After dealing with some daily affairs, Zhang Huaiding, who became a little tired, looked at the yellow sky and missed the Chang'an City, where he had lived for a long time; but he didn't know what the atmosphere and situation was like under the rule of the Taiping Army.

However, the next moment, a sound seemed to stab his ear, making him feel energetic and said loudly:

"What, the envoy from the Kingdom of Khotan (now the Hotan area of ​​Xinjiang) has arrived? Summon in!"

In fact, as the head of the Western Regions coalition forces responding to the war, Yuchi Piji Rama, the only remaining king of the Khotan Kingdom in the past, led by the four towns of Anxi, also lost the 5,000 Khotan troops and horses in Central China. In the Khotan, the remaining princes and ministers who supported them were confronted by them, they fell into some chaos and unknown.

So after Zhang Huaiding gained a foothold, he sent several groups of envoys to the East City of the King of Tian (now the ancient city of Axbir near Luopu County, Xinjiang), but he could not find a person who could make decisions and negotiate. This Kingdom of Khotan was also the focus of the strategy and negotiations explained by the Taiping Army; there were naturally many reasons and reasons.

First of all, among the many countries in the Western Regions that looked different from the Central Plains, the people, from kings to common people, dress and customs, were said to be palaces and houses facing eastward, and the most similar to the Eastern Land Tang Dynasty (not very beautiful, quite similar to China) naturally had a sense of cultural identity;

Secondly, the Kingdom of Khotan was once the largest Mahayana Buddhist center in the Western Regions. It is also the only place where the Buddhists in the Western Regions survived and the gradual decline of Buddhism. Whether it was the monks who were expelled from the Brahmin Kingdoms in the south, or the believers who were persecuted by Xifan in the land of the Lingxi River, they gathered here.

In the past, when the four towns of Anxi were still alive, the Kingdom of Khotan also had multiple identities. It was not only one of the most diligent Western governments in the Tang Dynasty that paid tribute to the Central Plains of the Tang Dynasty; it was also one of the four major towns that provided the garrison of Anxi in the Tang Dynasty, and led two guards to capture seven towns and fifteen garrisons. It was also the governor of the Visa Governor's Office, which was set up by the Tang Dynasty, and led more than 30 military prefectures (cities) in the ten prefectures; in response to the recruitment and dispatch of the Anxi Governor's Office.

The King of Khotan of each generation naturally also had multiple identities as the ministers of the Tang Dynasty, the governor of the Visha Governor's Office, and the deputy ambassador of the Anxi Jiedushi. At the same time, the king of the country would abdicate and give up to the selected prince after his age, and led his subordinates to Chang'an to settle down for the rest of his life, thus realizing a certain honor of guarding the Emperor of the Tang Dynasty and being buried with the tomb after his death.

Therefore, after decades of rule by the Tubo people and conquest of the Uighurs westward, it was one of the few or only remaining tenacious, which maintained its relative independence and was able to pay tribute to the east and never fall into the Western Regions. Therefore, in a natural standpoint, he has always been the leader of the two generations of Guiyi Army, and needed to form good potential allies and foreign aid.

It’s a pity that the contemporary king Yuchi Wa was entrusted by a man. Not only did he fail to successfully imitate the grand event that the coalition forces of the Western Regions went east to serve the Tang Dynasty and were listed in history during the Anshi Rebellion, but instead he was regarded as the abandoned son of the palace by the defeated official army, and was defeated and died in the Battle of Shayuan near Chang'an.

Of course, there were also the good nephew of the Tang Dynasty, one of the three surnames Uighurs, and the Lingxi Khanate established by Pang Teqin, an Anxi Uighur. Even the younger brother of the Khan and deputy Khan Bushula (meaning Gongtu King), who was lost in the firearm array of the Taiping Army, and many other princes and noble surnames were captured and killed.

Therefore, in fact, in addition to the headquarters of the Khan Lord Aselen (Lion King) who is in the middle of the river (now the Sir River and Amu River Basin in Central Asia), the headquarters of the Khan Lord Talas, there has been a serious emptiness behind the huge ridge west, or the small city-states that were forced to become vassals and subordinates led by the Ponzi tribe have lost the power to suppress it.

The situation under this situation is undoubtedly the God-given opportunity that the leader of the Guiyi Army, who was trying to expand his living space and development space to the outside world, dreamed of. However, what Zhang Huaiding can take over now is a Guiyi Army who is also strong outside and can only be barely maintained by years of accumulation of might.

Although, in addition to the more than a thousand men who escorted him back, the Taiping Army successively released four or five thousand people from the Western Army captives captured by Longyou from the Western Road to attack Longyou. However, in addition, the Guasha area included the right-age men, and the re-armed children of various families and the civil servants' charity were only more than ten thousand men;

It is very difficult to maintain the basic rule under the framework of the Guiyi Army and the Zhang family's open authority at present. Not to mention the possibility of exercising and using troops to all out. Not to mention the possibility of expedition and military use by all means. Not to mention that a considerable part of the army was not diverted by his will.

