Inside the heated pavilion in Bianjing, Prime Minister Zhao Pu sat deep in thought, his brow furrowed like a man trying to untangle a knot someone had deliberately glued shut.
He had been the sole chancellor for a decade. If there was one thing he understood better than anyone else in the room, it was the empire's political chessboard. He knew exactly where every piece stood and how one wrong move could topple the entire board straight onto the floor.
And the Screen was not lying.
Since the mid to late Tang, relying on the southeast for grain was not just some theoretical warning buried in a dusty old book. It was a hard cold fact of geography. So was this. Chang'an had lost its place as a capital, and no amount of nostalgic poetry could bring it back.
Look at the bloody era after the Tang collapsed. The Five Dynasties came and went one after another. You can name them yourself. Later Liang, Later Tang, Later Jin, Later Han, Later Zhou. And that was just the ones claiming the imperial throne. Below them, you still had regional kingdoms like Min, Shu, Chu, and Yue. A complete chaotic mess, basically.
But here is the thing. Out of all those regimes, not a single one chose to plant their capital in Chang'an.
That alone told you everything you needed to know. The ancient city had become a logistical graveyard, plain and simple. Even the most power-hungry warlords would not touch it with a ten foot pole.
The only exception was the Later Tang. They were founded by the Shatuo, a group of naturalized nomads from the Western Turks. But even they did not choose Chang'an. They borrowed the Tang name for political legitimacy and set up their capital in Luoyang instead.
Zhao Pu understood the cold reality behind that choice better than most.
The Shatuo did not actually like Luoyang. They picked it for one reason and one reason only. Legitimacy.
They were outsiders. Not a single drop of blood connected them to the original Li clan. If they called themselves the Great Tang but set up their capital in some random city, the old aristocratic families would have laughed them out of the room. The entire political theater would have collapsed before it even had its first grand opening.
But clinging to that borrowed prestige came with a heavy price. The Later Tang emperors spent their days wrestling with the exact same nightmare that had haunted the original Tang emperors. Starvation.
The local provinces had to scramble nonstop just to ship grain to the capital. Imperial tax commissioners would stand outside the Upper East Gate of Luoyang, staring down the road like men waiting for a miracle, praying that the next supply wagon would arrive before the city ran out of food and everyone started rioting.
This was not some hidden scandal. Every official in the bureaucracy knew about it. They complained about it constantly, usually over dinner, between mouthfuls of rice that had traveled further than most of them ever would in their entire lives.
Zhao Pu sifted through his political memories. He recalled that Li Cunxu, the founding emperor of the Later Tang, had seriously considered abandoning Luoyang. The plan was simple enough. Pack up the court and march down to Bianliang, where the food actually was.
But his advisors shut that idea down fast.
Traveling to Bianliang just to eat would be a public admission that Luoyang was starving. It would shatter the illusion of imperial stability and give every ambitious governor an excuse to start sharpening their swords. So the emperor stayed put, tightened his belt, and listened to his ministers lecture him about the virtues of extreme frugality.
What a wonderful way to rule an empire. Who needs power when you can just be hungry and dignified?
Reflecting on all this, Zhao Pu felt a deep sense of validation. The Screen was absolutely correct in its assessment.
The original Li clan built their capital in Chang'an and had to travel to Luoyang to beg for food. The Shatuo Turks built their capital in Luoyang and dreamed of running to Bianliang just to fill their stomachs.
Now, the Great Song Dynasty had done something clever. They skipped the middleman entirely. They planted their capital right on top of the canal network, in Bianliang itself. On paper, it looked like they had monopolized every logistical advantage. No more begging. No more hungry emperors. Progress!
But then the Screen delivered its final line, and it hit Zhao Pu like a bucket of ice water dumped straight over his head.
The Jin cavalry drives straight in.
Zhao Pu frantically searched his encyclopedic memory. Who in the world used the dynastic title Jin? He could not find a single match. It was like the future had made up a whole new dynasty just to ruin his day.
He looked down at the messy notes scattered across his desk, where he had quickly scribbled the names of future dynasties. His handwriting was getting worse the more panicked he became.
He looked at the timeline again.
The Song splits into Northern and Southern halves. Eventually, it gets completely replaced by something called the Yuan Dynasty. The geopolitical puzzle was becoming infinitely more confusing. He felt like he was trying to solve a riddle written in invisible ink.
Without thinking, Zhao Pu slowly turned his head and looked straight at Emperor Zhao Kuangyin.
"Are you going to explain this to us, Your Majesty?"
Zhao Kuangyin felt his brain tying itself into knots. He just offered a weak wave of his hand, the kind that said, Not now. Please, not now. I am this close to having a very un-imperial panic attack.
