Back In Time For Imperial Examination Chapter 294

"The most important thing for a country is to fight the army, and the most important thing for the army is to fight the horse..."

Soon after Yang Yiqing arrived at the border for inspection, he sent a memorial to the capital with an express courier, reporting several major malpractices of the Shaanxi Yuanma Temple, which provided military horses for Ningxia, Gansu and Shaanxi. The horse policy was not good, the military horses were insufficient, and many war horses were even boned and hairless, and were about to fall down. How could the Han army fight against the elite Tatar soldiers who could ride two or even three horses?

While he started to build castles, stables and barracks in Ningxia, he also held the officials in charge of horse administration in Shaanxi accountable and reorganized the local horse administration.

The supervision of the Yuanma Temple had been neglected for too long, and half of the pastures had become private lands of the princes and garrisons. Many places were called pastures, but in fact they were wastelands. Yang Yiqing took back the privately seized horse farms from the local vassal, Prince Su; he accepted refugees and exiled military prisoners to the border pastures to grow grass and raise horses; he tried to grow sweet potatoes and barley on the wasteland to supply food for the border troops...

In addition, he also wanted to restore the gold medal system for tea-horse trade with the Western Regions, ban smuggling, and return the tea-horse trading rights that had been relaxed for sixty years to the hands of the court.