In fact, the Russian army could have reached Outer Manchuria earlier.

The reason it took decades was that their king had no heir.

The king of Russia called himself Tsar, which is 'Caesar' in Latin.

In 1453 AD, four years after the Battle of Tumu, another famous fortress also fell - Constantinople was finally captured by the Ottoman Empire, and the thousand-year-old Eastern Roman Empire came to an end.

Later, the last Eastern Roman princess Sophia, who was exiled to the West, married Grand Duke Ivan III of Moscow at the order of the Pope. After that, the Principality of Moscow regarded itself as the successor of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Grand Duke began to call himself the Tsar, named the country Tsarist Russia, and began the central group's rule.

Tsarist Russia regarded the Byzantine double-headed eagle brought by Sofia as its national emblem and called it the Third Rome, so the Roman Orthodoxy is still in Moscow...

To get back to the point, Tsarist Russia was advancing rapidly and unstoppably under the leadership of Ivan III, his son Vasily III, and his grandson Ivan IV, also known as the famous Ivan the Terrible.

However, Ivan the Terrible died in 1584, the 12th year of the Wanli reign.

However, his successor, Fyodor, was not only mentally handicapped, but also physically weak. He would lose strength if he stood for a long time. Not to mention handling state affairs, he could not even complete major ceremonies. Therefore, the power of the state was controlled by the regent, Godunov.

When Godunov thought the time was ripe, he poisoned the idiot Tsar, who had no offspring, in 1598, the 26th year of the Wanli reign, and the Rurik dynasty came to an end.

Later, Godunov was elected as the new tsar by the All-Russian Council of Gentry. But he broke the long-standing concept of divine right of kings, making the concept of tsar no longer sacred. To become tsar, it was not necessary to pass down the throne from generation to generation in the royal family, with sons succeeding their fathers. Regardless of their background, everyone could aspire to the throne, and the main rule was that only the strongest could hold the throne.

This marked the beginning of a long period of civil war and unrest in Russia. After Godunov, several tsars had no good endings, and there was even a long period of "vacancy". It was not until the 41st year of the Wanli reign that the situation began to improve when the Romanov dynasty was established.

Therefore, Tsarist Russia was about to enter a period of chaos and weakness and was forced to slow down its pace of eastward invasion.

As a result, it was not until 1648, the second year of the Yongli reign and the fifth year of the Shunzhi reign of the Qing Dynasty, that the Russians arrived at the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Bering Strait, completing their expedition into the Pacific Ocean.

In 1651, they reached Lake Baikal and built the city of Irkutsk. However, the greedy Russians were not satisfied and continued to invade Northeast China and established many military bases on both sides of the Heilongjiang River, the largest of which was the city of Yaksa.

After establishing a military presence, the Russians began to assimilate the local ethnic groups with ease. The resistance of ethnic minorities on the Chinese border gradually developed into a direct conflict between the Chinese and Russian governments. Eventually, the Battle of Yaksa broke out and the two countries signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk, which temporarily curbed the Russian army's invasion of Chinese territory south of the Greater Khingan Range.

But by then, the Russians had already eaten up tens of millions of square kilometers of land north of the Greater Khingan Range.

In fact, the Russians deployed very limited military forces in the Far East. Even in the Second Battle of Yalu River, the Russian army had less than a thousand troops.

This is normal. Before the construction of the railway, they had no ability to project too many troops to distant Asia. The unprecedentedly vast eastern territory of Tsarist Russia was entirely created by the Cossack cavalry with super mobility and survivability!

In 1581, the ninth year of the Wanli reign, the Cossack leader Yermak led only 840 Cossack cavalrymen across the Ural Mountains and began to invade Siberia as if they were in an empty land!

Because right now the entire Siberia - the Ming Dynasty called it the 'Luo Wilderness' - is a completely undefended, unclaimed land. The Cossack cavalry that came from afar and crossed mountains and ridges can pass through it smoothly. There is no reason why the Liaodong cavalry that is closer in distance and has a flat plain in front of them cannot pass through it smoothly!

History is like this. Sometimes it will put all the opportunities in front of you, and it depends on how much you can take.

But if you miss this opportunity, you will miss it forever. If you are like Da Meng and Dai Qing, who spit out the food as soon as it is brought to their mouths, you will have to pay a thousand times the price if you want to eat it again and snatch the food from other people's mouths.

So after repeated consideration, Zhao Hao decided that he would take them all. Even if he couldn't digest them at once, he could store them in his cheek pouches like monkeys, leaving them for his descendants to digest slowly. Humans evolved from monkeys, so it's not shameful to learn from monkeys.

This requires Zhao Hao to unite all the forces that can be united and send them outward.

At present, the Siberian Khanate has disappeared, and Tsarist Russia is about to enter a long civil war and is unable to take care of itself. There is no enemy left in the entire Luo wilderness.

We would be really sorry to God if we don’t seize this rare historical window of opportunity!

Therefore, Zhao Hao decided to push Li Chengliang's Liaodong cavalry to march westward, even if this would turn them into real warlords and turn the King of Liaodong into the King of Siberia, it would still be a hundred times better than letting the Russians reach the banks of the Heilongjiang River decades later!

Moreover, according to the judgment of the General Staff, if Li's army really embarks on the westward expedition, it will be even more dependent on the support of the mainland. It is possible that Zhao Hao will have to bring Lao Xier with him to truly digest Siberia.

Lao Xier and Ningyuanbo Li Chengliang went all the way west to conquer "Xibo Liya", which was really a match made in heaven.

