national surname chiming

Chapter 457

As the Manchu Qing was completely forced by the Ming Dynasty to give up all coastal territories, they retreated back to the hinterland of the Liaohe Plain and even the inland territories further north.

The war between the Ming and Qing Dynasties has finally come to an end, and we have to usher in a new stage of peace that lasts for two or three years. A considerable part of the strategic deployment is based on the advantage of the sea route.

When the Qing Dynasty clearly recognized the situation in this regard, completely stopped playing with Daming on its shortest board, and gave up trying to import talents and gain profits from trade, and throw away all coastal areas, then Daming's previous accumulated advantages on the water would no longer be possible. Played by military means.

Of course, this does not mean that Ming's maritime superiority is completely useless, it can only be said that it has no use in the military.In terms of private development and industrial and commercial construction, of course, the advantages of shipping still have a lot of room to play.

It's just that all of this takes time, and it is necessary to transform the advantages of infrastructure into farming accumulation, and then into comprehensive national strength.

If Daming insisted on launching an attack on Shengjing in the Liaohe Plain in the seventh year of Longwu, it would not be impossible.

But the problem is that Zhu Shuren's ambition is even greater. What he wants is not to seize the core city of the Manchus, but to completely conquer the opponent.

If Shengjing is beaten now, the Manchus will completely flee into Baishan Heishui, and the Ming army has not yet had the strength to chase and annihilate guerrillas.The meaning of winning Shengjing is not great, it is nothing more than stretching Daming's logistics supply route, and it is more likely to be dragged down financially.

Since this is the case, it is better to leave this goal that cannot run away, and wait until Daming has completely rebuilt the north, and organizes follow-up cavalry strength for pursuit and guerrilla operations, so as to ensure that "Da Ming can destroy the Manchus by relying on cavalry alone" , and then launch the final blow to the Shengjing regime.

……

Under such a delicate balance, from the beginning of the seventh year of Longwu to the summer of the ninth year of Longwu, during another period of two and a half years of recuperation, the Ming and Qing Dynasties completely restored a state of peace.

In the past two and a half years, Zhu Shuren, as he had agreed with the royal family, personally went to Beijing to sit in town and restore the ruling order of the entire six northern provinces.He also took his main wife and princess Zhu Yuchan away, leaving only his side concubine Fang Ziling in Nanjing to take care of his two sons.

In this chaotic autumn, the emperor can only trust Zhu Shuren to sit in Beijing for a long time and coordinate the entire north, without worrying about the warlord's separatism.It is impossible for the emperor to be at ease if anyone else manages this game.

At the same time, considering Shi Kefa's status in the Nanjing court, it was only lower than Zhu Shuren, but higher than Shen Tingyang.So Zhu Shuren also made adjustments to the power arrangement in Nanjing——

It's definitely not that he doesn't trust Shi Kefa, but he wants to protect Shi Kefa so that he can get along with Emperor Longwu and work hard for a lifetime.Otherwise, whether it is promotion or transfer, it is an easier option.

Zhu Shuren's insurance operation was to reassign his cousin Zhang Huangyan, who had made great achievements in the north and served as the governor of Beizhili and Henan for a year, back to Nanjing, and then formally took over as Minister of the Ministry of War.

When Zhang Huangyan was the governor in the north, he had the title of Minister of the Ministry of War, but there was still a gap between the title and the official title of Minister of the Ministry of War.Zhang Huangyan would definitely be happy to be able to officially become the minister of a key department and also enter the cabinet. As for the local power, it doesn't matter.

Zhang Huangyan has been working as a local official for many years before. He donated an official in Chongzhen for 13 years, and reached the peak position of governor from the county level in 12 years. Now he is in his thirties. Finally, he joined the cabinet and participated in the work of the central government. up.

After Zhang Huangyan entered the cabinet, the cabinet was still headed by Shi Kefa, Minister of the Ministry of Officials, followed by Shen Tingyang, Minister of the Ministry of Households, Zhang Huangyan, Minister of the Ministry of War, and Fang Yizhi, the eldest brother-in-law of Zhu Shuren, who was transferred to the Minister of Industry. Even if Zhu Shuren left Nanjing, the four real powers in the cabinet The three characters belong to his family, and they can be regarded as iron buckets.

……

After stabilizing all the power structures in the front and rear, all you need to do is to farm with peace of mind. In the past few years, the achievements of Ming Dynasty's construction are of course extraordinary.

