In the New Year of the first year of Jian'an, the village elders of Huangmenting started with a banquet and ended with a banquet.
Of course, at this time they did not know how miserable the emperor Liu Xie, who was far away in Anyi, Hedong, was at this time. Amidst the pull of the Guanzhong warlords, he had to spend this New Year in a very miserable way.
In fact, it should not be considered the first year of Jian'an, but the third year of Xingping. It will not be changed to Jian'an until Cao Cao welcomes Liu Xie to Xuchang in September this year.
But according to the chronology of later generations, this year is indeed 196 AD, and it is also the beginning of the general trend of the world becoming increasingly clear.
After this year, Zhang Ji was first defeated in the struggle with Guanzhong Li Jue, Guo Si and other warlords, and fled to Nanyang in despair. He eventually died here and was taken over by his nephew Zhang Xiu.
Then Cao Cao defeated the Yellow Turbans in Runan, expelled Yuan Shu's troops, and expanded his power to Yingchuan, Runan and other places, gradually extending from Yanzhou to Yuzhou.
Liu Bei was fighting Yuan Shu in Xuzhou and fighting Lu Bu at the same time. He was exhausted and miserable, and finally fled to Xuchang at the end of the year to join the emperor.
Sun Ce marched toward Kuaiji with great success, and drove away Wang Lang, the prefect of Kuaiji. From then on, Jiangdong fell into Sun Ce's hands.
Yuan Shao and Gongsun Zan also decided the winner at the end of the year. Ju Yi was forced to withdraw because he ran out of food and grass. As a result, Gongsun Zan took advantage of the victory to pursue him, defeated Ju Yi and got all his supplies.
But everyone knows that Ju Yi has a high prestige in the army due to his meritorious service in the Battle of Jieqiao. This time when the food and grass are exhausted, it may be that Yuan Shao is constraining him from the rear.
After his defeat, Yuan Shao found an excuse to kill him immediately. The first was that the bird was gone and the bow was hidden, and the other was indeed due to Ju Yi's pride in taking credit.
Since then, Yuan Shao has completely controlled the army. Although he still has to guard against Gongsun Zan, at this time Gongsun Zan is no longer his opponent.
During this period of time, while he was developing with peace of mind, he launched an all-out attack on Gongsun Zan.
At the end of the year, Cao Cao welcomed the emperor to Xudu, attacked Lu Bu and Yuan Shu in the east, and Zhang Xiu and Liu Biao in the south. He gradually gained a foothold in Henan and became much stronger.
The general trend of the world has naturally become a watershed this year, forming a basic pattern with Yuan Shao and Cao Cao in the north, Liu Biao and Sun Ce in the south, Liu Zhang in the southwest, and the northwest is still in chaos.
However, these are things that will only happen in the future this year. At least on the surface, Nanyang is still in a very stable situation.
Huangmenting still lived in such peace. After gaining a certain ability to protect himself, Deng Mao also strictly followed Shen Chen's instructions to expand the surrounding wasteland, actively develop land, and adopt refugees.
Just because of geographical issues, even if there are hundreds of square kilometers of barren land around the Shahe area where Huangmenting is located, it will be difficult for them to expand quickly.
The main reason is that Xinye is located in the south-central area of the Nanyang Basin, closer to Xiangyang.
Wuguan is in the northwest of Nanyang, and Runan is in the northeast of Nanyang.
Refugees who flow into Nanyang from these two directions often go to counties closer to them, such as Liguo, Shunyang, Wancheng, etc., and it is difficult to go to Xinye.
Therefore, Huangmenting is still not able to absorb many refugees, only more than a thousand people so far.
But Deng Zhao and Shen Zhen also had their own plans.
The Yellow Turban stronghold that had attacked them before was located in Liao Mountain, about fifty miles away to the east, and there was not just one but many small Yellow Turban forces there.
There are many, maybe tens of thousands of people. If we can absorb all these people, Huangmen Pavilion will be much stronger.
It's just that the Yellow Turbans are no better than the refugees. They are bandits who rebelled and killed officials. They have blood on their hands. If they are recruited, I don't know if they will go inside and turn against the guests.
Regarding this question, Shen Chen gave an answer.
That is, the Huangmenting manor must be occupied by clan forces, that is, only the thousand people who moved from Xuzhou can stay in the manor.
The absorbed refugees and the Yellow Turban Army will be arranged in villages on the periphery, and they must be dispersed so that the refugees and the Yellow Turban Army can live together. Each village must be managed by people, and at the same time, young people must be organized into an army to prevent them from committing crimes. thing.
In this way, while controlling their families, they can control these young men and women into the army, and re-disrupt their social relations and organizational structure. There is no need to worry about the refugees and the Yellow Turban Army joining forces to cause trouble.
