I want to be emperor

Chapter 254

Behind this firm with high-ranking officials of the Ming court, they don't know whether to say that they are brave, or that they regard wealth as their fate, or that they really want to surrender to the Great Chu Empire.

Well, it doesn't matter what their inner thoughts are, but now they are all in trouble!

As long as the news that they colluded with the Great Chu Empire and helped the Great Chu Empire purchase and transport these prohibited materials was revealed, it would be trivial for the entire Li family to be exterminated, and they might all be punished by the nine clans.

What they did was much more than that of the Shanxi merchants who supplied supplies to Dongyao...

In just over half a year, Fenghe Trading Company continued to supply a large amount of saltpeter and sulfur, as well as iron and copper materials to the Great Chu Empire.

These strategic materials ensured the production of weapons and ammunition of the Great Chu Empire to a large extent, so that enough weapons and ammunition were accumulated to occupy the north of Chu, and now they are crossing the south of the Yangtze River.

To put it bluntly, every victory in the Great Chu Empire's battles, without capturing a single place, is inseparable from the efforts of Fenghe Trading...

Because there were no materials such as saltpeter and sulfur provided by Fenghe Trading Company, the supply of ammunition for the Township Protection Army had to be reduced by at least 30.00%.

The lack of so much ammunition must have greatly affected the strategies of the Great Chu Empire.

Fenghe Commercial Bank even spent a lot of money and contacts in order to meet the needs of the Great Chu Empire, and opened up the entire Yangtze River waterway and coastal commercial roads.

They directly purchased a large amount of saltpeter and sulfur from maritime merchants, and then transported them to Hanyang via the Yangtze River.

Moreover, people were sent to Sichuan, Northwest and other places to open up channels, and materials such as saltpeter and sulfur were purchased from these places and transported.

There are more and more strategically prohibited materials purchased and transported, and the prices are getting cheaper...

According to the information disclosed by Fengheshang Li’s uncle and nephew, in order to contact the source of goods and open up the Yangtze River navigation, the ship full of prohibited materials can reach Hanyang smoothly all the way.

Their masters personally wrote more than ten letters, visited many people, and even impeached an official in red robe who got in the way.

In the end, this channel for purchasing and transporting strategic materials such as saltpeter and sulfur, which was enough to cause the Li family to be ransacked and wiped out a hundred times by the Ming court, was opened.

The uncle and nephew of the Li family revealed this news on purpose, just thinking that once the world changes, you Luo Chu will remember our Li family's contribution.

The masters of their Li family are still counting on continuing to be officials, regardless of whether they are officials of the Ming court or Da Chu...

Regardless of what Li Jiafeng and Shanghang's inner thoughts are, but one thing is undeniable, Fenghe Shanghang has made an indelible contribution to the rise of the Great Chu Empire.

Luo Zhixue even thought about it. If the Li family is sensible enough, they can search for a title or something for them. It is also okay for the master of the Li family to continue to be an official. In short, all the treatment will be favorable.

Well, the premise is that it is interesting enough!
Otherwise, Luo Zhixue would be willing to put down a group of ministers, especially the ministers of the Ministry of Commerce and Finance would not agree.

Now many people in the Great Chu Empire mention Fenghe Trading Company, and they love and hate it. What they love is that they have great energy and can supply a large amount of strategic materials, and what is cruel is that the prices of the materials they provide are very high.

In the past half a year, the Ministry of Commerce and Trade of the Great Chu Empire has paid more than one million taels of material purchase funds to Fenghe Commercial Bank.

So much money is enough to make many people unhappy.

However, Fenghe Commercial Bank seems to be aware of this problem recently, or it has begun to think about the future, and the prices of materials supplied to the Great Chu Empire have been reduced many times in a row.

When the Township Protection Army took Xiangyang City, they lowered the price once, and when the Township Protection Army took Hanyang City and proclaimed the emperor to build a country, they lowered the price again.

Now that the Great Chu Empire has captured Wuchang City and has the momentum to capture Chunan, Fenghe Commercial Bank took the initiative to find it again, saying that the price of this material supply can be further reduced.

In addition, the Li family also has many other industries in the Huguang area. Each of these industries will pay taxes in full, and their industrial branches in various places will actively bear some local expenses, such as bridges and roads.

The whole performance is an advanced model of an outstanding gentry!
The Li family is also very smart and knowledgeable enough.

Luo Zhixue was quite satisfied with this, the Li family was smart, and he liked dealing with smart people.

Therefore, it has already been revealed to Fenghe Commercial Bank through the courtiers, expressing that they are very pleased with the Li family's active behavior of sharing the worries of the empire.

————

After crossing the south of the Yangtze River, the Great Chu Empire not only occupied Wuchang City, a city with an extremely important strategic position, but also gained a lot in terms of money and food.

This made the Great Chu Empire feel very happy.

The high-level people are happy, because with so much money and food, the financial operation of the entire Great Chu Empire will be healthier, and even on the premise of maintaining a large-scale military expansion operation, some money and food can be squeezed out to restore local people's livelihood .

For example, build more water conservancy facilities in Nanyang Prefecture, Xiangyang Prefecture, and Yunyang Prefecture to help local farmers resume planting, so as to alleviate the problem of food production reduction caused by local drought.

For example, through large-scale work-for-relief, we can absorb more homeless refugees and provide them with a job that can feed their hunger. This can not only provide relief, but also prevent these refugees from turning into thieves again. question.

