The summer rains are continuous. In the south, it is just a common rainy day, but in Myanmar, it is an overwhelming heavy rain.
In the entire Myanmar region, spring, summer, autumn and winter are not obvious, and the biggest distinction is only the rainy season and the dry season.
The rainy season is from May to September every year (Gregorian calendar).
The torrential rain poured out, sweeping away a large amount of vegetation and flowing down the mountain forest path. It was like a mountain torrent along the way, taking away all obstacles.
Many animals, plants, and even people and houses were swept away and submerged in the vast torrent.
The path we used to take in the past is now muddy, bottomless, and completely impassable.
As for those rice fields in the ravines, there is a 70% chance that they will yield nothing.
In Mubang City, Sun Kewang looked at the scene in the distance and couldn't help but grit his teeth, feeling extremely excited.
Although he was wearing a bamboo hat, the big raindrops pitter-pattered on his body, which made him feel particularly painful.
Retreating from Yunnan, they walked all the way to Luchuan, swept through Mengmao calmly, waited until the dry season, took away the population and materials, and then slowly crossed Hanlong Pass.
Mubang was the first Burmese city in the true sense that he captured.
Of course, he didn't know about Myanmar. It was just the Xuanfu Division of Mu State, which was once subordinate to Yunnan.
"Who can bear the five-month rainy season from April to August?"
"This ghost place, no wonder the imperial court abandoned it and refused to take it back."
Yang Changzhi looked at the insects crawling on the city wall. They seemed to be locusts, but they didn't look like them. There were sporadic snakes that were blown to the city wall by the wind, which made people feel frightened.
But compared to the torrential rain outside the city, it seemed inconspicuous.
This was a heavy rain that exceeded his knowledge, and it continued for several months without stopping. If this was not built on high ground, the entire Mubang City would have been buried long ago.
With such a harsh climate, even if the land here is fertile, Ming Dynasty would not look down upon it, let alone the land is barren.
"Li Dingguo stopped at Hanlong Pass and never took another step forward."
Sun Kewang gritted his teeth, feeling extremely uncomfortable: "Follow us and clean up those toasts. I'll rob him. He can win people's hearts, and he does it really comfortably."
"Your Highness, Yunnan is in the past, we have to look forward."
Yang Changzhi sighed, glanced at the demoralized soldiers, and said in a deep voice:
"The Xuanfu Division in Mubang only has tens of thousands of acres of land, and most of the land under its jurisdiction is owned by mountain people. There is no profit or water to be harvested at all."
"It's not good for us to just sit back and have nothing."
"In this damn rainy season, even if you are practicing, you can only stay indoors." Sun Kewang cursed secretly.
"Your Majesty, it doesn't matter if your legs and feet are crippled. You can still practice with enough food and clothing, but if your spirit and head are crippled, it will be difficult again."
"did you mean?"
Sun Kewang squinted his eyes and became serious.
"The river around us is called the Awa River. Going south along this river is Awa City, the capital of Toungoo Kingdom."
Yang Changzhishu said: "We came here just for the city of Awa, but we can't reach a thousand miles without taking small steps. We can't go straight to Awa, right?"
"Weichen asked the mountain people to find out. There was a market two or three hundred miles down a path. The busiest place within a few hundred miles was called Lashio."…
"There is not only fertile land there, but also caravans, farmers, fishermen, and scarce craftsmen."
Hearing this, Sun Kewang didn't understand why. This was where he would use his troops next.
"How much land is there?" he asked quickly.
"Anyway, it can feed 100,000 people." Yang Changzhi said solemnly: "These lands are not mountains but plains, and they are very fertile."
"As long as they are distributed among the soldiers and cultivated some more, the land will be harvested twice a year and enough food can be stored for the troops in just one year."
Convinced by Yang Changzhi, Sun Kewang quickly mobilized the more than 10,000 soldiers who followed him. After promising to give them fertile land no less than that of Yunnan Prefecture, their morale was greatly boosted.
After some emergency drills, in mid-August, the rainy season finally stopped and the dry season began.
The Western Army was like a tiger descending the mountain, with nearly 5,000 men sweeping across the Lashio Basin.
In later generations, this place was the capital of Shan State. It was a rare basin plain in northern Myanmar and could support 300,000 people.
After occupying this place, Sun Ke expected to see so much plain land, and immediately organized a large number of mountain people to reclaim it and carry out farming.
In addition to farming, he also recruited mountain people as soldiers, with a total of more than 20,000 soldiers.
He also brought the brick-making technology to Lashio and built the first brick city in northern Myanmar.
Lashio is located in a strategic location in the basin and was built not as a city but as a fortress.
Tens of thousands of mountain people were enslaved and worked hard for several months to build a mountain fortress.
As for the newly reclaimed land plus old soil, there are nearly 100,000 acres. Supplemented by the farming technology of the Central Plains, the harvest has almost doubled.
It turns out that the mountain people in northern Myanmar practice slash-and-burn cultivation, scattering handfuls of seeds and doing whatever they want. The harvest from one acre of land is often only a few dozen kilograms, or at most a hundred kilograms.
Thanks to the farming techniques of the Han people, the yield per mu has generally reached more than 150 kilograms, and Lashio City harvested 150,000 kilograms, which can be described as a bumper harvest.
The Ming people built a city in Lashio, which deeply stimulated the Toungu Kingdom.
For a while, the sound of beatings and killings continued.
But the merchants in Ava City saw the way.
"Mingguo?"
A certain Ceylon businessman seemed to find it familiar.
Suddenly, he remembered that those white-skinned ghosts liked to buy and sell things from the Ming Dynasty, especially silk, which they loved very much.
He traveled around India, and what the Portuguese in Goa liked most were the ships from the East, which were full of spices, silk, and porcelain.
"If the Ming people were in Toungoo country, then I wouldn't need to go all the way across the sea. I could buy valuable silk directly and resell it to the white people."
The more he thought about it, the happier he felt.
I couldn't help but write a letter and send it back to my hometown, asking my brother to send more gold and silver.
When this letter came to Ceylon, it caused huge waves.
When Zheng He's fleet arrived in Ceylon, King Ariel Kunel presented many gifts to the Ming Dynasty to express the reconciliation between the two countries.
Unexpectedly, the greedy Ariel Kunel saw that Zheng He's fleet was carrying a large amount of gold and silver, so he pretended to invite Zheng He to his palace.
After the feast, he again asked for gold coins from Zheng He, but secretly sent troops to rob Zheng He's fleet.
As a result, more than two thousand soldiers, under the command of Zheng He, unexpectedly attacked the capital city of Mount Ceylon and captured Ariel Kunel, his wife and officials alive.
This caused a huge response in Ceylon.
For more than a hundred years after that, Ceylon paid tribute continuously.
The power of Ming Dynasty has been deeply imprinted in their minds.
"Why not ask for help from the Ming Dynasty and drive away those Portuguese?"
The king of Kandy dynasty, Rajsinghe II, could not help but come up with an idea.