soldiers, equivalent to a day's rations for four ordinary households.]

[Maintaining a hundred thousand cavalrymen means maintaining three hundred thousand warhorses, which is equivalent to providing food and drink for a million or even two million people every day!]

[There were dynasties in ancient times that could afford to maintain a hundred thousand cavalrymen! But not many!]

"It would be utterly impossible for one person to maintain a hundred thousand cavalrymen!"

"At the height of my Great Tang, all our cavalry together numbered only a little over a hundred thousand, and not all of them were elites!"

The emperors who had won their realms on horseback agreed with these comments. Cavalry really did cost a fortune to maintain.

[Don't pay attention to TV dramas, historical romances, and novels. In them, battles involve hundreds of thousands or even a million troops, with cavalry numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Even if they lose a battle and the whole army is wiped out, they can casually raise another one. In fact, it's all exaggerated. Ancient armies weren't that large, mainly because they couldn't afford to maintain them!]

[At the standard ratio of ten infantrymen to one cavalryman, having a hundred thousand cavalrymen in the late Ming would mean having three hundred thousand horses and a million infantrymen, enough to sweep away everything in their path.]

[Give me thirty thousand Great Snow Dragon Cavalrymen and that would be enough!]

Cao Cao: Great Snow Dragon Cavalry. Just hearing the name, I can tell they're elite cavalry!

Li Shimin: I wonder what makes this Great Snow Dragon Cavalry so formidable?

Genghis Khan: Great Snow Dragon Cavalry? Are they that formidable? How do they compare to my Mongolian iron cavalry?

[If you really had the Great Snow Dragon Cavalry, ten thousand would be enough to destroy the Manchu Qing and take the realm!]

[Hearing Guangling knew no cold, the Great Snow Dragon Cavalry rode south to Jiangnan.]

[The Great Snow Dragon Cavalry seems to have had only ten thousand men.]

"Ten thousand men could destroy us Manchus? People of later generations have such big mouths!"

"Could those ten thousand men be heavenly soldiers and generals? Or did every one of them carry a firearm?"

"Guangling is Yangzhou, right? The Great Snow Dragon Cavalry was going to trample Jiangnan flat!"

[Great Snow Dragon Cavalry #Sword Snow Stride]

"The Great Snow Dragon Cavalry! The heavenly screen is going to tell us about the Great Snow Dragon Cavalry!"

"What does Sword Snow Stride mean? It looks like the title of a book, yet it also seems like a storybook."

"Let's see just what this Great Snow Dragon Cavalry can do."

["The Northern Liang Iron Cavalry wore the finest armor under heaven; the Great Snow Dragon Cavalry stood supreme in Northern Liang."]

["Everyone knows Northern Liang had three hundred thousand iron cavalrymen, but they weren't all cavalry. There were around a hundred and forty thousand cavalrymen; the rest were infantry."]

"An army of three hundred thousand, with a hundred and forty thousand iron cavalrymen. Truly terrifying!"

"Was Northern Liang in Western Liang, in Liangzhou?"

"Could Northern Liang be a dynasty of later generations?"

["These hundred-odd thousand cavalrymen were roughly divided into the Iron Pagoda led by Qi Dangguo, the two heavy cavalry forces known as the Zhihu Army and the Weixiong Army, the Dragon Elephant Field Forces led by Xu Longxiang, and Xu Xiao's personal army of ten thousand, the Great Snow Dragon Cavalry Army."]

["The fiercest among them was the Great Snow Dragon Cavalry Army. Its commander was White Bear Yuan Zuozong, the foremost cavalry fighter in Northern Liang."]

["The Great Snow Dragon Cavalry's equipment was even more extravagant. Each man had three top-grade warhorses. Both men and horses wore armor, and one horse also carried heavy armor. Once they put it on, they became heavy cavalry."]

["The Great Snow Dragon Cavalry wasn't ordinary light cavalry. It stood somewhere between heavy and light cavalry. In heavy armor, they were heavy cavalry; in light armor, they were light cavalry. Their mobility and flexibility were both exceptionally high."]

["As for their other weapons, their Liang sabers, crossbows, and arrows were the best in the entire cavalry."]