On the third day after arriving in Buwei County, Yongchang County, after receiving the warm reception from Prefect Li and others, and a little adapted to the climate and recovering their physical strength, Li Su diligently launched a visit to the local area.

Li Su got up early in the morning that day and left the county town to travel westward for exploration.

There is a short half way to ride a horse in the middle, and the rest can only be supported by a guide to hike. There are uneven hills along the way, but there are not many steep mountains and valleys. Until the evening, I finally crossed the last hill and suddenly a surging river appeared in front of me.

"Huh--I'm so exhausted, is this river Zhoushui?"

This is the key to Li Su's future farming and infrastructure planning for Yongchang County - opening up the trade route for Shidu Haima.

The young county magistrate Lu Kai, who was responsible for the guidance, quickly replied: "Governor, this is indeed Zhou Shu. The rumor of "Shangshu. Yao Dian" comes from Buzhou Mountain, which is the west, so it is named. Thank you for your hard work, let's drink some water."

The Zhou River is the Nujiang River in later generations. It is obviously nonsense to say that it comes from Buzhou Mountain. Li Su knows common sense in geography. Whether it is the Nujiang River or the Lancang River, they are all like the Yangtze River, from the Tanggula Mountain on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

The locals in Yongchang thought that the maximum upstream of the Zhoushui River was probably only more than 1,000 miles, but in fact, it had already passed two thousand kilometers, or four thousand miles away from the Nujiang River to southern Yunnan. The actual flow of the Nujiang River was only more than 1,000 miles away from the sea in Myanmar.

Li Su made people sweat, spread out the tent to rest, drink water and eat to restore energy, and have been walking for most of the day. It is definitely impossible to go back to the county town tonight, so they can only camp here. Although there are one or two scattered tiny primitive villages by the river beneath the hills, it seems that there are only a dozen families, so they will definitely not be able to live in the hundreds of personal guards who Li Su traveled.

Two soldiers helped him knead the calves of his leggings, and Li Su continued to ask: "How long have we been walking today? How far is the straight line distance from Buwei?"

Lu Kai: "We walked seventy miles today. The straight line from the county town should be fifty miles. We have to go around the mountain road. If the governor is too far away and wants to build ships and cargo to Shan Country, it is also OK to go to the shipyard on the bank of Cangshui in the east of the county. Cangshui is only thirty miles away from the county town. Moreover, Cangshui also flows south into Shan Country and will eventually enter the sea."

The Cang River is the Lancang River, which flows to Myanmar, and then Thailand is the Mekong River. Although the Cang River is the same as the Zhou River when doing business with Shan people, Li Su knows: the key point is that the Mekong River ends up entering the sea on the east coast of the Indochina Peninsula. In this way, wouldn’t it be necessary to go around the Strait of Malacca to go to the West?

Therefore, it is better to walk forty miles more than this town in Buwei County, and never take 2,600 more miles of sea roads to save these forty miles of mountain roads.

"Absolutely not possible. You are not familiar with geography. If you want to get rid of the body, you can only go to Zhou Shui." Li Su directly rejected, and Lu Kai and others stopped talking.

In fact, if the road is closer, it is better to walk the Ivalody River in Myanmar further west, and enter the sea from Yangon, the capital of Myanmar in later generations. But from Buwei County, you have to go to the Ivalody River, and you have to go westward to climb up Gaoligong Mountain. That mountain is the boundary mountain on the border between China and Myanmar in later generations. The whole journey is a snow-capped mountain with an altitude of more than three or four thousand meters. The Han people really couldn't get through it, so they broke down.

Anyway, the Nujiang River also flowed into the Indian Ocean from the west coast of the Indochina Peninsula, which is not less than this a few hundred miles away. Ninety years ago, when the Ailao Kingdom rebelled against the Han Dynasty, the part of Ailao Yi who refused to surrender, climbed over Gaoligong Mountain to rebuild the Shan Kingdom. It is said that "seven or eight out of ten people died after crossing the mountain", which was a terrifying logistical punishment of "directly reducing personnel by four-fifths".

Even the Nujiang River under Li Su's feet is not easy for the Han people to reach - outside the north gate of Buwei County, it is backed by the "Nushan" mountain range, and the Nushan Mountain range is the watershed separating the Nujiang River and the Lancang River.

