[The Grand Canal - Struggle for a Name in History]
Strictly speaking, the lives of the lower class people in Yinzhou are generally better than those of the local farmers in the Ming Dynasty.
Although the land in early immigrant towns has been saturated, landless farmers can choose to open up land. Take the Quercus Prefecture as an example, there were only San Francisco and Oakland at the beginning. After continuous migration and development, the entire San Francisco Bay has been reclaimed.
In the coastal area south of San Francisco, there are dozens of large and small villages, all of which are farmers who moved there from Yuezhou Prefecture and Fushan County.
Between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a large settlement also sprung up. It was so large that the imperial court directly established a county, named Hong County. Hong County's situation was extremely special. It was developed and expanded by the descendants of immigrants who moved freely to reclaim wasteland.
Why can settlements form so quickly here?
Cotton can be grown here!
South of San Francisco Bay, north of Los Angeles, and east of the Coast Mountains, the narrow strip of coastal land became one of the major cotton-producing areas in the United States in later generations. Moreover, the cotton produced here had the best quality and the most expensive price among all cotton-producing areas in the United States.
The most expensive.
Therefore, Hong County is also called Mian County. Several large cotton-growing families have developed, and they mainly sell cotton to Bamo Prefecture (Panama). The cotton export port is the county seat of Hong County.
Bamo House, Panama, is not only a territory directly under the Governor-General, but also has the birth of the textile industry.
The fourteen wealthy families in Yuezhou Prefecture were very jealous of this. They were right next to the cotton-producing fields, how could they endure the cotton being shipped to Panama? How great would it be to have cotton woven in Yuezhou Prefecture!
These guys are already planning to raise funds to build factories. As soon as the textile machines ordered from Daming arrive, they can immediately compete with Panama's textile factories for business.
…
Further south in Hong County, Xinquan (Los Angeles) has been upgraded to a prefecture. In the nearby fertile delta, there is almost no wasteland, and it is all cultivated fertile land.
Xinquan Prefecture's industry and commerce are extremely backward, with no saltworks or shipyards, but agriculture is extremely developed and it is rich in rice. Most of the rice currently enjoyed by wealthy people in Yinzhou is produced in Xinquan Prefecture, while common people use corn.
, potatoes and other foods for a living.
The development of Xinquan Mansion is very interesting. Some immigrants who were abandoned by merchants initially struggled to survive here. They then coexisted peacefully with nearby tribes, exchanged farming techniques with each other, and intermarried with each other for more than a hundred years, naturally assimilating those primitive tribes.
No looting, no oppression, no killing.
When the Han people assimilated the indigenous people, they were also naturally influenced by the indigenous people. For example, in the first 20 to 30 years, they imitated the indigenous people in electing leaders and imitating the indigenous people in establishing public ownership, so as to get through the most vulnerable stage.
Some customs are still retained today, such as the chief selection system. Each village elects the village chief, who then elects the town mayor, and the town chief elects the county chief. The county magistrate sent by the imperial court must also listen to the local county chief, otherwise what will happen?
Don't even think about getting things done.
However, after all, it has been developed for hundreds of years, and the leader selection system gradually changed its flavor and began to develop towards the "village sages" of the Ming Dynasty.
Fortunately, land annexation here is not serious. If you want more land, you can just open up the surrounding areas. The farming conditions and cultivated land area here are far better than those in Yuezhou Prefecture, and the irrigation water resources are also extremely abundant.
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Because there are a large number of homesteaders, the common people speak tough words, and the elected "village sages" do not dare to mess around, and basically maintain relatively simple customs and concepts.
If the moral bottom line of the wealthy people in Yuezhou Prefecture is 30, then the moral bottom line of the wealthy people in Xinquan Prefecture is 60.
In the southeast of Xinquan Prefecture, cotton can also be grown, but the quality is slightly worse than in Hong County. Several small towns have been developed there, and most of the residents are cotton farmers. The biggest worry is the lack of water, and they are trying to build diversion systems.