He absolutely did not want to talk about this. What he needed was a room with no other people in it, a very large cup of wine, and maybe several hours alone to put his thoughts back together and stop his hands from shaking.
Truth be told, the idea of moving the capital away from Bianliang had been brewing in his mind for a long time.
When the future generations on the Screen first started debating the reasons for establishing capital cities, Zhao Kuangyin had scoffed.
Moving a capital is a matter of grand imperial strategy, he had thought smugly. Bah. What do you soft handed future scholars know about military geography? You probably have never even held a spear!
But then the Screen started laying out the raw data. It presented the brutal facts, explained the logistical root causes, and casually revealed the horrific future of his empire.
The smugness vanished faster than a thief at the sound of gongs.
Zhao Kuangyin started sweating profusely under his heavy imperial robes. He could feel his back sticking to the fabric.
Okay. I understand now. Moving a capital is grand strategy, he corrected himself bitterly. And now... what do I know about military geography?
He glanced across the room. His younger brother sat with his head bowed, the shadows hiding his face perfectly. Seeing his brother sitting there like a lurking ghost made Zhao Kuangyin feel even more irritated.
He took a deep breath, shoved his anxiety down, and forced a warm diplomatic smile.
He nodded at his prime minister.
"If you have questions about these revelations, Zeping, stay behind after the court session. We can discuss it in private. And bring wine. Lots of wine. The strongest stuff we have."
---
Meanwhile, back in the early Tang Dynasty, the atmosphere in the imperial study was heavy with grim realization.
"Dual pillars," Du Ruhui muttered to himself.
He tasted the modern slang. It was blunt and completely lacking in poetic grace, but it was horrifyingly accurate. Why did future people get to come up with all the good simple phrases?
"The center of military, political, and financial power," Fang Xuanling whispered.
He was equally fascinated by the concise vocabulary used by the future generations. It perfectly summarized decades of complex statecraft into a single sharp sentence. Why did no one in their time think to put it that simply? We have been wasting so much ink!
The two chancellors exchanged a dark knowing look. The pieces of the geopolitical puzzle finally snapped together in their minds with an audible click.
"The catastrophe of the An Lushan Rebellion," Du Ruhui began, his voice low and careful, "started because the court handed control of the Hebei region to foreign generals. Once the rebels took that territory, they held half the wealth and military strength of the Tang. That was the root of the cancer."
If our dynasty loses control of Hebei... Du Ruhui stopped talking. The heavy air hung thick in the room. He did not need to finish the thought.
The chain reaction that would follow was already clear in everyone's mind, bright and terrifying.
If armed rebels take the north, the central government must raise a huge army to fight them. Raising an army requires an astronomical amount of money. With the northern tax base gone, the court has to squeeze every single copper coin out of the southeastern Jianghuai region.
Doubling the taxes and forced labor quotas on the southeast will inevitably breed deep resentment among the southern peasants. Eventually, the starving southerners will snap. They will launch their own rebellion. The empire will face a war on two fronts with an empty treasury.
"What was that exact phrase the future generations used?"
"An infinite death loop," Wei Zheng said, sucking in a sharp breath. The legendary troll master recalled the heavy words of the ancient philosopher Mencius.
"If a state lacks strict laws and wise advisors at home, and faces no foreign threats abroad, it is doomed to perish."
Li Shimin sat behind his heavy desk. He provided a chilling annotation to the ancient wisdom, his voice steady as steel.
"A nation always dies from the inside out. Always."
The Screen had taken the terrifying collapse of his future empire and laid it out on an autopsy table. It explained the exact cause of death from an entirely new angle.
The endless farming in the Guanzhong region destroyed the topsoil. The loose dirt washed into the Yellow River, choking the waterways with silt. The canal system failed. The logistics collapsed.
The court allowed armed nomads to migrate inward. Those nomads hijacked the Hebei region. The Tang lost half its territory in a single bloody night.
When the common people have absolutely nothing left to eat, all the glorious poetry and towering palaces of the empire become nothing more than a mirage. A single spark will burn the entire structure to the ground.
Li Shimin absorbed the tragedy. He accepted the geopolitical reality. But even with all those facts laid out in front of him, the arrogant warrior spirit inside him still had to ask a very basic tactical question.
"How on earth could anyone choose Bianzhou as a capital? Have they lost their minds?"
Li Shimin was not ignorant of geography. As the future generations pointed out, Bianzhou was a critical hub for the southeastern canal network.
During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the area was split into Liang Prefecture and Kaifeng Commandery. Later, it was renamed Bianzhou. When the Tang Dynasty took over, they reinstated it. Combining his own military maps with the information from the Screen, Li Shimin knew the exact topography of the area perfectly.
His first reaction was utter disbelief.
People complained that Chang'an lacked perfect defenses. But that was only true if an enemy army miraculously managed to breach the outer geographical shell of the Guanzhong region.