After receiving Shen Chen's advice, Deng Zhao and Shen Zhen both felt it was very clever. However, they did not know that warlords of all walks of life had done this for thousands of years in Chinese history.
Not only warlords and bandits, but also the imperial court did this.
For example, the border guards sent by the Han Dynasty to guard Gucheng Fortress were allowed to bring their family members with them.
There is also the old camp of the Dashun Army in the late Ming Dynasty, which is also a camp for the family members of the army.
As refugees, their family is their only concern. Basically, as long as you control your family, it is equivalent to controlling the entire army.
It can also boost morale, saying that their family is behind them, and if they don't fight to the death, their family will die.
Therefore, separate control of the military and family members has become an important means of control.
However, there are advantages and disadvantages to this. Controlling family members can indeed control the army. However, once the family camp is attacked, the morale of the army will immediately be weakened.
During the battle between Li Zicheng's Dashun Army and the Qing army at Fuchikou, the Qing army raided the family members of the Dashun Army's old camp, causing the army to collapse instantly. The soldiers all wanted to find their families and had no intention of fighting, and they were defeated like a mountain.
Therefore, this is only a temporary way to control the young and strong soldiers collected by the Yellow Turban Army and the refugees. It will not be necessary to do this in the future when the army takes shape.
By mid-January, after staying in the clan for almost twenty days, Shen Chen and Deng Hong had to leave again to go to Xiangyang to go to school and take up their posts.
During these more than twenty days, Shen Chen also made new plans for the clan.
His planning structure is relatively clear. In the main direction, he will continue to farm and recruit refugees, and he will start to engage in side businesses.
Shen Chen hopes to temporarily use colored porcelain and spirits as pillar industries to support Huangmenting's economy, because now their main source of income is still selling grain, and other income is very small.
Although food is very important, even buying pig iron from Fuyang requires a large amount of expenditure, as well as daily necessities such as oil and salt. Therefore, there is no way to do this. We can only use food production in exchange for life development.
However, relying solely on food is definitely not enough. As the world becomes more and more chaotic in the future, the importance of food will also increase day by day.
Therefore, new commercial and trade industries must be developed.
Last year, Zhou Lin introduced them to several Xiangyang businessmen. They were still very interested in the porcelain and high-strength liquor produced in Huangmenting, but the current number of orders was not large and the production could not increase.
This is normal. The demand for porcelain in the south is very high, especially now that the north is in chaos and a large number of refugees and powerful families have moved to the south, which requires a large amount of household porcelain.
However, the current mainstream porcelain market is still dominated by Jiangdong white porcelain and celadon. It will take time for Huangmenting's colored porcelain to break into the market.
At the same time, spirits also encountered Waterloo.
Because of the humid air in the south, people are actually not willing to drink strong spirits in spring and summer. On the contrary, winters in the north are colder, so the sales of spirits should be better.
So from last year to now, I have only sold several thousand kilo of spirits.
However, winters are also cold in the south, and drinking wine can ward off the cold. However, the sales of the thousands of lithos of wine were not a problem, and they were quickly sold out.
But it is estimated that by this summer, the sales volume of this wine will not increase and will tend to decline. At most, people who are particularly good at drinking will like it, such as Zhang Fei and Chunyu Qiong.
Therefore, the porcelain and spirits produced by Shen Chen are far less popular than expected.
Of course, this was also within Shen Chen's expectation.
It is pure nonsense to say that a time traveler invented soap glass and it immediately became a hit.
No matter how good the product is, it must follow the laws of the market.
If emerging things want to enter the market, they not only need time to establish themselves, but also need a suitable opportunity.
Therefore, although the current sales of porcelain and spirits are not very high, Shen Chen feels that businessmen should first conduct promotion experiments and wait for market feedback before starting large-scale production.
Judging from market feedback in the past few months, spirits are very popular in winter.
The cold and humid climate in the south coupled with the bitter cold of the Little Ice Age winters, if you can drink a few sips of strong liquor in winter, it can not only dispel the cold, but also dispel the moisture, so at least strong liquor can be of great use in winter.
Shen Chen plans to brew a few more batches of wine this year, store them, and sell them in the second half of the year. I believe Zhou Lin and the big businessmen in Xiangyang will be happy to accept this large amount of spirits in the second half of the year.
As for colored porcelain, white porcelain and celadon still occupy the mainstream high-end market. Shen Chen plans to target the mid-range market, increase sales first, and then attack the high-end market.
Anyway, the price he is selling to Zhou Lin and the others is mid-to-low-end. Zhou Lin and the others certainly don’t want to make less money, and naturally they also want to enter the high-end market of colored porcelain.
After all, they were able to make huge profits by purchasing colored porcelain at cabbage prices and then selling them at celadon and white porcelain prices, increasing their profits several times.