In the north, Zhu Shuren pays light taxes and encourages industry and commerce, personally grasps the construction of water conservancy in various places, promotes the policy of permanent tenancy rights, educates the northern people to farm well, ensures that they can always cultivate the land they rent, and treats the land as a fixed asset that can be passed on from generation to generation. Protection, even if the land property rights are not yours, you should protect them, because the future of Ming Dynasty is already "buy and sell without breaking the lease".

Even if the landlord sells the property rights of the land, it cannot harm the interests of the tenant farmers who have contributed to the construction of these lands, fertilization and water conservancy.

In just a few years, water conservancy in the north has recovered very well. As the hottest year of the Little Ice Age has completely passed, natural disasters have also decreased, and mild floods and droughts can be overcome by water-assisted irrigation.

In Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong and other provinces, the Ming Dynasty was completely restored at the beginning of the sixth year of Longwu, so by the summer of the ninth year of Longwu, it was already the fourth year of grain harvest.

After several years of recuperation, the population of Ming Dynasty has stabilized at the 6000 million mark. The war has not yet ended completely, and every year there is consumption of military service and corvee service. It is unrealistic to increase the population, and there must always be complete peace. Only when the tax is light and the tax is light will it enter a period of rapid population growth.

Fortunately, with Daming's current arable land, 6000 million people will definitely not be too small, but it can ensure that basically everyone has a field.

Any more and you'll have to roll it yourself, which doesn't help overall productivity.Unless foreign land reclamation, or the rapid development of industry and commerce, more labor force can be absorbed.

Although the absolute number of population has not increased, after three years of rest, production in the north has completely recovered, and the population structure between the north and the south is much more balanced and healthier than it was in the sixth year of Longwu.

The total population of the six northern provinces has recovered to 500 million.Adding up the southern provinces, the number has dropped to 500 million.

In the past three years, a total of 700 million people who were originally born in the north and went to the south as refugees due to famine and war, finally returned to the north with the reconstruction of the north.The imperial court also gave benefits to returning northerners, re-allocating the unowned land that had been abandoned due to war and population decline to a guaranteed minimum area for returning civilians, so that the common people can live and work in peace and contentment.

In the sixth year of Longwu, the north achieved self-sufficiency in food rations.

Beginning in the seventh year of Longwu, the imperial court set up Changping warehouses to purchase surplus reserves for future military rations. In that year, it raised as much as 300 million shi of surplus rations in the north—this figure was definitely obtained from moderate purchases of rations, and there was no rush Cheng, don't need sensitive associations.

In the eighth year of Longwu, the surplus grain raised by northern purchases had further increased to as much as 800 million shi, and the savings were enough to launch another wave of military operations involving tens of thousands of people and lasting more than a year.

Similarly, in the past three years, although the agricultural production in the south has not improved significantly, the progress in industry, commerce and technology has been very obvious.

From scientists like Descartes, to explorers and geographical discoverers like Tasman, to military engineers like Vauban, they all worked for Ming in an open academic environment.In the past few years, Jansen Tasman has been poaching people from Europe, which has just ended the 30-year war, to Daming.

As the minister of the Ministry of Industry of the Ming Dynasty and the highest person in charge of the Academy of Sciences, Zhu Shuren's brother-in-law and friend of the same year, Fang Yizhi, also tried his best to provide the best and most inclusive research environment and hardware conditions for the following researchers.

The advances of engineers are most evident in the field of chemistry.Since Zhu Shuren first produced nitrocellulose, that is, gun cotton, six or seven years ago, the production cost of that new type of smokeless gunpowder was originally high, and it could only be used by a small number of advanced and elite troops mainly rifled gunmen.Since then, the production efficiency and cost of gun cotton have not been significantly improved.

Now, under the mutual inspiration of the Chinese and Western teams, coupled with strict R&D management, favorable laboratory conditions and incentive systems, the efficiency of indigenous sulfuric acid production, indigenous nitric acid production and the final gun cotton production has been increased several times.
Nowadays, most of the breech-loading firearms of Ming Dynasty will be uniformly distributed with smokeless propellants in the future, which can be regarded as a qualitative change in the upgrading of military industry strength.

Moreover, the technological upgrading of the chemical industry actually has a greater impact on the improvement beyond the military.After the nitration and sulfur can be produced locally at a lower cost, there are still many by-products that can be produced incidentally.

