Xinshun 1730

Chapter 853 A penny stumps the emperor ([-])
"The words of all the ministers, whether pleading for the people, or being mature and prudent, are all reasonable."

The emperor let out a muffled sound, stopped everyone's debate for the time being, then turned around, stopped talking, but stared at the rolling river in a daze.

Although the clear water of the Huaihe River and the turbid water of the Yellow River do not have the clear and distinct scenery of Longxing, they are also wonderful and exquisite.

It is believed that the construction of the levee, sluice, spillway, and scour gate, these projects that have been continuously repaired for hundreds of years, does not know how much manpower and material resources were spent.

However, how many problems are hidden behind these huge projects created by human and material resources?

The meaning of water control in the previous dynasty was to protect the ancestral mausoleum, followed by water transportation, and protect people's livelihood last.

What is the difference in this dynasty?
Wouldn't it be the same if the ancestral mausoleum wasn't here?Even if the ancestral mausoleum is not here, it is still the last thing to protect people's livelihood.

The imperial court has always known that officials such as water transport and river courses are corrupt.But sometimes it is acquiesced, as long as the water transportation is guaranteed, the rest is turned a blind eye.

Li Gan said that he was not an ostrich, but how many years had he been an ostrich before the formation of the navy and before going to Nanyang?

Up to now, the emperor has to be convinced of the influence of Liu Yu's strategy of building a navy and going to Nanyang.

From the perspective of water transport and sea transport alone, 20 years ago, when it came to sea transport, the voices of opposition from the DPRK and China must be "dangerous, easy to be robbed by pirates; unsafe, if it encounters wind and waves, it will disappear; it is fragile." The nape of the neck, once the waterway is cut off, the north and south will split" and other sounds.

Anyone who mentions shipping must be associated with disasters for the country and the people.

When the Jiedu envoy of Jiangsu wrote a letter asking for a trial of sea transportation, Liu Yu did not immediately stand up to support it.

Up to now, at least, those who oppose shipping no longer have the same reasons as they did 20 years ago.

Because those reasons are not won by debate, but by doing things so that they have nothing to say.

When the principle of "serving the country and the community" fails to make sense, these opponents only have very realistic problems in their mouths.

However, after the Nanyang issue and the navigation issue are resolved, the remaining reasons for objection can be stated in one sentence: there is no problem that cannot be solved with money, and if it cannot be solved, then there is not enough money.

The news sent by the courier just now did not say that the trade negotiations with the Netherlands were completed, but only that the Dutch coup d'état.But the emperor also knew that according to Liu Yu's strategy, after the coup d'état was completed, the negotiation would be [-]% stable.

As long as the negotiation is settled and the money is in place, many things will be simple.

At the beginning, Liu Yu's promise was that two or three taxes from Henan Province would go into the emperor's internal funds.Now it seems that it is higher than expected.

Monopoly fees, interest-bearing dividends on share capital, official kiln porcelain monopoly, plus the fact that Ceylon is not in Nanyang, and the cinnamon and betel nut benefits also belong to the emperor.

In the memorial to the emperor, Du Feng, the governor of Ceylon, also patted his chest and said that he was absolutely confident that [-] soldiers would break through [-] from the Indian state.Now India is in the situation at the end of the Tang Dynasty, and the envoys from all over the country are fighting in chaos. There must be people like "Shi Jingtang" who want to borrow soldiers from "Khitan".

If you can take it, treat it as outside, and collect taxes if you can abide by it, and return it to Nanyang if you can't, without the risk of extortion and slavery, and you can get more than one million silver a year.

If all goes well, within three to five years, there will be at least six or seven million taels of silver in hand every year.If you plan to invest more than one million taels in the northwest and southwest every year, you will still have 700 million taels left.

The emperor thought to himself, as long as he has money, the Huaihe River can be cured, right?Even if you rule for ten years, if you can change the richness of Lianghuai and Song Dynasty, it will be worth it.

The letter written by the Jiedu envoy of Jiangsu made it very clear.

In the Huanghuai area, Zhu Yuanzhang would not be able to leave. At least under the circumstances that Dashun's centralization can guarantee, the Huanghuai area is at most the king's pioneer.

Unless Dashun's centralization is as bad as that of Meng Yuan, and petty officials hammered down provincial officials to seal the water transport and pretend to be imperial envoys, and the central government didn't know about it.

However, the corruption of Huanghuai and the pioneering of the king caused many problems.Especially if the canal is not converted to sea transportation.

Since ancient times, there has been a problem that must be faced in all dynasties, the north and the south.

