Chapter 755 Difficult Conditions
Although Takahashi Minami's unit usually trains very hard and performs the most dangerous tasks, the treatment in life is quite good. When he was garrisoned in Annan, all the rice he ate was high-quality rice supplied to Annan nobles. The quality of this rice could be tasted by Gao Qiaonan as soon as he entered it.
As soon as Gao Qiaonan tasted it, he knew that it was old rice. He put down his bowl and chopsticks not because he thought the rice was not delicious, but because he thought of another question: "Village Chief Mou, I see that there is land reclamation outside your village. There are many rice fields, how will the harvest be this year?”
In fact, Qian Tiandun had already asked this question to the village representative once before. Gao Qiaonan also heard it at the time, but now he wanted to ask it again - since this village took the initiative to host a reception, even sour fruits The wine has been taken out, how can you use aged rice to cook rice?
Mou Qing responded honestly: "This village has a total of 700 acres of rice fields, and the total harvest last season was about 130,000 jins." In terms of yield, this level is indeed surprisingly low. The rice yield per mu on Hainan Island is Generally, they weigh four to five hundred kilograms, almost two or three times as much as here.
"What about the new rice you harvested this year?" Takahashi Minami asked. Judging from the time, Shibazhi had already fled overseas when the rice was harvested, and it was unlikely that he would sneak back to exploit these immigrants, so Gao Qiaonan wanted to find out where this year's new rice was going.
"This..." Mou Qing probably didn't expect Gao Qiaonan to ask such a question, and thought he was dissatisfied with the treatment. He quickly confessed: "I don't dare to neglect you, but there is really no one in the village at this time. New rice..."
"I'm asking you where the new rice went." Takahashi Minami frowned and interrupted the other party before he finished speaking: "Just answer whatever I ask you, and don't waste any more nonsense!"
Mou Qingzhan responded tremblingly: "The new rice... has been taken away by the nearby natives..."
"Are they the natives who come here every month to cause trouble?" Takahashi Nan continued to ask angrily.
"Yes..." Mou Qing couldn't figure out the purpose of Gao Qiaonan's question, so he could only carefully explain: "If we don't give it to them, the village will not be peaceful. The young people in the village are limited, and we can't compete with them..."
"Are they robbing them directly or exchanging them with something?" Takahashi Minami immediately asked the next question.
"They will exchange deer skins, medicinal materials and some game, but the value is not that high..."
"Is that forced buying and selling? Then you sell these things to Bengang and use them to buy Chen rice?" Gao Qiaonan has roughly sorted out the context of this matter.
Most of the indigenous tribes living in the mountains on the island of Taiwan practice slash-and-burn farming. Some of them are even inferior to the Limiao villages on Hainan Island, and naturally they will not grow rice in the plains. However, they could rely on their military superiority to coerce Han immigrants to barter food to them. Of course, the passive party does not have control over the pricing of the transaction, so what is exchanged for how much food is probably left to the indigenous people. If the Han immigrants are unwilling to cooperate, then the indigenous people do not even need to take extreme measures such as attacking the village. They only need to continue to harass the outside of the village and prevent the villagers from cultivating the farmland outside the village normally, and they can bring down the village.
Although the food output in Fengrong Village is low, it is still barely self-sufficient. However, due to the coercion of the indigenous tribes, they can only passively accept the transaction conditions offered by the other party and sell the food they have worked so hard to grow at an extremely low price. Sell it out, and then take the items given by the natives to the merchants in Bengang to exchange for aged rice. During this process, the villagers were first exploited by the indigenous people, and then were exploited again by grain merchants when they went to Bengang to buy grain. No wonder the village looked so poor.
After figuring out the mystery of this matter, Takahashi Minami calmly picked up his rice bowl and started eating. These indigenous tribes that exploited Fengrong Village obviously would not give up such easy advantages easily. In the future, when Haihan resettled immigrants to this place, they would inevitably face similar situations. Obviously, this problem cannot be solved by just swallowing one's anger. In the end, some more direct measures need to be taken - such as asking the army to come forward. Considering the natural environment of Taiwan Island, to launch military operations here, there is really no team in the Haihan Militia that is more suitable than the special operations force under Qian Tiandun.