During this process, Zhu Shuren himself couldn't help but make some small comments, and helped to put forward some strategic ideas to guide the research of technicians.

For example, he can inspire engineers to imagine that the world is composed of "countless basic particles". It's easy to understand the idea.

Although it needs to be accepted concretely, it has to be proved by experiments. For example, someone measured the air pressure through air combustion experiments and can prove that about one-fifth of the air in nature is "oxygen", thus discovering the existence of this combustion-supporting gas. The concept of "atom".

Of course, it will take more than half a century of hard work for the Western scientific community to move from the "simple atom theory" to the later "atom/molecule theory" that is closer to the truth of nature.The main reason for this is that Dalton took a detour because he insisted on pure atomism and did not believe in the existence of molecules, and it was finally resolved in the Lavoisier era.

But since Zhu Shuren can report the answer directly, he can inadvertently design experiments to encourage engineers to better discover the truth.

For example, he only needs to use a little knowledge from high school in his previous life to make engineers think of designing a simple gas pressure ratio and volume ratio after the combustion of oxygen and natural gas, verify the volume of oxygen before and after the reaction, and the volume ratio of carbon dioxide and water vapor after the reaction, and calculate The ratio of the atomic number of the three elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in the above-mentioned types of substances.

If one experiment is not enough, then it can be combined with some other auxiliary supporting hydrocarbon and oxygen combustion experiments, which can be combined with the daily research of the gunpowder research units of the Daming Academy of Sciences.

Of course, considering that Zhu Shuren himself is based in Beijing, he is not suitable for some research and development in person, and there are no supporting scientific research institutes in Beijing, so it is impossible for Zhu Shuren to waste resources in the next few years and go to the north to reproduce a self-supporting portal. scientific research institutions,

After all, the development of science is still in its infancy, and it is necessary to concentrate resources to do big things, and work together to inspire each other.If a separate portal is established, it is easy to waste scientific research by "repeating the wheel". The communication conditions in the late Ming Dynasty were not developed.

Therefore, Zhu Shuren had to rely on his concubine Fang Ziling and his brother-in-law Fang Yizhi to move to Nanjing to discover many of Zhu Shuren's foresights.

Fortunately, Zhu Shuren is already a great man from heaven, and he doesn't need much fame at all, and he doesn't need to compete with scientists for his status, so it doesn't matter who he uses to express.

Over the past few years, under the promotion of Zhu Shuren, scientists finally "self-discovered" the theory of atoms and molecules, and realized the most elementary laws of the microscopic world.

After Zhu Shuren led these people in from a theoretical level, the follow-up work was much easier.Scientists have this way of thinking and understanding of the world, curiosity will naturally drive them to synthesize more things, and take down a lot of "low-hanging fruits that are easy to pick".

The department of traditional medical research in the Academy of Sciences was the first to think of using chemical methods to combine traditional Chinese medicine minerals to refine more pure poisons and disinfectants, as well as other bactericidal external medicines, which greatly improved the basic medical and public health levels of Daming.

With a world of primitive disinfectants, the outbreak rate of infectious diseases and plagues can be greatly suppressed.

The gunpowder production department, combined with the addition of chemical knowledge in the new era, has also created better blasting medicines.Even if it is far from reaching the level of explosives developed by Nobel in later generations, it is more than enough to surpass the level of early explosives in the West in the middle and early 19th century in history.

With better civilian explosives, the cost of all kinds of infrastructure projects in Ming Dynasty, such as building bridges, cities and roads, was much lower.

Although there is still no mechanized construction equipment, at least it can be used cheaply and on a large scale.The south was originally mountainous. Until the 17th century, the infrastructure in Jiangxi, southern Hunan, Sichuan, and Yunnan and Guizhou was still very backward, and the road conditions were extremely poor.

With cheap explosives, the imperial court could follow the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, open up roads with better road conditions into Sichuan, and then upgrade the road conditions between Sichuan and Yunnan and Guizhou to a higher level.
It is of great benefit to reforming the land and bringing together the Southwestern Yi, strengthening the trade of tobacco and other tropical indulgence crops, and enhancing the Southwestern Yi’s recognition of Ming’s rule.

After three full years of farming development, the control and recognition of the remote provinces in the mountainous areas in the south of the Ming Dynasty has been significantly improved, while the north has ample food and clothing, and the Changping warehouse has ample rations.