Aqueducts, but unfortunately the manpower and material resources are far from enough.
In any case, the development of Beiyinzhou is naturally limited. For the time being, it can only open up wasteland along the coast. To the east is blocked by the coastal mountains. Beyond the mountains are various plateaus, deserts and deserts. Further to the east is the extremely long mountain range Beiyinzhou.
The real essence of Yinzhou is still in the hands of the indigenous people in the east. The Great Lakes are really fragrant. The British and French have sporadic immigrants there.
…
Mexico City is very interesting. It was originally called Mexico and was a colony snatched from Spain.
After being robbed, it was difficult to immigrate. Only a few careful immigration strongholds were set up on the western coast of Mexico.
In the interior of Mexico, the Ming Dynasty mainly controlled the gold and silver mines, while other places were occupied by Spaniards, indigenous people, and mixed descendants of Spanish and indigenous people.
Regardless of whether they are Spaniards or Spanish mixed descendants, they are willing to collectively naturalize as Han people, and are even willing to give up Catholicism, provided that the Ming Dynasty cannot take away their plantations.
The Western Han Chinese in Mozhou Prefecture basically run slave plantations, producing sugar cane, coffee, potatoes, corn, rum, etc. However, the Han immigrants on the northwest coast of Mozhou Prefecture accidentally discovered high-quality cotton planting land.
, it was also the only cotton-growing land in Mexico in later generations.
Hong County, southwest of Xinquan Prefecture, and northwest of Mozhou Prefecture are the three major cotton-producing areas of the Ming Dynasty in Yinzhou.
And they are all close to the sea. They are taken directly to Bamo Mansion by boat and sold to textile factories to be spun into cotton cloth and sold to people all over Yinzhou.
In Bamo Prefecture, there are more than 20 textile factories gathered, half of which are invested by businessmen from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong.
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Shengzhou Prefecture, south of Mozhou Prefecture, is a proper country within a country, and most of Central America is controlled by the Chen family.
However, Shengzhou Prefecture does not have much industrial capacity. It only has a small shipyard that can manufacture some offshore ships. Large ocean-going ships must be ordered in Yuezhou Prefecture.
But Shengzhou Prefecture is very wealthy, producing tobacco, sugar cane, sisal, incense and other products, and several large gold and silver mines have been discovered.
The current owner of Shengzhou Mansion is Chen Li's sixth generation grandson.
how to say?
Brutal people!
After this guy came to power, he crazily captured slaves for mining and squandered the gold and silver he mined. He also spent huge sums of money to build cities. Although Shengzhou Fucheng was not large, the height and thickness of the city walls imitated those of Beijing.
!
The relationship between the Ming Dynasty and Shengzhou Prefecture has dropped to a freezing point because the gold and silver dug out have not been distributed to the court in recent years.
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The place where Zhang Mei took up his post this time was Guo Bamo Prefecture, a subsidiary of Bamo Prefecture.
After visiting the governor and prefect, Zhang Mei began to get familiar with the work. In fact, there was nothing to be familiar with. Anyway, under the eyes of the governor and prefect, there was no room for power left.
One month after taking up his duties, Zhang Mei led several mixed-race Han Chinese to personally survey the Isthmus of Panama and formulate a canal excavation plan.
This place has a tropical rainforest climate, and after walking back and forth, even though we carried mosquito repellent with us, one-third of the entourage still contracted malaria.
"What? Dig the Bamo Canal to connect the east and west seas?" Long Zhiru, the governor of Yinzhou, asked in surprise.
Zhang Mei nodded and said: "Once the canal is opened, the cotton produced in Bamo can be shipped directly to Europe."
"Where's the money? Where's the people?" Long Zhiru asked.
Zhang Mei explained: "Your Majesty promised me to withhold 200,000 taels of silver every year for the construction of the Bamo Canal. The merchants of the Ming Dynasty who invested in building textile factories in Bamo have also been persuaded by me and are willing to invest a total of more than one million taels of silver.
.The local merchants in Yinzhou must be willing to invest."