Compared with the opponents that the special operations forces have encountered in the past, the tribal armed forces on the island of Taiwan not only have more primitive weapons and equipment, but also have a large gap between their combat system and the real army. Although the two sides have not had real contact yet, neither Qian Tiandun nor Gao Qiaonan has much fear of the indigenous tribes on the island. The difference in combat effectiveness between the two sides is not due to one of them being more familiar with the fighting terrain. can make up for it.
After a simple meal, Takahashi Minami asked his men to go to the village in teams to check the situation. He is not worried that the villagers here will do anything untoward to his men. After all, there are large troops outside the village. Even if someone wants to cause trouble, it is unlikely that they will choose this moment. Gao Qiaonan himself also led a team and asked Mou Qing's grandson to take him to explore the village.
Gao Qiaonan randomly selected a few families. After entering the house, he first looked at the kitchen and rice vats. Sure enough, each household only had a small amount of old rice. In the kitchen, except for fish, shrimps and crabs caught from the river, there was basically nothing to see. To other Hunxing. As for the poultry and livestock that are commonly seen in ordinary farmers, they are actually rare things here. After asking, Gao Qiaonan found out that it was not that livestock were not raised in this village, but after they were raised, most of them were sold to Bengang for food. The stewed chicken that was brought to the table earlier was also an egg-laying hen that was killed ruthlessly - there were only two hens left in the village, and one was left for breeding. Life is a problem, not to mention other conditions. The current conditions for education and medical care are basically zero. The most literate person in the village only attended a private school for two years when he was young, and what little he learned has been forgotten. At present, the illiteracy rate in the village exceeds 90%. Only two families have relatives in Bengang, so they send their children to local private schools. Doctors who have no medical expertise at all. If someone has a headache or fever, the villagers will use their experience to deal with it by making some herbs and decoction. If they are lucky, they will recover. If they are not, they will have to accept their fate. The nearest clinic here has to go to Bengang. The dozens of miles in between are an insurmountable obstacle for seriously ill people.
Given the medical and health conditions here and the knowledge level of the people, the mortality rate is also quite high. When they first moved here from Bengang, there were more than 60 households with more than 300 people. However, after a few years, the population not only did not increase, but showed a downward trend year by year. During this period, families did not move away from the local area. Almost all the population decreases were caused by deaths, of which at least more than 70% were caused by various diseases. If this situation continues without much change in the surrounding environment, in ten or twenty years, this village may die naturally due to too small a population.
The troubles caused by poverty don't end there. Due to the poor conditions in Fengrong Village, other immigrant villages are unwilling to marry here. As time goes by, the rate of reproduction of offspring is gradually slowing down, which in turn contributes to the population growth. downward trend. The decline in population will cause the above shortcomings to continue in a vicious cycle. Without the intervention of external forces like Haihan, Fengrong Village will be difficult to escape from its increasingly difficult situation.
After visiting several houses to determine the actual situation in the village, Gao Qiaonan returned to Mou Qing's residence and learned from him in detail about the distribution of some nearby indigenous tribes. As the village representatives said before Qian Tiandun, there are some tribes that are relatively friendly and willing to conduct normal transactions and interactions with Han immigrants, but there are only one or two such tribes, and the goodwill they release The benefits that can be brought to Fengrong Village are not enough to maintain peace in this place. At least three indigenous tribes from the mountains require Fengrong Village to provide them with a certain amount of supplies every month. Although it is not an open robbery, in terms of the value of the goods they exchange, it is actually not much different from a hard robbery.
With this information, Gao Qiaonan led the team back to the camp outside the village. After listening to his report, Qian Tiandun pondered for a while before asking: "Are these villagers repulsive to immigrants?"