The training and construction of the army did not fall behind either. For future guerrilla pursuit warfare, Ming poured more resources into building musketeer cavalry troops.

More dragoon snipers with rifled guns were trained, and other elite cavalry were equipped with double-barreled breech-loading nozzles and revolver pistols.

The firearm ratio of the main cavalry troops of the Ming Dynasty is basically close to 100%.Even if the cavalry is mainly for melee combat, it can be equipped with a revolver, and its combat power will directly explode. Even if you encounter five times the number of Manchu cavalry in the field, you can have the power to fight——

No matter how flexible the firepower output of the cavalry is, can it be compared to a revolver that fires six shots in a row?It is nothing more than the fact that the effective range of the revolver is much closer.But as long as the large-scale legion fights, the Manchus are not given the opportunity to fly kites, and the pistol cavalry cooperates with melee weapons, then they are invincible.

After being suppressed by the grassland Hulu for more than a thousand years, the cavalry troops of the Han people finally returned to the level of "one Han as five Hus" with another qualitative change in weapon upgrades.

……

In the past three years of Daming's frenzied farming and technological advancement, other forces of course have not been idle.

After the Manchus had to give up their coastal territories, they could only shift their strategic focus and choose to develop northward.

The Liaohe Plain, which has been well developed, has little value and potential for further development. The easily cultivated land has already been cultivated in the past half century.

Haoge and Shunzhi devoted their main energy to the Songnen Plain on the north side, where they reclaimed wasteland and farmed.

In particular, they brought hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese from the pass.These Han people may have a national identity with Ming Dynasty. If it is too dangerous to be placed around Shengjing, if the Ming army fights again and these people turn against them, the Qing Dynasty will be completely over.Therefore, these hundreds of thousands of Han people, especially some of the craftsmen, were brought to the Songnen Plain by the Qing court.

This can also be regarded as "Crossing the East" under the butterfly effect of the new time and space.

However, it is obviously not enough to rely on the existing technology to farm in the hinterland of Northeast China, which is further north than the Liaohe Plain.Because the seeds and habits of the crops are different, the Songnen Plain is colder than the Liaohe Plain.

Fortunately, the potential is forced out by desperation. When Man Qing faced life and death, he was unscrupulous. He worked together and was willing to try any tricks that could tide him over.

After a few years, I really found out some ways for them one after another——

They approached the earliest merchants from the Raksha Kingdom who had just arrived in East Siberia and the Heilongjiang River Basin to do business, learned from each other, and finally learned a trick from the Raksha merchants, saying that they could grow black on the relatively dry plains in the hinterland of Northeast China wheat.

Then, through exploration and trade in the Sea of ​​Japan, the Manchus also came into contact with Kuye Island, the Fusang people and Anui people in Hokkaido, and discovered a cold-resistant rice variety that can be grown in both Hokkaido and Kuye Island.

In fact, in the history of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, it was not until the middle and late stages that they obtained sub-frigid rice varieties from Fusang Hokkaido, and thus began to promote rice in the Northeast.

At this point, Manren's Northeast Development Plan can be considered to have made up for both legs.Dry land can grow rye, and paddy fields can grow Hokkaido rice.Over time, it will definitely be possible to re-increase food production and feed a larger population.

But it is a pity that they have only explored, surveyed, and experimented for more than three years.Generally, there is basically no harvest in the first year of land reclamation. It would be very good to recover the cost of seeds and earn a little more than two or three times the crop-to-seed ratio.

In the second and third years of land reclamation, basically only [-]% to [-]% and [-]% to [-]% of the harvest of fertile ripe land can be achieved.Basically, it takes five years to open up wasteland before the land can completely achieve the effect of fertile and mature fields.

Of course, considering that the land in the Northeast is black soil, which accumulates fertility all year round, even if you just plant it at the beginning, the effect will be much better than opening up wasteland in the pass.But at most, it will speed up to "reach the peak output after three years of land reclamation".

And the truce period left by the Ming Dynasty to the Manchus was only three years, so when the Manchus and the Qings along the banks of the main rivers of the Songnen Plain matured the first batch of reclaimed fields and settlements, the peace period was almost over.

The fields they worked so hard to plant were destined to help Daming.Breaking through the Guandong to open up wasteland is also destined to open up for Daming.From this point of view, Zhu Shuren will have to thank Hauge and Shunzhi for this in the future.

(End of this chapter)