At the same time, large-scale labor relief can also build more water conservancy facilities to stabilize food production.

Large-scale relief from work and the restoration of agricultural production, if these measures are in place, the effect will be leveraged.

But the problem is that these measures also need money and food to support them.

Why was the Ming court still unable to solve the uprising of various peasant armies led by Shaanxi? One rebel army was wiped out today, and another rebel army will emerge tomorrow.

It is because they lack the money and food needed to restore the local people's livelihood!
This also led to them being able to suppress the rebels militarily, but they couldn't solve the problem of the rebels from the root.

Why did the Rebel Army arise?The main reason in the early stage was due to the extreme natural disasters such as the local drought for years, coupled with the increasingly heavy tax assessment and so on.

These caused a large number of farmers to go bankrupt and starved of food. In order to survive, the farmers began to rebel and grab food, and eventually evolved into a large-scale rebel army.

And after these insurgents reached this stage, because of their continued large scale, they were forced to continuously plunder the countryside and attack cities to grab food.

The officers and soldiers will naturally send troops to suppress the encirclement and suppression.

The large-scale battle between the rebel army and officers and soldiers further caused a larger scale of man-made disasters, and a large number of farmlands were abandoned, which further aggravated the disasters in the western part of Shaanxi and Henan.

Under natural disasters and man-made disasters, the local people can no longer survive. These people are either forced or voluntary, and will eventually join the rebel army.

In this continuous process, the officers and soldiers are also continuing to destroy the rebels, and so far, it is relatively easy for the officers and soldiers to fight the rebels, basically one shot at a time.

However, the problem lies after the fight!

The imperial court dispatched a large army to wipe out the rebel army, and after the defeat, they didn't care about it...or they didn't have the ability to manage it anymore.

The local people's livelihood has not been restored, and a large number of rebels or refugees who surrendered cannot be properly resettled, especially some rebels who accepted the recruitment. Although the imperial court accepted their recruitment, they often just let them station in a certain place to fend for themselves.

After a few months, the rebels who accepted the recruiting took a look, oops, they were about to starve to death again...so they raised their flags and rebelled again.

After the other rebels who were defeated were dispersed, they would gradually continue to gather remnants or take refugees to grow stronger again.

In this way, the imperial court discovered that the rebels from all walks of life could not be killed at all. If one rebel army was killed today, another one would emerge tomorrow, and more would emerge in a few days.

The thieves are like weeds, burned over and over again, but they also grow tenaciously over and over again, and the longer they grow, the more luxuriant they are.

If there were no major changes at the end of the Ming Dynasty, for example, there would be no rise of the Great Chu Empire.

Then the struggle between the Ming court and the rebel army has only one outcome: the rebel army will kill the Ming court sooner or later!
And it has been the same in history.

Li Zicheng and the others were defeated several times and raised troops again, and finally entered the capital and forced Emperor Chongzhen to Meishan.

If you look at the struggle between the rebel army and the Ming court, you will find that pure military suppression is useless. If you want to really solve the problem of the rebel army, you can only restore the local people's livelihood.

What the Great Chu Empire is doing in the northern part of Chu, especially in Nanyang, Xiangyang, Yunyang, and Junzhou, is to restore people's livelihood.

Coupled with strong military suppression and control, the external rebels such as Gao Yingxiang and Li Zicheng are kept out, and the Ming army is also kept out, preventing them from running over, burning, killing, looting and destroying people's livelihood, then the people's livelihood in this area will be improved. Continued recovery.

As long as the people's livelihood is restored, the living soil of the rebel army will no longer exist.

However, doing so requires money and food.

Helping farmers resume farming requires money and food, and helping farmers survive the lean period also requires a lot of money and food.

And does the Ming court have so much money and food?

they do not!

Or it means that there was so much money and food under the dynasty, but the finances of the Ming Dynasty did not.

This is also a tragedy.

The Great Chu Empire is different. The Great Chu Empire seized a large amount of money and food through war, and at the same time occupied Chubei and Wuchang Mansion and other areas, and obtained a large amount of local food.

Now the finance department has more than [-] million taels of cash in stock, and the hoarded food is even more enormous.

It only needs to allocate a small part to the northern prefectures where the disaster is more serious, then the local disaster problem can be alleviated, and the production of large-scale refugees can be curbed at the root.

Even if a part of money and food was allocated to restore people's livelihood in some severely affected areas, the Great Chu Empire still had enough money and food to maintain a large-scale military expansion.

On October 26, Luo Zhixue officially conferred the titles of the Fifth Division and the Sixth Division at the Imperial Military Conference, and appointed Han Ziping, the former commander of the First Infantry Brigade, as the division commander of the Fifth Division. Major General Zhang Malin, the director, will be the commander of the Sixth Division.

On the same day, the General Staff Department and the Military and Political Department were ordered to start preparing for the establishment of the Seventh Division, the Eighth Division, the Second Mortar Regiment, and the Third Mortar Regiment.

The military expansion of the Great Chu Empire did not stop because of the Battle of Crossing the River, nor did it stop because of the large-scale work-for-work relief in the northern Chu area, but still maintained a rapid expansion.

During this expansion, Major Gao Zheng, who led the assault battalion in the battle of Wuchang and led the first batch of troops to attack the city, was promoted as he wished, and was transferred to the Sixth Division to serve as No. 20 Four Steps Deputy head of the Corps, and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel at the same time.

(End of this chapter)