Chapter 328 Steam Locomotive
Zhu Houzhao was about to escape from the questioning of Hu Zongxian and Zhang Juzheng. At this time, he saw many people running outside Yongding Gate, shouting that the steam locomotive was starting to run outside Yongding Gate.
Zhu Houzhao didn't expect that the appearance of steam locomotives would make these people so excited, so he couldn't help but smile and walked over. He knew that steam locomotives were a new thing for Ming Dynasty.
After all, before this time, steam locomotives had only appeared in newspapers and magazines.
When Zhu Houzhao arrived, he saw that both sides of the cement main road outside Yongding Gate were crowded with people, and there were even some officials and gentry with Eguan Bo. Between these Han family landscape walls composed of silk clothes and long hair, was A black steam locomotive came spitting out white mist. The locomotive was large, like a locomotive, but it was obviously simpler than the locomotive.
The soft morning light shines on the roof of Yongdingmen Gate, shining on the word "Da Ming" on the top of the locomotive. The metallic luster is even more dazzling on the steam locomotive, as is the look on the faces of the Han people on both sides of the road. The smile is just as bright.
Bang!
The huge steam power was transmitted from the cylinder, directly driving the rotating shaft, causing the motorcycle tires to suddenly change their resting state, and suddenly started to move forward like a tall black horse galloping.
At this time, the Han people were already shouting excitedly: "It's moving! It's moving!"
These people grinned happily and gathered friends to watch. Some schoolchildren used their superficial mechanical knowledge to explain the principles to their families.
At this time, the officials of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce who were still standing on the locomotive were obviously a little bit behind the scenes. When the steam locomotive was moving, they suddenly leaned back and realized that the steam locomotive had moved. For a moment, they couldn't help but get excited. , not caring to straighten the black gauze hat that was shaken askew on his head, and grinned regardless of his identity: "It's moving! It's moving!"
In this era, in the Ming Dynasty, there was no closed and conservative national policy, and there was no invasion of aliens. The people of the empire who had broken free from the shackles of Confucianism no longer worried about food and clothing. The wealthy people were knowledgeable and educated, and even had Enough opportunities to be exposed to new things.
The empire's science and technology did not stagnate due to the short-sightedness of the aliens, the arrogance of Confucianism, and the conservatism of the small-scale peasant economy. Now the new steam industry has officially begun to intervene in the field of transportation.
The leaves beside the road were blown by the breeze, brushing against the tough outer shell of the steam locomotive.
The four tires made of natural rubber are also very huge. They are running on the road that has just been wet after the early summer rain. The rotating linkage rods are also rising and falling, and the hearts of the Han people are also starting to move. After all, what is happening in front of them The visual impact the metal monster gave them was really great!
Even the old Confucian Tang Jingyi, who was about to leave Beijing, couldn't help but widen his eyes. He looked at the heavy locomotive traveling on the ground with four rubber iron wheels. He couldn't help but sigh: "Incredible! Incredible! Driving does not require horses. , and it can still carry more than ten people, can the skills of hundreds of people change the times? ”
"Sure enough, rotten Confucianism cannot save the country, only miraculous skills can prosper it. With this motorcycle, the world no longer needs to raise horses, and the people in Gyeonggi, Shandong and other places who are burdened by the imperial court's money for raising horses can be relieved!"
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Zhang Juzheng said at this time that although he was only fifteen years old, he had already begun to care about the people of Li.
Tang Jingyi turned around and glared at Zhang Juzheng, wanting to say something, but couldn't.
Zhu Houzhao felt even more happy when he saw Tang Jingyi, an old scholar, suffocating his breath with Zhang Juzheng's words. For the people, the emergence of steam locomotives might just make them feel fresh, but for the Ming Dynasty, it would indeed change. The social ecology of empire.
Before the emergence of mechanical power, horses have always been the most important means of transportation. Whoever masters the resources of horses will have the most advantageous military power and transportation power. Horses have always been an important strategic resource. In fact, horses have always been the most important means of transportation. The main product of the nomadic people, because of this, the Ming Dynasty was often limited by horse resources.