Guanzhong was a natural fortress. It had the towering Long Mountains acting as a shield on the left, and the impregnable Tong Pass blocking the right. Luoyang was similarly protected by the Chenggao Pass on one side and the Xiaohan bottleneck on the other.
But Bianzhou? Kaifeng?
There was absolutely nothing blocking the north. Not a single mountain range. Not a single natural choke point. It was a completely flat exposed pancake of dirt. Perfect for cavalry. Perfect for burning.
Li Shimin calculated the marching speed in his head, his eyes lighting up with the pure tactical joy of a man who loves a good military problem. If he personally led a heavy cavalry strike force, starting all the way up north in Zhuo County, he figured he could reach the gates of Bianzhou in 5 days. He would burn the city to the ground before the defenders even knew he was coming.
He thought about the Jingkang Incident mentioned earlier, where the nomadic Jin cavalry drove straight into the Song capital and kidnapped their emperors.
Li Shimin shook his head in disgust.
He truly did not know whether to admire the suicidal bravery of the Song Emperor for putting his throne on an open plain, or just laugh at him for reading too many books and losing his mind.
A capital's true defense lies in the ruler's virtue, not its walls?
If you have no walls, you are dead. Dead men have no virtue to speak of.
---
[Lightscreen]
[The impact of climate change runs like a thread through the entire history of human civilization. This truth applies to the empires of the East, the empires of the West, and the modern world we live in today.
Just as the Grand Canal system served as the absolute lifeblood for the imperial dynasties of China, the Mediterranean Sea served the exact same critical function for the ancient Roman Empire.
The only difference is that the Mediterranean is a huge naturally occurring body of water. Consequently, its reaction to global climate shifts was far more violent and unpredictable.
This incredibly convenient geographical bathtub allowed ancient Rome to forge its magnificent Golden Age. But ultimately, that same body of water tolled the death knell for their empire. Talk about a double edged sword.
In the East, the incompetent Emperor Huan of Han, Liu Zhi, and Emperor Ling of Han, Liu Hong, stood watch over the agonizing decay of the Han Empire. During that exact same historical window, an emperor named Marcus Aurelius witnessed the opening notes of the Roman grand tragedy. Bad timing really is a universal curse.
During this peak period, the population of the Roman Empire exploded to an unprecedented 75 million people. But gravity always wins. The situation quickly began a downward spiral.
The Antonine Plague and the Plague of Cyprian we mentioned earlier were definitely devastating. But the true underlying architect of the destruction of Rome was climate change. Surprise surprise.
Right around the exact same time Prime Minister Zhuge Liang was dying under the autumn winds at the Wuzhang Plains, the Roman Climate Optimum officially slammed shut. The Golden Age of warm weather was over. The freezing cold launched a brutal counterattack.
The warm and perfectly stable weather patterns that built the Roman Empire vanished completely. They were replaced by freezing temperatures, droughts, and unpredictable storm cycles. Fun times for everyone.
The immediate result was exactly the same as in ancient China. Agricultural failure. The crops simply died in the dirt. Oops.
Remember the Bishop of Carthage, Cyprian? Yeah, the guy who got a plague named after him. Lucky him. He left behind some writings that basically said North Africa was turning into a dust bowl.
Rainfall? Scarce. The earth? Cracked and useless. The crops? They grew, but not fast enough to matter.
If the Tang Dynasty leaned entirely on Hebei and Jianghuai to survive, Rome leaned on Egypt.
Egypt was the golden breadbasket. The kind of place that made every other province feel deeply insecure.
But when the climate shifted, the Nile's water volume dropped by half. Half! And Egypt's food production fell off a cliff, right along with it.
When the food supply collapsed, the Roman economy went full panic mode. Then the Plague of Cyprian showed up and started setting the population on fire. Starving peasants plus dying legions equals a very bad time. The result? Civil war. Military anarchy. The usual Roman drama. They really did love their civil wars.
In the year 251, right around the time Sima Yi was dying in China, the Roman Emperor Decius thought it would be a great idea to march to the Danube River. The Gothic tribes disagreed. Violently. They hacked him to pieces.
The very next year, Shapur the First of the Sassanid Persian Empire decided Rome looked weak. So he invaded, took Syria, and looted Asia Minor for fun.
The Goths in the north saw the party and decided to join. They launched naval raids all over the Aegean and Black Seas, burning everything that floated and half the things that did not.
Seven years later, a Roman general stationed in Gaul got tired of taking orders. So he did what any reasonable man would do. He declared himself emperor and ripped the territory away from the central government.
Honestly, this guy and Emperor Zhao Kuangyin could probably bond over their shared experience with mutiny. It really is a universal language.