If you go one hundred miles north from Buwei County, the Nushan Mountains will be in a state of towering snow-capped mountains and cannot be crossed at all. It’s just that when the crust just moved to the vicinity of Buwei County, the “wrinkles” of the crust suddenly stretched out, and from the snow-capped mountains with a relative height of more than 3,000 meters, it suddenly dropped to a hill only three or four hundred meters. This is a geographical advantage given to China by heaven.

It is also because of this that when Li Su and his party arrived at the bank of Zhoushui, they felt hot because of the fatigue of exercise at the beginning, and after camping and resting, they quickly felt that the climate was acceptable.

Li Su lighted the lights in the tent and was preparing for dinner. He chatted with Lu Kai, Nang Xi, Li Hui and others: "When I was in Yuyu County, I was near Ye Yuze where I stayed. I didn't think the climate was so cool. I didn't expect that this place would be four hundred miles south of Yuyu, but it was a little cooler, and there was no trouble from poisonous insects, flies, what's the reason?"

Lu Kai explained: "Of course, it is because this place is not far from Buzhou Mountain. It is a snowy mountain dozens of miles north. How can there be hot poisonous insects? Even the miasma common in the south central region does not exist around Buwei County.

I have been waiting for a long time to hear that the governor is timid and hates the miasma. I specially asked the hunters here to prepare some clean ice drinks and prepare wolfberry sauce, so I asked the governor to reward them."

As they said that in order to please Li Su, these locals even presented a can of cold drink like ice, using Nanzhongzhen flavored wolfberry sauce (jujube sauce) and yurica flower dew. It was not surprising that Li Su also ate it in the county a few days ago.

What he was curious about was that it was almost the end of the third lunar month, so where did the ice and snow come from in the tropical areas?

Lu Kai saw Li Su's curiosity and explained proudly: "It was all taking advantage of the darkness of the sky to let the hunters pick pure ice and snow on Buzhou Mountain. Buzhou Mountain was regarded as a holy mountain by the natives. We know that the governor does not drink raw water, but these ice and snow will definitely not contain any filth. These containers that hold snow were cooked before and covered with boiled linen cloth, so they will never be polluted."

Li Su thought to himself: It seems that I love taking baths, cold drinks, and afraid of heat, and not drinking raw water... These reputations have spread all over the world, even people in the most remote and southwest county towns in Nanzhong know about it.

Forget it, after all, the body is resistant. People in every era have the bacterial environment of each era. If they are not clean, they will not get sick if they eat. Isn’t it okay for Su Wu to drink the ice water of Lake Baikal?

...

After enjoying the smooth drinks in the tropical area at the end of March, Li Su officially supervised the locals to start planning shipyards nearby, farming, and preparing to set up a new county town here.

After all, there are still seventy miles away from the county seat, and there is definitely another county that can be set up on the 70 miles of the north. If you are really ready to build a good construction and pioneering.

Moreover, there are actually quite a lot of narrow and fertile land on both sides of the Nujiang River. You don’t even have to make it into terraces, just plant it directly along the river and set it on fire to burn the wasteland. There is absolutely no problem in feeding thousands of households in the nearby valleys.

In addition, there is no winter in Nanzhong, so even if the wasteland starts to burn at the end of March and plant it in May, you are not afraid of delaying the farming season. At worst, you can only plant one season this year and harvest it again in "winter".

Although Yongchang County has a population of more than 1.5 million, it is equivalent to most of Yunnan Province and part of Myanmar in later generations, and there are still many fertile lands that can be planted idle.

The imperial court did not develop in previous years because it felt that this place was the end of the world. No matter how well it was developed, it was restricted by logistics and transportation, and the materials handed over could not be fed back to the Central Plains, so it was too lazy to take care of them.

Li Su came prepared. He brought dozens of experienced shipbuilders, hundreds of ordinary carpenters, and dozens of masons in the shipyard. He spent a few days asking the craftsmen to choose the land for the newly built county town first, and then began to log and dig wood to build a kiln and burn bricks, and started step by step from scratch.

After living in a simple house, the wasteland was burned, and a batch of wood, bricks and stone were stored, and then the shipyard was officially built. As for the drawings of the ship, they were left behind, and there were 200 materials and 400 materials.