Of course, Daming also had its own horse farm, but the price of this horse farm was at the expense of the interests of farmers. After all, using the cultivated land in the pass as pasture was a waste, and it was difficult to breed high-quality horses.
Now that steam locomotives have begun to appear, it means that the status of horses, a strategic resource, will gradually decline. Mechanical power will become the main source of power for transportation. Transportation will no longer rely on animal power, which will undoubtedly make the advantages of nomadic people begin to decline.
More importantly, as Zhang Juzheng said, once steam locomotives replaced horses, the people would no longer bear the heavy burden of supplying horses to the court.
Of course, it's just a vision at the moment. After all, the speed of steam locomotives can't keep up with the speed of horses. In fact, the manufacturing cost is still higher than the cost of buying horses, but the loading capacity has obviously far exceeded the loading capacity of horses.
Zhu Houzhao did not stay outside Yongding Gate for long. After seeing the successful operation of the steam locomotive, he quietly returned to the Royal West Garden. However, as soon as he returned to the Royal West Garden, Zhu Houzhao received the news that the Southern Front Corps had occupied Qinghua City in Jiaozhi.
"Once Qinghua City is captured, it means that our Southern Front Corps has a landing point in Jiaozhi. The cabinet immediately began to prepare the internal affairs plan to rule and develop Jiaozhi, and issued policies to encourage Ming people to move to Jiaozhi. According to the pre-strategic plan, Jiaozhi Implementing the farmland plan, Yan Song was appointed governor of Jiaozhi and left minister of the Grain Bureau. He was first stationed in Qinghua and started the matter immediately. "
Although Jiaozhi has not been completely recovered, and the Southern Front Corps has not completely eliminated the Ruan family and only occupied a city of Qinghua, Zhu Houzhao can't wait to get enough food resources from Jiaozhi immediately, so he directly asked Yan Song to immediately He went to Thanh Hoa and took office as the governor of Cochin.
There is no way around it. Zhu Houzhao has to admit that the Daming Pass is really troubled by disasters. Droughts and floods are always constant. In addition, the small glacier climate phenomenon is becoming more and more obvious. The arable area in the north is gradually shrinking, and after industrial development, agricultural products are favored. The demand has increased sharply, so now Ming Dynasty must speed up the development of Jiaozhi to obtain sufficient supply of agricultural products.
Yan Song went to Jiaozhi. When he came to Qinghua, Yan Song got a group of prisoners of war, the so-called monkeys, local indigenous people.
These natives had already been frightened out of their wits by the officers and soldiers of the Ming Dynasty. They were also frightened in front of the Ming Dynasty officials Yan Song and others. They all sat in a makeshift cell with cement walls as prisoners.
These natives had already been numbered by the Guards when they became prisoners. Therefore, these prisoners had no names at this time. When they were placed in front of Yan Song's copywriter, they only had names and simple gender statistics and physical characteristics. Statistics and distinction between old, middle-aged and young people.
According to the arrangements of the Ming Dynasty, these indigenous people must be arranged as farmers. Regardless of whether these indigenous people were officials or Confucian scholars in Jiaozhi before, they all had to work in the fields.
Of course, much of the cultivated land in Thanh Hoa is still cultivated by local indigenous farmers and even landowners.
However, Ming Dynasty did not want to take away the opportunity of these indigenous farmers to cultivate the land, but only wanted to take away the agricultural products on these lands.
But there are ways and means.
Following Zhu Houzhao's instructions, Yan Song's initial strategy was to launch land reform, and it was a forced land reform. He forcibly distributed the land of the Jiaozhi landlord class to its tenants, re-established the land register, and re-established the land tax.
As for the future population increase caused by these farmers getting married and having children, and the problem of insufficient land supply and land annexation leading to an increase in the number of landless people, it is naturally beyond our control now.
The only thing that can be done is to develop industry and commerce in the future to absorb the landless population.
The farmers in Jiaozhi were naturally the happiest. After all, they could get land, and what they gave to the Ming government was equivalent to giving it to the previous landlord class, or even much less.
