Actually, after the Rebellion of Gold, many people had fled to the mountains to avoid paying taxes. In the years since, Jingzhou had become a battleground, with fighting breaking out from time to time. Many people had grown used to hiding in the mountains whenever war came.
After seeing that Liu Bei and Sun Quan had not fought for some time since drawing the Xiang River as their boundary, and with Guan Yu's daughter Guan Yinping leading a campaign against bandits, they had chosen to join her.
So Sanhu City, which Wang Yue had built with three thousand men over the course of a month, had filled its empty spaces with the twenty thousand people Guan Yinping had recruited during that same month.
It was called a city, but it was more like a gigantic village. It had no towering walls, just houses built close together.
The people who had previously lived in the houses Constable Cai had arranged for them had also moved into this large village, bringing Sanhu City's population to nearly forty thousand.
Guan Yinping's army for suppressing the bandits had also grown to six thousand.
Although all six thousand were able-bodied, Wang Yue considered only a little over two thousand worthy of training as elite troops. The rest could serve only as auxiliary troops.
Still, more than six thousand men gathered together made quite an imposing sight. Under the Great Han's military organization, two hundred men made a battalion, five battalions made a division, two divisions made a regiment, two regiments made a brigade, and two brigades made an army.
Guan Yinping's six thousand men were just enough to form an army, and she was quite pleased with herself.
But Guan Yinping had her worries, too. With so many people in Sanhu City, the food that