On September 17, Li Laosi was riding a horse on the Chao Phraya River plain in Siam.
Li Dingguo rode next to Li Laosi and introduced Li Laosi to the situation in the mountainous area.
"Uncle, now the Japanese samurai in the mountains have basically controlled the situation. The natives of Indochina have been basically suppressed. Except for a few samurai who failed and were driven out by the natives, most samurai have successfully become managers in the mountains.
"
Li Laosi asked curiously: "Are there any warriors who couldn't defeat the natives and were driven out?"
Li Dingguo said with a smile: "There are always warriors who are proficient in using the Yu and are not good at martial arts."
Li Laosi nodded and looked north.
It is very cost-effective to use samurai as grassroots managers in mountainous areas: the level of productivity development in Indochina is very low, and the farmers here are not as hard-working as the Han people, and they can only make ends meet all year round. Although the land here is fertile, the people here are just getting by.
The average adult only cultivates two or three acres of paddy fields, and each person only harvests an average of five or six dan of rice. Counting the elderly and children, each person only has about three dan of grain for food rations.
Therefore, although the warriors can receive one-tenth of the total land tax as salary, they only receive the living expenses of four indigenous people and twelve shi of grain. According to the food price in Fanjiazhuang, these grains are only thirty taels.
In other words, the warriors maintained order in the mountains for Li Zhi, and their monthly salary was only twenty-two-five cents.
Moreover, these warriors must be able to be both literary and martial. They must not only be skilled in martial arts to control the mountain people in the mountains, but also have arithmetic skills to collect taxes and settle accounts.
Looking around, in the entire East and Southeast Asia, the only group with such civil and military talents is the Japanese samurai.
Each Japanese samurai will provide Li Zhi with nearly 300 taels of land income every year. Moreover, Japanese samurai are often good at water conservancy and terrace technology, and can urge the lazy Southeast Asian indigenous people to develop agriculture. Therefore, Li Zhi’s future land income in the Indochina Peninsula
It will continue to expand.
Li Laosi felt that Sanada Nobuyuki's suggestion of using samurai to manage mountainous areas before his death was indeed a good suggestion.
The most important thing is that samurai also like to do this. Samurai enjoy their status as grassroots managers. Transporting unemployed samurai from Japan to Southeast Asia greatly reduces the risk of samurai uprisings and wars in Japan.
This is an arrangement that kills three birds with one stone.
Li Laosi felt that as the plan unfolded smoothly, the prince would definitely praise him for this arrangement.
In the next few years, as the Southeast Asian natives who moved into the mountainous areas gradually develop valley fields and terraces, Indochina will deliver tens of millions of taels of land to one town and nine provinces every year. As this income gradually increases, the prince's strength
There will also be a step up.
The prince can raise more Tiger and Ben troops. I heard that the prince has recently made plans to expand the army.
But the prince is obviously not a person obsessed with money. For Li Zhi, it is more important to let the Han people colonize the new land. In other words, the most important thing is to settle the Han immigrants from the mainland and truly bring Southeast Asia to the country.
It became the land of the Han people.
Li Zhi invested heavily in the relocation of immigrants and subsidized Han Chinese farmers who were willing to go south to reclaim Southeast Asia.
Li Dingguo pointed to a forest in front of him and said loudly: "Uncle, after passing that small forest, we are at the 179th colony of the Chao Phraya River."
Now the King of Qi is widely publicizing the benefits of immigrating to Southeast Asia in various places. Private steamship companies are like dumping goods, sending boat after boat of immigrants and boat after boat of immigration materials to Indochina. Where these new immigrants have arrived
Construction began before they even had time to name them. The military-controlled government in Indochina could only name these Han colonies with numbers.
Li Laosi sat up straight on his horse and looked over at Li Dingguo's finger.
The lush green fields of the Chao Phraya River plain came into Li Laosi's eyes.
There are low tropical rainforests and rice fields between the trees everywhere, and the terrain is very flat. A small river flows through it at regular intervals, making the entire plain look extremely rich and fertile.
There are many places on the plains that have not yet been developed and there are many woods.
If we talk about agricultural production conditions alone, Southeast Asia can be said to be uniquely endowed with abundant sunshine and abundant rainfall, and the flat land in the plains has many rivers. However, in the 17th century, the indigenous people here did not have the organizational ability to vigorously develop agriculture, and wasted such fertile land.
Thousands of miles of great plains.
For example, the fertile Mekong Delta was basically an uninhabited swamp area in this era.
However, this situation was about to be changed by the Han people who moved in one ship after another.
Li Laosi said "drive" and rushed out on his horse, galloping towards the 179th colony in front.
Beyond the woods, Li Laosi saw a village of five or sixty brick houses.
There were dozens of children jumping and playing near the village, and a few old men and women were guarding the children.
Outside the village, there are endless paddy fields as far as the eye can see. Those paddy fields spread on both sides of a small river, and I don’t know how many acres there are. A dragon-tail cart has been set up on the creek, and a buffalo is constantly turning next to the dragon-tail cart.
River water continuously flows into paddy fields through irrigation canals.
Li Laosi saw some farmers driving their cattle to plant rice in the paddy fields.
Different from the paddy fields in the south of the Yangtze River, the paddy fields here in the Chao Phraya River Plain are located in the tropics, and the coldest winter temperature is more than ten degrees. There is sufficient sunlight all year round, and rice can be grown three times a year. So even now in September, farmers are still planting
Third season rice.
Li Laosi became somewhat interested in those power-driven rice transplanters and stopped his horse to take a look.
Those machines were powered by stored energy. As the buffalo kept moving forward, the machines inserted densely packed seedlings on a large iron plate into the paddy field. Li Laosi carefully observed the seedlings in the field and found that the seedlings were inserted well.
It's very straight, the spacing between the seedlings is well maintained, and it looks very neat.
Li Laosi jumped off his horse, walked deep into the field, and shouted to the farmers: "Fellow, what is the name of your machine?"
The farmers looked up at Li Laosi. Seeing that Li Laosi was wearing a blood-red military uniform and looked like a high official, they respectfully replied: "Master! This is the animal-powered rice transplanter that the prince gave us!"
Li Laosi asked: "Do you also need a machine to transplant rice seedlings?"
The old farmer stopped the cattle next to him and replied with a smile: "My lord, this rice transplanter is really a magical machine. In the past, one of us could only plant seven points of land a day, but could not plant one acre of land, so one person could only take care of it."
Twenty acres of crops.”
"Now that we have this animal-powered rice transplanter, we can plant five acres of paddy fields a day, and the busiest task of rice transplanting has become the easiest thing. Coupled with the animal-powered harvester that the prince gave us a loan to buy, we can take care of forty acres by ourselves.
Paddy fields are not a problem.”
"With the new machine invented by the prince, the plains of Siam will really become our cornucopia!"
