Once the group had finished touring the capital's construction sites and arrived together at the Engineering Command Post, the three of them gathered around the capital's enormous Sand Table model, chatting over tea.
Looking at the gigantic Sand Table before him, Dashu was the first to offer a reminder.
"Chieftain, the capital is so enormous. When it's finally completed, filling the entire capital with people will probably require hundreds of thousands. Even if we moved everyone from the Han Tribe in, it probably still wouldn't be enough.
"Besides, the capital's population will all be urban residents. How are they supposed to live? Even if the outskirts of the capital can be used for farming, the suburbs are too far from the city proper. We can't have people living in the city and running outside to farm every day, can we?
"But if the capital's citizens don't farm, then the only way they can earn an income is by working for money and using what they earn to buy the necessities of life.
"If hundreds of thousands of people all go to work, how many jobs will be needed? How many goods can they produce, and how many people will it take to consume all those goods?
"Then there's the issue of food for hundreds of thousands of people. Assuming each person eats one jin of rice a day, if there are five hundred thousand people, that means needing 250 tons of rice every day, over a hundred tons of meat, and over a hundred tons of vegetables. And that's the daily amount.
"Hundreds of thousands of people... Not to mention where we'd even get so many people. Even if there really were that many, how many commanderies and counties' worth of farmers would it take to support a single capital?"