As long as Zhao Hao thought about the scene of the Liaodong Iron Cavalry and the Cossack Cavalry fighting on the Siberian Plain, he felt it was very exciting...

~~

Of course, convincing Lao Li to give up Liaodong and make up his mind to head west is not something that can be achieved by just talking.

No matter how you say it, at least in front of Zhao Hao, Li Chengliang was really angry.

Even though Old Li was so excited by Zhao Hao's words that he wanted to mount his horse and start the Western Expedition, Zhao Hao had been dealing with old foxes for half his life, so how could he not know that each of these guys was an award-winning actor? If you believed their real and fake performances, you would lose.

The key lies in how he does it.

But Li Chengliang had no choice. Why was Zhao Hao so persistent in asking Qi Jiguang to go to Liaodong? It was not just to fulfill his personal complex of "Qi Jiguang crossing the sea to attack Japan". The deeper purpose was to drive Li's army out of Liaodong and force them to march to the northwest!

But it is not enough to just coerce, but also to bribe. Zhao Hao proposed to set up a Northwest Company, with Jiangnan Group and Xishan Group each holding 30%, and the remaining shares to be divided between Lao Xier and Li's army, so that everyone can develop Xibo Li together.

Yes, Zhao Hao also told Li Chengliang that he wanted to rename Siberia to "Xiber Li", using this strong hint to inspire Li's dream of the westward expedition.

Because Siberia could not accept immigrants during the Little Ice Age, it was of no benefit to Zhao Hao's century-long immigration, so his main focus had to be on Southeast Asia. When he had spare capacity, he would go to develop America...

There are India and Africa waiting in line, and it will not be their turn to develop Xiboli within a hundred years. That is a gift left for future generations...

Therefore, it was enough to let the Li family keep the Cossacks west of the Ural Mountains. If the Li family really became the second king of Xibo Li, Zhao Hao would accept it.

He would never be as petty as Zhu Zhanji, who would rather give up the Jiaozhi Provincial Administration than give it to Zhang Fu.

I still can't help but curse, Zhu Zhanji is an eternal sinner, even his son is also an eternal sinner...

~~

When everyone has the same dream, the previous problems are no longer a problem.

After Li Chengliang took the initiative to write a letter of loyalty, Zhao Hao notified Beijing that the case could be closed.

The joint trial by the three judicial departments soon came to a conclusion, and Nurhaci was convicted of eighteen crimes, including treason.

You know, the last unified Han dynasty was destroyed by the Jurchens. This Nurhaci actually dared to rebuild the Jurchen Kingdom. Once it is exposed, even the Buddha cannot save him.

The final sentence was lingchi and excommunicating nine clans according to the law. However, considering his meritorious service and his willingness to pay tribute, and his lack of rebellion, the sentence was reduced to hanging and execution, which was not carried out in public.

In fact, it was mainly because they came to pay tribute, and it would be ugly to kill them. For the sake of their own dignity, the court had to give them a decent death...

But he acted very quickly in private. On the night of the verdict, he was hanged in the prison of the Ministry of Justice.

That person watched the entire execution process and collected the body.

After learning the news of Nurhaci's death, Zhao Hao breathed a sigh of relief.

This time, not only was Nurhaci eliminated, but the birth of the true son of the plane, Huang Taiji, was also strangled.

Huang Taiji was the eighth son of Nurhaci, and his biological mother was the daughter of the leader of the Yehe tribe of the Haixi Jurchens.

In order to form an alliance with Nurhaci, the leader of the Yehe tribe betrothed his youngest daughter to him in the 16th year of Wanli. But the bride was only 14 years old at that time, so Huang Taiji was not born until October of the 20th year of Wanli.

Zhao Hao calculated that the next time Nurhaci would come to Beijing to pay tribute would be in April of the 20th year of the Wanli reign, when Huang Taiji would already be in his mother's belly. So no matter what, he couldn't let the wild boar skin go back this time.

Huang Taiji is a standard male protagonist in a happy novel. It is said that when he was seven years old, his father and brother went out to fight, and he began to take charge of the household affairs. He managed the family's daily affairs, financial income and expenditure in an orderly manner, all to Nurhaci's liking.

Later, when he grew up and went to the battlefield, whenever he was about to lose, Kamikaze would help him - they were fighting in the Northeast, where typhoons rarely landed, but Kamikaze helped him defeat the enemy, and it happened more than once. Just thinking about it makes my scalp tingle.

So it is better to ban such a cheater permanently...

~~

As for E'yidu, He Heli and others from Huitong Hall, they were wiped out by the special operations team that attacked in the form of government troops after several days of stubborn resistance. No one was left alive at the scene...

As for Gong Zhengliu, he had made meritorious contributions in exposing the crime, so his experience as an accomplice to the bandits was not pursued, and he was rewarded with fifty taels of silver and sent back to his hometown.

As soon as he was released from the Ministry of Justice, Meihua took him out of the capital in a carriage.

In the carriage was his long-lost son.

It was because the Special Operations Group helped him find his son who stayed in Shaoxing that Gong Zhengliu had no choice but to volunteer to be their informant...

However, the public statement is that he was inspired by Hao Zhongcheng when he was in contact with the Liaodong Governor on behalf of Nurhaci, and was willing to eliminate this hidden danger for his homeland.

Therefore, Hao Jie was not implicated in any way. Instead, he was widely praised by scholars for his clever arrangement for the chieftain to come to Beijing to surrender. Moreover, because he finally found a place for Li Chengliang, he was regarded as a capable official by the government and the public, and his future was promising.

ps. Two consecutive updates.