The Roman court was stuck. The Franks and Alemanni were pressing in from the north, so they had to hold their noses and legally recognize the breakaway Gallic Empire. They even signed an alliance with the traitors.
And how did that work out? The Romans still got thrashed by the Franks on the battlefield. Ouch.
To be fair, later emperors did try to save the sinking ship. They launched reforms, made grand speeches, and tried to patch the holes. But the agricultural foundation was already wrecked. The freezing weather had seen to that. So every fix just created a brand new crisis.
In the year 293, Emperor Diocletian finally admitted that one man could not plug a hundred holes at once. So he invented the Tetrarchy. He split the Roman Empire into two halves, each with a senior emperor and a junior emperor. Because clearly, what a collapsing empire needs is more emperors. What could possibly go wrong?
The second Diocletian died, the whole system exploded into civil war. That is how the Western and Eastern Roman Empires were born. Not with a grand vision, but with a very predictable meltdown.
For the next 200 years, Roman emperors and Chinese emperors had the exact same schedule. Crops fail. Peasants rebel. Draft more soldiers. Farm fewer fields. Crops fail harder. Fun times for everyone.
History never changes its tricks. It just swaps the costumes.
The only real difference was the political coping mechanism. Faced with endless natural disasters and boiling public fury, the Roman emperors eventually played their final card. They outlawed all the ancient pagan religions, declared Christianity the absolute state orthodoxy, and fused the imperial government directly to the Church. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
This brutal and freezing era lasted all the way until the 6th century. When the ice finally thawed, China exploded into the brilliant and glorious heights of the Sui and Tang Dynasties.
Rome tried to do the same. Emperor Justinian the Great, swore a holy oath to restore the ancient borders. He launched a huge and violently expensive military campaign to reconquer the lost western territories.
He almost pulled it off. Then, a huge cluster of volcanoes erupted. The ash blotted out the sun. The Mediterranean climate spiraled back into chaos. A horrific new strain of plague swept across the continent.
The dream of Justinian to restore the Roman Empire died in a pile of infected corpses. The secular state collapsed, and the power of the Church filled the vacuum.
The sudden and violent climate shift also forced the nomadic Arab tribes out of their freezing deserts. They launched the unstoppable Islamic conquests, violently crushing whatever was left of the Roman dream.]
Seventy-five million people.
Liu Bei stood rooted to the spot. The number hit him like a physical blow to the chest. His first reaction was shock. His second, burning hot on its heels, was pure envy.
"Is this Mediterranean Sea truly that much better than our inland rivers?" Liu Bei asked to nobody in particular.
He knew it was a stupid question the moment it left his mouth.
The evidence was right there in the history books. From the ancient Spring and Autumn period all the way to the present day, Chinese emperors never stopped digging artificial trenches in the dirt. Even the future Sui and Tang empires had to bankrupt themselves digging a huge Grand Canal.
Why do you dig a ditch? Because navigating inland rivers is a logistical headache. A huge one.
But Liu Bei had a psychological barrier.
He remembered growing up in the landlocked Zhuo County. Occasionally, traveling merchants would bring back terrifying stories about the eastern ocean. They talked about unpredictable violent storms that swallowed entire fleets without a trace. Because of those campfire stories, most commoners possessed a deep primal fear of the open sea. Liu Bei was no exception. The ocean sounded like a giant hungry monster that ate ships for fun and asked for seconds.
Zhang Fei, who had been still for whole 5 minutes, suddenly snickered. "Brother, you look like you just saw a ghost. It is just water! Big water!"
Liu Bei shot him a glare that could have curdled milk.
But looking at the vast blue expanse on the map, he realized this Mediterranean must be completely different from the raging ocean of his childhood nightmares. It looked... manageable.
"They possessed a huge and sprawling territory," Zhuge Liang said.
He stared at the projected map, his mind rapidly processing the foreign geography like a human calculator, his feather fan moving slowly as he thought.
"They relied entirely on the geographical loophole of the Mediterranean Sea. Because moving supplies by water was so easy, they completely ignored the importance of securing defensible land borders. Therefore, when the foreign tribes attacked from every side, the empire shattered. It is not surprising at all. A little arrogant, maybe. But not surprising."
Zhuge Liang mapped the terrain in his head like he had been born there.
The maps provided by future generations were usually stripped down to the basics, but they never omitted the critical data points. He could clearly read the topographical story of ancient Rome.
The coastal regions were dominated by mountains and heavy hills. But the northern borders? Wide open plains. Perfect for cavalry to run wild. Perfect for raiding. Perfect for trouble.
Zhuge Liang waved his feather fan. "These so called Goths and Franks swarming over the northern plains were exactly the same as the Xiongnu cavalry harassing the borders of the Han Dynasty. The faces changed, but the bloody mechanics of history remained exactly the same. Some things never change, no matter how far you travel or how big your empire is."