The landlord class in Jiaozhi was naturally very unwilling to accept the emergence of the Ming Dynasty, and they all rose up to resist, but in the face of the powerful military power of the empire, they were all dealt with.
Naturally, all the surplus grains of these landlord class families in Jiaozhi will be taken away, leaving only the rations to satisfy the main family members, and naturally all the so-called maids and slaves will be taken away. In addition, these masters of the landlord class will all He was assigned land, became a real farmer, and contributed land to the Ming Dynasty.
A team of Ming Dynasty policemen were standing beside a field bank, pointing their guns at the indigenous people who were reclaiming the wasteland.
These natives were either captured monkey soldiers, the Jiaozhi landlord class, or the slaves of the landlord class families. Both men and women were uniformly renumbered and arranged to open up wasteland and farm in Qinghua territory.
These landlords, who are not originally farmers or live off farmers' means of production, are naturally neither willing nor able to work on the land. Therefore, they need to be managed by police force by force.
Yan Song listed the amount of cultivated land and grain harvest as key assessment indicators. Therefore, the officials and police soldiers sent to Jiaozhi carefully supervised the work of these middle- and upper-class Jiaozhi indigenous people who were usually domineering. live.
A Cochin native was obviously unwilling to work because he was a former landowner. After working a few times, he got up and fled in anger.
Snap!
At this time, the police soldier fired directly, killing the native who had not yet run into the woods.
Seeing this, the other Cochin natives also behaved a lot and had no choice but to continue working honestly.
Of course, there are still many Jiaozhi natives who are unwilling to become serfs of the Ming Dynasty and want to escape, but some of them escape.
Yan Song even promulgated a fugitive law for this purpose. As the governor of Jiaozhi, he had legislative power, but according to regulations, it could only be effective for non-Ming people during his term of office. Therefore, this law naturally only targeted these Jiaozhi natives.
Yan Song requested that every county in Qinghua organize regular executions of fugitive slaves every three months, and directly execute all the fugitive slaves who tried to escape in front of all the Jiaozhi natives, and shoot them to death with the Ming Dynasty Gatling machine gun. Afterwards, it is burned and turned into fertilizer, which is used to increase soil fertility.
Basically, all the natives of Cochin who were not engaged in agricultural production, including the landlord class, their affiliates, and soldiers were turned into serfs and could only engage in agricultural production every day.
Affected by the Fugitive Law, most of these new serfs of the Cochin natives began to get used to their new identities and began to live as serfs in peace and contentment, engaged in land cultivation.
As for the original homesteaders and tenant farmers among the Jiaozhi natives, it is natural that they still farm their own land as usual, but they have to pay summer taxes and autumn grain every year. In general, in the Qinghua area of Jiaozhi that the Ming Dynasty had occupied, all the original landlord classes were wiped out, and it basically turned into a simpler small-peasant economic society. Except for some necessary towns, most of them were natural villages. There are also new villages in the old villages, but each village has a certain number of police soldiers, and the mayor of each village is a Han.
Because of this, even in the early days of the war, after the Ming Dynasty only occupied the area around Qinghua City, nearly one million stones of grain were transported back to the Ming Dynasty.
Most of this food comes from the original landlords in Cochin, and it also comes from the summer tax that just passed.
In any case, this allowed Daming to obtain more raw materials, and naturally there was no need to care whether these raw materials were obtained roughly or in a more civilized way.
certainly.
Although the land in Jiaozhi was forcibly confiscated and turned into public ownership, and the serfs in Jiaozhi only had the right to use it, even if they had the right to use it, they would inevitably have private property. With private property, there would be transactions, and if there were transactions, there would be transactions. There will be commerce, and as long as commerce exists, there will be a private ownership economy. The existence of a private ownership economy means there will be exploitation, and there will be a landlord class or a bourgeoisie that exploits laborers.
Yan Song is basically suppressing this phenomenon.
Therefore, the local officials in Jiaozhi recommended by him when he submitted it to the Ministry of Civil Affairs were basically Confucian officials. They believed in the idea of valuing agriculture and suppressing commerce, and respected the Confucian philosophy of governing the country. They imposed heavy taxes on commerce and basically limited it to the goods of serfs. Communication returns to the level of barter.