Whether it is the Xizhou Uighur Pugu tribe, who was a former ally and rival, or the Ganzhou Uighur Anning clan, who was a subordinate vassal, they were also injured in the battle within the pass. To this day, many surviving Jianrui were driven to work as prisoners of the Taiping Army. For a long time to come, they will inevitably be depressed, and there will be no hope.

Therefore, under this situation, as a regional state with a vast land of thousands of miles and a dozen cities, the Kingdom of Khotan, which can conscript tens of thousands of victorious soldiers all year round, has become a key existence. In fact, in addition to the 5,000 soldiers who had already sent troops with the king, the Visa Governor's Office, which was under the jurisdiction of the Anxi Protectorate of the Tang Dynasty, still followed the example system of more than 30 military prefectures in ten prefectures.

Therefore, if the remaining territory of Khotan can be activated with all its strength, there will be few military presences east of the Pamir Plateau.

(Not to mention that the early Buddhists had no martial virtues. Those who could pass through countless deserts, poor mountains and dangerous places to preach the Dharma were comparable to those of Sui Faxian, Yijing, and Xuanzang of Tang, who had an explosive physical fitness and extremely strong mental will. They were not the Buddhists in the Middle Land who were successively domesticated and trained by secular regimes.

Just as the last Buddhist country in the Western Regions, Khotan, once fought a war of faith for more than 40 years with the Anxi Uighur Black Khanate, which owned the Qihe River Basin and the Fergana Valley, which had been transformed from Buddhism and Maniacism to the green religion. With the help of traditional ally Gaochang Uighurs in Xizhou, he once attacked the capital Kashgar and killed the Khan Ali of the Black Khanate in the Battle of Yingjisha.

However, later, under the leadership of Prince Yusupu, the remaining troops of the Black Khanate, in the western river, launched a jihad army on the grounds of shared respect for faith. They recruited a large number of soldiers from Khwarezm and the rivers, obtained reinforcements from the Turkic Gassini Dynasty in the south, and also joined the *** volunteer army brought by four Imams including the saints of the *** religion and the leader of the Bukhara religious.

As a result, during the Jedi counterattack in the capital of Yutian, Gaochang and Ganzhou Uighur cavalry, Qingtang Tubo cavalry and Guiyi army came to help one after another, and the jihad army was wiped out again. The four major imams and a large number of people died in battle. On both sides of the Qianli Avenue from Kashgar to Khotan, Maza was left all over the country, which was later called "Sheyide (Tomb of Martyrdom of Holy War)".

But Khotan eventually exists on a desert oasis and a city-state with limited population and resources. This process of victory almost exhausted all its national strength and caused serious damage to the local area. Therefore, when the jihad army made a comeback next year, there was no more resistance left, and they were defeated one by one before reinforcements arrived.

During this period, in the face of the repeated requests for help from the Kingdom of Tantan, the Iron Blood Song Dynasty, which always had the highest winning rate in foreign wars, the greatest support that I could provide was to send a group of 150 monks to join the foreign vassals in the history books and daily notes.

This war expanded the spread of the *** religion, changed the comparison between the *** religion and the Buddhist power in Xinjiang, and consolidated the *** religion's position in Xinjiang. The Buddhist forces, which originally had an absolute advantage in the local area, began to be suppressed and liquidated by the expansion of the *** temples. Therefore, many corpses can be dug out in the archaeology of the ruins of ancient Central Asia temples.

Although some groups have persisted in Buddhist beliefs for a long time, and there are still Christian believers in the Western Regions such as Manichaeism and Nestorians, the overall trend of poverty has been inevitable. At the same time, it has also caused a large number of people in the western and southern Tarim Basin to die, cities were destroyed, productivity was severely damaged, and economic decline. As well as a thousand-year-old population change)

(At this point, I would like to advise some people who always report on religious and ethnic issues. If you have the ability, you have blocked the official account of the Chinese Academy of History, you have the ability to delete the central government’s recognition of the “main ethnicity” issue of Xinjiang’s “subject ethnicity”, and you have the ability to burn the Tang Dynasty documents unearthed from Kuqa, Xinjiang. Could it be that if you quote the official proven fait accompli, you have poked some ulterior motives and lung tubes?)

In addition, I would like to add a short joke from ancient people, which is recorded in the Song Dynasty's "Songmo Jiwen":

"The Uighurs have been in the late Tang Dynasty. When the dynasty was prosperous, some people lived in Qinchuan and became familiar households. Before they got married, women first communicated with Han people, and some were able to match their species after having children for nearly thirty years. The matchmakers came to discuss it, and their parents said that my daughter once had a close relationship with someone, and it was a win, and the customs were the same. Now there are also people with small eyes but deep beards but not squid, which was probably born with Han children."

The general meaning is that the Uighur people who were generally involved in the Tang Dynasty as the author saw at that time, so they have almost been sinicized in terms of race. Or, as long as you were once powerful, people cannot look up to you, even if there will be people who miss and admire you for many years after everything changes, and strive for revival as the goal. This is the significance of the heroic spirit of the Han and Tang Dynasties.

However, when the envoy from Khotan was brought in, he fell to Zhang Huaiding in a panic and cried loudly and shouted:
Chapter completed!