When Lu Kai, Li Hui and others first saw the drawings of the dual-purpose boats of the river and sea that Li Su took out, they were worried that the boat would be too big. When they encountered dangerous shoals and reefs downstream, they could not get through the place where there was insufficient water treatment. However, Li Su said there was no need to worry at all - the "earth wrinkles" belt in the Hengduan Mountains had passed, and the south would only become flatter and flatter. At most, there was a lot of miasma in the dense forest, but there was absolutely no need to worry about navigation and draft.

This place is already considered the "middle and lower reaches of Nujiang". Who has ever seen a river with no problem when it is upstream, but when it reaches the middle and lower reaches, the draft becomes a problem?

It’s like the Yangtze River is more than 6,000 kilometers. The first 4,000 kilometers are in the mountainous areas, with mountains in Qinghai, Tibet and Bashu. But the last 2,000 kilometers are all in Huguang, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. What other dangers can be difficult to travel?

Lu Kai and Li Hui saw that Li Su was so sure, he did not stop him for a while. He just said that they would send scouts or expedition teams to build the first batch of small boats in the future, then go downstream to explore the path and find out the geography further south.

After seeing everyone's reactions, Li Su was even more confident in his decision-making: to put it bluntly, this was the inspiration to break through a layer of window paper. It was because everyone misjudged the "is this the upper reaches or the lower reaches of the Nujiang River" that others overestimated the difficulty of navigation. Only Li Su knew that this place was already the downstream, so he was brave.

This just proves that the failure of our predecessors to do it is not a technical problem, but a judgment problem. Just like Columbus's seaship technology for more than a hundred years ago has actually reached America, but there are no ambitious people who have the courage to die in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, it is not that the ship cannot do it.

Unfortunately, Li Su himself didn't have time to stay here for too long, so this long-term construction would not allow him to continue to supervise. So after he stayed in Buwei County for more than half a month, he made a list of species such as "long lint cotton" that he would focus on looking for from the Sindu Kingdom in the future and handed it to Lu Kai and the Li family, Li Su decided to leave.

Of course, before leaving, he did not forget to let the new prefect Li Ji and others be represented by a memorial to jointly praise the new policy systems such as the selection of officials, finance and taxation implemented by the General of the Western Conquest in Yongchang, and listed some of the benefits and achievements of the pilot of this new policy. After Li Su took it, it will naturally be useful in the future-

For the personnel system of "the list of candidate officials for local elections and the provincial governors selects the final officials" in the first stage of "changing land and returning to flow" in Nanzhong, as long as it is slightly improved, the transition from the Han Dynasty's recommendation system to the prototype of the "tribute election system" in the Sui and Tang Dynasties can be achieved.

"Let the Southern Barbarians replace taxes with corvee service and other corvee services" can also be used as a transition from changing the current tax system of the Han Dynasty to "replacement of renting and mediocre adjustments".

Li Su worked hard in Nanzhong for more than half a year and achieved real results, and the resistance was less than taking out a reform that would divide the personnel, financial and rights and interests of the Runshi family.

After all, this is a gun with a stick and a finger, and a mountain stone can be used to polish jade. There is a layer of warm water to boil a frog to disintegrate the will of resisting. Li Su's old and slutty beep has always been linked to things.

Before leaving, Li Su's last words were given to Guan Yu: "Chang Yunchang, the southern expedition has been delayed, so you have to live here for the whole summer and autumn. However, I finally thought about it. By then, your attack on Yueli this fall will be better to be ahead of the end of July.

I will convince my lord that in early July, Yide would pretend to cross the river attack in the North Line Moshui, and attract Gao Yi's main force to the coast of the North Line Moshui half a month in advance. When Gao Yi's main force is fully released, you steal his old nest Qiongdu from behind, and you will definitely win a complete victory in one battle. The reason for in advance is to dismantle his vigilance-

Everyone will be wary of the enemy's attack when the autumn cooler enters the warehouse. If Yide attacks Yueli, it is indeed necessary to cross the Dadu River in July to reach the heart of Yueli. But you are different. Crossing the Lushui River from the southern line in July, you can reach Qiongdu in July. Even if Gao Yi wants to break his head, he will not expect that someone will face the disadvantage of insufficient military rations and rushing to 300 miles a month before the autumn rations come down."

(Note: Guan Yu's route is equivalent to sneak attacking Liangshan Yizhou from Panzhihua northward along Lushui.)
Chapter completed!