Zhenhai Port.
Several hundred vessels of all sizes were drilling.
This time, the court had unusually paid out the arrears in military pay, issued next month's pay in advance, fed them full meals, and even provided five pigs.
Though only the officers got to eat meat, while everyone else could only drink oily broth, it was still treatment rarely seen in recent years.
The officers had also said that if they won this time, they would receive a full year of actual pay at once!
How could they not drill desperately? Han soldiers were useless when underpaid, but invincible when fully paid.
The premise was that the money truly reached every soldier's hands.
Take Liaodong, for example. Its annual military pay amounted to four to seven million taels.
Even calculated at four million, it would have been enough to pay 200,000 troops in full.
The problem was that Liaodong maintained fewer than ten thousand retainers who actually received full pay.
As for the need for additional military equipment, Liaodong also had vast military farmlands that paid no taxes whatsoever.
Thus, the Liaodong problem began with the military families' boundless greed. In collusion with officials, they pocketed enormous sums of money and income from military farmlands instead of using it to train all the troops.
Why were they greedy?
Because the Liaodong court had not established a feudal prince.
If Yun* had been permanently guarded by a house like the Prince Mu Mansion, the Eastern Tartars would certainly have been pacified.
The problem was that Liaodong lay too close to the Capital Region. After producing one Zhu Di, they would never establish another Liaodong feudal domain, not even if it killed them.
Without a feudal domain, the military families alone might be transferred south for the Southern Expedition or north for