Therefore, Shen Chen did not need to do anything. He only had to wait for Zhou Lin and others to expand the market in Yizhou and Jingzhou, and the sales of colored porcelain would naturally increase sharply, gradually replacing the status of celadon and white porcelain in the south.
So to a certain extent, Shen Chen has put down the bait, and all that's left is to wait for the market to ferment.
Maybe in another year and a half, Huangmenting will be able to go full throttle to create wealth.
On the 19th day of the first lunar month of the first year of Jian'an, Deng Hong and Shen Chen prepared to leave.
When they returned from Xiangyang, both Shen Chen and Deng Hong were relatively thin. When they set off from Huangmenting, both of them had gained weight, but the sixth grandmother had lost some weight.
Because when the two of them returned to their own homes, they had chicken, duck, and fish every day, and were served by people to eat and drink. When they came back to celebrate the New Year, the furthest they had to go was to go to the ancestral hall to worship their ancestors.
The sixth grandmother used to have a very low self-esteem due to her figure and appearance in the Cai Mansion. She never left the house or took a step outside the house. She was getting fatter and fatter. The fatter she got, the less she dared to go out.
After coming to Huangmenting, everyone praised her every day. They took her from home to home and alleys to the west, and she became the center of attention wherever she went. She enjoyed this feeling of being the center of attention, and instead walked diligently outside every day.
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Now that I have to leave, Grandma Six is a little reluctant to leave.
When they arrived, they only had a few carriages and horses, and more than thirty slaves.
When we left, there were seven or eight more carriages and horses. We took them with us, including chickens, ducks, fish, all kinds of pickles, pickled vegetables, and smoked bacon, filling up seven or eight large carriages.
It would be impossible for such a large team to take a boat, because Feishui is a dry season in winter. Although it is a medium-sized river, large boats cannot travel in winter, and only small and medium-sized boats can travel.
They don't have many people, but they have a lot of stuff. A dozen or so large carriage-sized boats are too big for them. Only flat boats can do that, and they can't get away with flat boats during the dry season of Feishui River.
Therefore, they chose to go south by carriage and horse this time.
The last time they went south by car, Deng Hong and Shen Chen were very embarrassed. There were only three of them in total, the grandfather and grandson plus a driver, and they were riding in a donkey cart pulled by two donkeys.
But after just one year, the situation is different from the past, and this trip south is much more spectacular.
Escorted by fifty tribesmen led by Shen Zhen, with twelve carriages and a total of nearly a hundred people, the large troop was very eye-catching in the countryside.
When passing through Huyang County, even the magistrate of Huyang County heard that such a large team was passing by in his territory, so he quickly sent someone to inquire about the situation. When he learned that it was Deng Hong, he immediately came to see him in person.
To some extent, the position of the Huyang County Magistrate is greater than that of Deng Hong. As the Zhongxian County Magistrate, the Huyang Magistrate's position was 600 shi. Deng Hong was only a state meritorious officer, with 300 shi.
But from another point of view, in the Ming Dynasty, the eunuch who held the seal and was the chief official was only a fourth-rank official. The chief minister of the cabinet usually served as the three official and three orphans.
Should it be regarded as an ordinary fourth-grade product?
Therefore, in the same way, as the staff accompanying Liu Biao, even if they only have three hundred shi, those working in the state government are already middle- and high-level officials, second only to Cai Mao, Kuai Yue, Huang Zu, Zhang Yun, Liu Pan and others.
As long as the Huyang County Magistrate is not stupid, he will naturally come out to curry favor.
However, the main reason why he came out to greet him was not to curry favor with Deng Hong. In this era when officials abandoned their posts and ran away if they disagreed with him, many officials still had great integrity.
The main reason is that a nationwide drought occurred last summer, which not only affected the Guanzhong and Guandong regions, but also affected Nanyang and Huainan to a certain extent.
The main river in Huyang was Bishui, which was later known as the Tang River. The water level dropped sharply, making it difficult for the people to obtain water, so they had to dig canals to irrigate farmland.
However, the workload of digging canals is very large. Water must be collected from upstream and downstream. The lower the water level is, the deeper the canals must be dug. It requires mobilizing the participation of the entire county.
As a result, it was at this juncture that Deng Hong, who was just the chief secretary of the office at that time, presented a keel waterwheel to Liu Biao, and then promoted it in various places in Nanyang. Liu Biao gave him this task. In the past six months, Deng Hong traveled all over the country.
Half of Nanyang.
At that time, Huyang County was also facing the embarrassment of water shortage. After Deng Hong sent the keel waterwheel, the county magistrate summoned all the craftsmen in the county to speed up production and built hundreds of waterwheels and put them on the river to draw water, solving the urgent need.
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As a result, Deng Hong became famous in Huyang countryside. When he heard that the benefactor who helped Huyang people solve their water problems was passing by, the Huyang County magistrate was naturally grateful and invited him to the county government to meet him.