Here the north and the south are blocked, and it is also related to the canal.At that time, if the governor of the south is strong day by day, if there is another uprising elsewhere, the imperial court will throw a large number of energetic soldiers on the Huanghuai River, fearing that something serious will happen.

Huanghuai, just in the middle of the north and south, plus the canal, if you talk about people, it is like a person's waist.

If the hand hurts, heal the hand, if the foot hurts, heal the foot, but if the waist is sick, the core strength will be abolished, and the whole body will not be able to exert strength.

Since the Song Dynasty, the Chinese dynasties have been like a person with a broken waist. He used to have a thousand catties of strength, but now he is sick and has no strength in his waist. How can he still have strength?
Where is the problem?

From the perspective of Jiangsu Jiedushi, the problem lies in water transportation.

If the world is peaceful, that's fine.

Once there is trouble in the world, do we have to use money and food from the south to fight?

Does the money and food in the south have to go through the canal?
Does the canal have nearly ten times the wear and tear?
Will the loss of the canal be made up by the people on both sides of the canal?

Is the loss of manpower and labor sent out to prompt an uprising?

Will the uprising cut off water transport and make the problem worse?

Water transportation is corrupt, will there be problems in war?
Of course, Jiangsu Jiedushi could not use the word "uprising", but used words such as rebellion, civil uprising, and fooling the people.

At that time, foreign aggression will cause internal troubles, and internal troubles will cause internal strife. Even though Huanghuai is located in the Central Plains, the imperial court can suppress it with all its strength.

However, if there is a series of chain reactions triggered, if the court has a wise king, it can still be suppressed. Once it is a weak king, the world will be in chaos.

The emperor agreed with this, but he also knew in his heart that the two dynasties of Ming and Dashun were indeed "ruthless" towards the people of Huanghuai.

In order to protect water transportation, once there is a flood, although the imperial court does not expressly express it, it actually acquiesces to the policy of "protecting the north but not the south, and blocking the north and dredging the south". People in Henan and other places, the first word that comes to mind is begging for rice.

There was a shortage of nine years in ten years. The problem was not with Emperor Zhu in Fengyang, but with Emperor Zhu in King Yan. It was caused by the battle of Jingnan, when the capital was established in Beijing, and the sea transportation was abandoned and water transportation was abandoned.

After crossing the Yellow River, the canal is close to the Yellow River.Once the silt from the Yellow River enters the canal, the canal cannot be used by boats.

Decades ago, when the Dutch envoys came to Beijing to request trade and attack Catholicism by the way, Peter von Holm, a member of the envoy, measured the water depth of the canal and saw the problem of the canal, thinking that silting would happen sooner or later.

Later, the Dutch mission also came up with a weird conclusion, saying that the silt at the bottom caused the water depth to be too shallow, so flat-bottomed boats had to be used. Farther and farther away from the ocean.

Even the Dutch who came to the canal for the first time can see the problem, can the people of Guochao not see it?
Therefore, it is the policy of the imperial court to "protect the north from floods by default but not the south".Although silting is a matter of time, but if the Yellow River silt is not allowed to enter the canal, at least the silting can be delayed by decades or hundreds of years.

Hongze Lake is getting higher and higher. The upper reaches of the Huaihe River, especially the Huaihe River Basin on the ground in Anhui, the water does not flow down, so how can it not cause floods?How could it not be ten years of famine?

And if it is not acquiesced to protect the north and not the south, and the Yellow River has an accident from the north, and the turbid water rushes into the canal, will the canal still pass with the sediment content of the Yellow River?
Since the Ming Dynasty, they dare not use the water of the Yellow River as the water source of the canal.

That's why there are all kinds of wonderful policies: those who irrigate the fields are not allowed to compete with the transfer of water for profit.

When there is a shortage of water in dry weather, the canals are not allowed to release water and the land is not allowed to be irrigated.

When it rains, the canal drains, and a large amount of water enters the ditches and floods the farmland.

The local people don't have much culture, and their "quality" is obviously not high. Those who don't understand it will naturally scold their mothers directly.

The local gentry are well-educated, and their "quality" is slightly higher. Those who understand it also said: the country's major plan is to transfer, transfer to Caoqu, and Caoqu to river dams.However, the wealth of the people is stored in the fields, and the benefits of the fields are stored in the water.If there is no water to irrigate crops, the people will be poor. How can the poor be transferred?

If you don't use the water from the Yellow River, you have to compete with the farmland for water.

The water from the Yellow River can be used for up to 20 years. After crossing the Yellow River all the way to Jining, it will all be silted up.