Long Zhiru asked: "In this case, will the property rights of the canal belong to the public or to the private sector?"
Zhang Mei said: "Build a Bamo Canal trading company and allocate shares according to the amount of investment. The court has the power of supervision and can send an official to serve as a shareholder representative."
"Are you really sure?" Long Zhiru couldn't help but persuade, "The environment here is harsh. Except for Bamo City and its surroundings, it's easy to get sick in other places."
Zhang Mei said: "I will prepare a large amount of mosquito repellent drugs and form an army to maintain order, expel mosquitoes, and deliver clean drinking water."
Long Zhiru asked: "How many years will it take to build it?"
Zhang Mei said: "Maybe three years, maybe five years, maybe ten years."
Long Zhiru said: "Ten years later, the king will no longer be in Yinzhou, and he is afraid that people will leave and the government will cease."
Zhang Mei smiled and said: "First, I have Shang Fang's sword; second, the current governor of Bamo has resigned, and I will succeed him as governor of Bamo. I will not be able to leave Yinzhou within ten years."
Long Zhiru suddenly stopped talking. This was obviously the emperor's decision, and even Shang Fang's sword was brought out.
Is it reliable to build the Panama Canal in the middle of the seventeenth century?
There is no technical problem, the problem lies in the climate and environment.
Historically, when France was building the Panama Canal, tens of thousands of workers died of yellow fever and malaria because they failed to consider hygiene issues. As a result, the project was abandoned halfway, and the canal construction company went bankrupt.
Egypt's Suez Canal is even more interesting. Four million Egyptian civilians were recruited to dig it.
Do you think the excavation technology is so advanced?
Most of the workers only had a shovel in their hands and a kettle hanging on their waists, and they just dug the soil hard. There were even a large number of child laborers under the age of 12 involved.
Tens of thousands of Egyptian workers died of thirst in the desert because the canal company refused to dig a drinking water canal for the workers.
Then came the disaster again, with tuberculosis, smallpox, hepatitis, and pneumonia spreading. There were no doctors at all. People who couldn't survive it would die. At the worst time, the company couldn't find healthy workers to collect the corpses, and a large number of corpses piled up and rotted on the construction site. The chief physician of the Canal Company
, was later awarded the Chevalier Medal of the French Order in recognition of his great efforts to protect Egyptian workers from death.
There are records of as many as 120,000 Egyptian workers who died in the construction of the Suez Canal.
If Zhang Mei wants to dig the Panama Canal, he must use slaves, and a large number of indigenous people in Central and South America will suffer. However, although he is cold-blooded, he has a moral bottom line. He must at least prepare various drugs in advance, and will not
Save money and cause unnecessary deaths.
The canal was dug not only to develop Yinzhou, but also as a means for Zhang Mei to consolidate power.
Emperor Yanjia said that he would make Zhang Mei the governor of Yinzhou.
By digging the canal, the local forces in Yinzhou are connected and tied into the chain of interests. During the digging process, a large amount of manpower and material resources need to be mobilized, and a lot of power can be obtained.
After the canal is dug, the soldiers responsible for health and epidemic prevention can form a direct army. Some outstanding indigenous people can also be selected to form an army.
Then select and eliminate the troops directly under the governor, taking the opportunity to truly control the generals.
With military power, you can gain financial power, divide, attack, and win over local forces, and truly bring all prefectures and counties in Yinzhou under the rule of the Ming Dynasty.
By then, the fourteen families in Yuezhou will be just small fish. Even the Chen family in Shengzhou Prefecture and the Dajin Kingdom in the north will be able to be conquered by the governor with troops.
Zhang Mei estimates that the entire process will take 10 to 15 years, and the specific time will depend on whether the canal is dug smoothly.
The emperor has promised to promote Zhang Mei to the governor of Yinzhou first, and then directly recruit Zhang Mei into the cabinet as an assistant minister after Yinzhou is well governed.
Zhang Mei's ambition is to be a wise prime minister through the ages. His idol since he was a child is Wang Yuan. Money is not attractive to him.