This basically restricted the commercial development of Jiaozhi. After all, as serfs, apart from their demand for currency, they basically had no demand for agricultural products because they could produce them themselves.
Once these serfs inevitably produced too much agricultural products and had to engage in commercial trade, these surplus agricultural production materials would be taken away by the government through taxation.
In short, Yan Song tried his best to stifle the possibility of the development of the commodity economy in Jiaozhi.
The Confucian ministers who were transferred to Jiaozhi also worked very hard to carry out these measures, so that the serfs in Jiaozhi basically could only maintain a state of not starving to death.
However, the emergence of the landlord class is still inevitable. After all, the landlord class is the inevitable product of the small peasant class.
first.
The Ming Dynasty officials and police soldiers who came to Jiaozhi became the first batch of landlords.
Because they are now the leaders of Jiaozhi, they are the easiest to have more wealth, and they are the first-class subjects of the Ming Dynasty and are allowed to own land, so they can buy their own land in Jiaozhi through the Ming government or Create your own land.
In addition, the Ming Dynasty also encouraged the first-class people in the interior, that is, Han scholars, to move to Jiaozhi. Since it was an encouragement, there were naturally preferential policies. For example, if you go to Jiaozhi, you can not only have land use rights, but also have the right to raise a second-class stock. The right to wait for slaves, and they will be exempted from tax for three years, and even have legal privileges.
For example, Yan Song immediately promulgated Han customary laws that were in line with the outlines of the imperial constitution. The core idea was to give Han people legal protection that was higher than the status of local indigenous people.
To be honest, due to the influence of the development of capitalism in recent years, and the fact that Emperor Zhu Houzhao of the Ming Dynasty was a leader who pursued equality for everyone within the nation, he protected the personal rights and interests of Han people as much as possible in the system, which made domestic vested interests They lived a very unfree life. If it weren't for the fact that their income continued to increase with the empire's external plunder and expansion, they would have wanted to rebel against the Ming Dynasty.
Nowadays, if you move to Cochin, you can have land use rights and be exempted from taxes for three years. The important thing is that you can keep slaves and become masters. At least you will not bear criminal responsibility for killing a person, and you can also enjoy the benefits brought by your increased wealth and status. A more enjoyable feeling of domination.
Therefore, people from the landlord class and the bourgeoisie began to migrate to Cochin.
Especially the gentry, they began to escape from the Ming Dynasty where even the vassal kings and dignitaries could not act recklessly. They liked Cochin very much, just like they liked Goa.
After all, going to these places makes nobles look like nobles.
Only those from poor families within the empire truly like the environment within the Ming Dynasty, and only the common people within the empire truly like the current Ming Dynasty in their hearts, so that the number of members of the Zhongjun Society has rapidly expanded among major schools and grassroots This also made Zhu Houzhao's prestige among the people higher and higher.
But the funny thing is that once these people at the bottom become the middle class or above through education or other means, they begin to be tired and disgusted with the internal policies of the empire. They begin to feel that they have been brainwashed by official education and begin to hope that they can have something. More special treatment, so that once these people from the bottom of the family became rich, they also began to migrate to places such as Cochin and Goa.
But in order for the Ming Empire to prosper for a long time, as the emperor of the Ming Dynasty and the top officials of the empire, they can only continue to take care of the interests of the lower class, continue to maintain a balance, and continue to emphasize the citizenship rights of the first-class people of the Ming Dynasty, because with the development of industry and the spread of education, A large number of Han workers and farmers needed these.
Today's Cochin has undoubtedly become the second place after Goa where vested interests of the Ming Dynasty, that is, the gentry group, migrated.
The first thing the gentry did after coming to Cochin was to buy people and land, and the rhythm of the life of the landlord class was repeated on this land.
The land in Jiaozhi is inherently limited. Even through reclamation, it is impossible to cultivate enough land in a short period of time for these indigenous people who have been reduced to serfs. Naturally, many indigenous people will still be used for trading.
After coming to Jiaozhi, these Confucian scholars would also buy a large number of these serfs to use as their own slaves.