The so-called acquiescence means that of course the emperor cannot directly say it.It is also impossible for the emperor to say in the court that the people in the south can be harmed, but the water transportation in the north cannot be harmed.

But when the officials were doing it, the opening in the north affected the heavy fines for water transportation, and the opening in the south would pass by with a haha ​​as long as it was blocked afterwards.

As the emperor, there is no conscience to condemn the people.

But the default was to ensure water transportation.

Now that we have the ability to transport by sea, it is natural to talk about the people.

I had already discarded my conscience when I acquiesced to protect the north but not the south, but now it suddenly grows out.

If it can really solve the "hands and feet" problem of water control caused by water transportation, and even cure the Huaihe River, it is equivalent to a lot more basic disk in Dashun's hands.

Even if there is chaos in the future, holding the navy in your hands is equivalent to killing the population and food of the northern provinces including Anhui and northern Jiangsu, plus southern Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong that the navy can control.

No matter how hard you go elsewhere, as long as you hold Gyeonggi, Shandong, Shanxi, Henan, Shaanxi, Liao, and the well-governed northern Jiangsu and Anhui in your hands, there will be rebellions elsewhere without the Huanghuai dividing them into north and south. thing.

Because of foreign troubles, it seems that the problem is not big for the time being.

In terms of internal troubles, pinching these places, the navy controls Fujian, Guangdong, Zhejiang, and southern Jiangsu.What power do the remaining provinces have?
Not to mention Sichuan, it is basically stable, unless the centralization of power completely collapses, this place will be chaotic.

Excluding Sichuan and the places that Dashun can control, the provinces that can cause troubles are really not very powerful.

If it can really spend two dollars to solve the scourge of the Huanghuai District, even if it is just to solve the northern Jiangsu and Anhui, it sounds like a lot of money, but it is worth it.

The only thing I don’t know is whether these water conservancy officials can come up with a plan to cure the Huaihe River without the ancestral mausoleum and the water transportation. Don’t even think about curing the Yellow River. I still have a few batches in my heart.

Come up with a plan, I don't know how much it will cost, can it?
…………

Liu Yu, who had already learned the news of the successful coup d'etat in the Netherlands, was relieved.

Seeing the emperor staring at the river in a daze, he only looked at the river, then looked away.

I thought I didn't have that ability.

After the diversion of the Yellow River in later generations, the management of the Huaihe River took great pains.

If you want to say that the Yellow River is still taking the Huai River into the sea, you want to completely cure the Huang Huai River?How big is that?

Even in future generations, if the situation of seizing the Huaihe River into the sea is still the same, it may not be easy to deal with.

Anyway, if you want to cure it, you have to wait for a heavy rain one day, the Yellow River will burst into Shandong, and tens of thousands of people will die.

But this is hundreds of thousands of human lives, and we can only say that we are waiting for an accident or a natural disaster.

There is a specialization in art, and I don’t know how to control water at all. I can’t copy homework with things from later generations. The Yellow River goes north, and the Yellow River goes south. These two most basic conditions are different. Isn’t it ridiculous to copy homework?

Now that we have gone by sea, the manpower and technology at this time have to fight against the mighty power of nature, and it is still such a natural power as the Yellow River. There can only be one word: difficult.

It is to wash the sand with water, and the safety of water transport is not considered. How can the Huanghuai be treated?
It is almost inevitable that Hongze Lake will break through and go to Gaoyou Yangzhou, and it will continue with this trend.Or this year, or next year, or ten years later, or a hundred years later, it just depends on which year there will be a heavy rainstorm.

It is almost inevitable for the Yellow River to break through and follow the northern line thousands of years ago. Both the Huaihe River and the Huaihe River have already silted up aboveground rivers.It just depends on which year a big event happens.

After thinking about it, the only thing that can be done is to let the imperial court hold 5000 to [-] million taels of silver at any time.If something like the diversion of the Yellow River or the collapse of the embankment of Hongze Lake happened, the only thing I can do now is to spend money on treatment and treatment immediately.

It was so easy for the emperor to find something that he felt was "can be done, should be able to be done, and is the easiest to do in theory compared to completely solving problems such as land annexation", which is also a good thing.You need someone to get you money, right?
The point is, if the emperor just wanted to build a big garden or something, how much would it cost?If it is really that promising, overseas trade and industry and commerce may be killed by the emperor before they grow up.

It is best for the emperor to find more "hobbies" or "aspirations" that require a lot of money.

I only hope that the emperor can settle this matter.At this time, don't be afraid of wolves and tigers, worry about water labor and expenses, you have to be ruthless, you have to have a dream of once and for all, or ambition.

(End of this chapter)