Gao Qiao Nan said: "I asked the village chief, and he does not object to more immigrants moving here. He believes that the biggest problem in Fengrong Village is that the population is too small. If the population is large enough, more land can be reclaimed. land, and enough young people to protect the village from the intimidation of the indigenous tribes.”
Qian Tiandun said with a smile: "He doesn't consider whether this place can afford to support the population if the population suddenly increases? When immigration starts, we will inevitably have to put money and food in here."
Takahashi Minami did not care about future immigration plans. He was still concerned about military issues. He bowed and asked: "General, should we continue to march inland next?"
"Come in, why not?" Qian Tiandun said confidently: "Our trip this time is to collect as much information as possible about the surrounding environment, including the indigenous tribes. Those indigenous tribes are dozens of miles away. We won’t be so timid as to stop here. But it’s getting dark today, so we’ll camp here and continue eastward tomorrow.”
Because Fengrong Village was discovered on the way, the original trip was delayed for half a day, so the day's destination was only twenty miles away from the seaside camp where they started. When Gao Qiaonan came back, he also brought some vegetables sent by the villagers, so the troops had an extra vegetable soup for dinner, so they no longer had to chew on the hard marching rations.
Early the next morning, the troops broke camp and continued to advance. When they passed Fengrong Village, many villagers were still cowering at the entrance of the village to watch the army without any flags. Seeing that these soldiers carrying muskets had no intention of entering the village, the villagers breathed a long sigh of relief. To be honest, if this army intends to make a fortune in Fengrong Village, the people in the village can only obey obediently and let the other side take what they want.
Qian Tiandun asked Gao Qiaonan to spend two taels of silver to find two bold young men from the village to serve as guides. However, even if a special guide was hired, the troops' advance did not speed up. Because this inland operation was not simply about marching or attacking hostile targets, but more importantly, it was about completing the inspection of the areas along the Zhuoshui River and revising the originally used maps. This involved a lot of surveying, mapping and hydrological recording work. Every time they advanced one or two miles, the team had to stop to complete the surveying and mapping work. At the end of the day, it would be considered a good speed to be able to march about twenty miles.
Going east from Fengrong Village, there were no other Han villages. However, on the third day of the march, we came to a village of the Pingpu tribe. Under the intermediary contact of two guides, the indigenous residents of this tribe carried out a simple transaction with the troops led by Qian Tiandun with vigilant eyes - in fact, they took some personal belongings carried by the soldiers, such as copper whistles and horns. Combs, cowhide belts, knives, etc. were bartered with these natives in exchange for clean well water and food made from millet.
Qian Tiandun's troops actually did not lack supplies. When they set out, the soldiers carried enough dry food for a ten-day march. They only needed to add drinking water on the way. In fact, the main purpose of such a transaction is to release goodwill and avoid unnecessary conflicts caused by these natives overreacting to sudden outsiders.
These Pingpu natives are relatively easy to communicate with, and they were also the ethnic minorities with a higher degree of sinicization in their original history. They were indeed very interested in these exquisite gadgets provided by strangers, but at the same time they also maintained a high level of vigilance and refused to allow the Haihan militia to enter their village. This made Qian Tiandun a little disappointed. He also wanted to see the difference between this village and Han villages. However, only from a peripheral perspective, the houses of this indigenous tribe seem to be inferior to the adobe houses in Fengrong Village. They are all small houses with bamboo and wood structures. The floors are raised off the ground to prevent dampness. The structure is a bit unsatisfactory. Like the Li boat-shaped houses on Hainan Island. If there is a typhoon, it is not difficult to imagine that this simple shack will be blown to pieces.
Although they were not allowed to visit this tribe, the goodwill released by Haihan still played a certain role. The tribal elders here allowed the Haihan militia to continue marching eastward through their sphere of influence. But before the militia set off, the locals gave them a special warning: One day's journey eastward from here, they would enter the territory of the mountain tribes, and the residents there were not as easy to communicate with as they were.
(End of chapter)