Ren Han, a famous Confucian who once served as a scholar in the Hanlin Academy, also moved to Jiaozhi. Coming from a bureaucratic family, he really could not accept the idea of citizenship brought about by the idea of equality in the mainland of the Ming Dynasty, which made him no longer able to be a slave who could kill at will. The gentry who wantonly executed clan members through clan lynching.
This made him feel depressed.
Moreover, when Ren Han thought that he happened to catch one of his long-term workers carrying manure from the front yard and was dirty, he scolded him for being degrading and ordered the hired long-term and short-term workers to only enter and exit through the back door in the future. Later, many literati actually criticized him verbally and writtenly, saying that he was discriminating against the common people, which made Ren Han feel even more depressed and uncomfortable.
But he couldn't stand the behavior of his students who didn't take care of the face of his famous Confucian teacher, and he couldn't accept the concept that the lower class people who only knew how to visit the brothels and talk about naughty things and do hard work were equal to him in terms of status.
However, he also knew that he could not refute it, because none of the sages said that as a Confucian scholar, he should treat common people as nothing.
Because of this, Ren Han also moved to Jiaozhi, where he could establish a strict hierarchical clan covenant, raise slaves, and become a patriarch and patriarch who could control his tribe and family. Even if he killed his own son, it would not be illegal. He felt that Jiaozhi It is obviously much freer than the mainland of Ming Dynasty.
Even Yan Song himself is a little happy to miss his childhood. Now he can enjoy the slave girl he bought beating her back and pinching her legs. However, he is greedy and lacks courage because of the lustful power of his wife Ouyang and does not dare to go further. But his His son Yan Shifan is now very indulgent in Jiaozhi, and he has no less than three or four female slaves every day.
The idea that everyone is equal is most beneficial and needed for the civilian class, but for the ruling class, this is obviously unacceptable, even if they accept it on the surface.
And now, it is precisely because of this that this phenomenon has occurred.
The rich and powerful began to migrate to Cochin, while the common people still stayed in the country, but as soon as these civilians accumulated wealth, they began to migrate to Cochin.
In his heart, Zhu Houzhao actually yearned for the life of his own people as masters in the colonies.
Because now he found that he had dug a hole for himself. His investment in emancipating the mind, opening up trade and education made it difficult for him as an emperor to execute a person at will as before. Sometimes, Zhu Houzhao was also very I want to try raising a few female slaves and do something exciting.
But Zhu Houzhao finally restrained the animalistic side of his heart, but he could also think that maybe in the future, even if the social economy is highly developed, only partial equality can be achieved. Maybe those who enjoy equal freedom will never think that they actually They are also exploiters, just not through their own hands, so they feel how noble they are.
For example, the common people in the mainland today in the Ming Dynasty will not realize that they now have high welfare benefits because the imperial court continues to distribute the benefits exploited from the colonies and other ethnic groups to them, so that they can drink The blood of other ethnic groups grew up happily without worrying about survival crisis.
"Bai doesn't understand why the court has to separate two levels. Since it can grant citizenship rights to the people of the Ming Dynasty, why can't it grant citizenship rights to the indigenous people of Jiaozhi? Since everyone is equal, why can't we respect these indigenous people! Why are they so cruel! Respect their culture and their beliefs!”
Bai Ruoyi said this in newspapers and even aroused enthusiastic responses from some so-called emerging intellectuals.
Zhu Houzhao was both happy and scared when he saw it. What he was happy about was that these Madonna's theories must have appeared because the Ming Dynasty had indeed become rich and the people had indeed become rich, otherwise they would not be noble enough to love all human beings.
The fear is that this concept of the Virgin will become more and more common as the number of wealthy people increases, causing more and more people to ignore that the essence of natural law is the law of the jungle.
"The story of the farmer and the snake cannot be forgotten! Today, people who have no worries about food and clothing want to love people of other races, but they don't know that their food and clothing depend on the sacrifices of people of other races. They want to treat people of other races as equals. If they are rich, then they must be willing to be slaves! ”
Zhu Houzhao couldn't help but sigh.
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(End of chapter)