Song On The Issues Of The The Liaoning War Rations Supply Study

The military provisions supply during the War of Song—Liao was the beginning to form the military provisions supply system of the northern battlefield in Song Dynasty and un-avoidable part of studying the military provisions supply of the Song Dynasty. This thesis is mainly confined to before the Chanyuan Alliance, that is 45 years between the first year of Jianlong in Song Taizu as an emperor (960 years) till the first year of Jingde in Song Zhenzong as an Emperor (1004). During this time, Northern Song Dynasty had made various explorations and attempts on how to satisfy the military provisions need which was gradually expanded day by day in the war. It had developed step by step from the way comparatively suited temporary, small-scale military attack into a military provisions supply system with many ways together such as the peacetime and wartime supply, land and water transportation, buying, moving soldiers to help grain grow, developing the camp into farm, recruiting the countryside soldiers and so on.The main battlefield of the Song Liao War was in Hebei whose developed river system had provided certain powerful condition for the military provisions transportation. After the dredging and constructing of the first three emperors of Song Dynasty, it had form a crisscrossed network water transportation line between the borderlands and the inland, and it had also played the influential role in the war. The period of the Emperor Song Taizu was the methods of military provisions supply exploration period during the Northern Song Dynasty doing battles to Liao. Northern Song Dynasty had learned from the experiences in northern and southern battles, putting a series of long-term actions into practice in the frontier and building the foundation for the hereafter military activity; Song Taizong took the failure in the Yong Xi northward expedition as boundary, Song Liao both of these two countries exchanged on military offense and defense. Before, the military provisions supply of the Northern Song Dynasty were more focused on transferring the military provisions from other places, henceforth it had turned into satisfying the military provision needs on the premise of cutting down the cost of moving the military payroll; at the time of Emperor Song Zhenzong, the quantity of Hebei station troops had been expanded gradually day by day. The pressure of military provisions supply of Northern Song Dynasty on Song Liao battlefield had also been enlarged. So, on the basis of developing the original way of the military provisions supplying, Northern Song Dynasty had adopted the method of moving the soldiers to grow grain which was adapted to the defense strategy of Northern Song Dynasty. Then, it had relieved the military provisions supplying pressure in the transporting difficult area. To a certain extent, it had also changed the arrangement of the station troops in Song Dynasty. Meanwhile, Northern Song Dynasty had gradually formed a series of systems of collection, management, transportation, and distribution, making the military provisions supply more systematization, and regularization.