Chapter 2157
Through the explanations given by civil affairs officials, Xiunian roughly understood the political status and development direction of overseas colonial areas like Zhoushan in Haihan State. According to his understanding, the environment of Zhoushan is somewhat similar to that of the Hirado Domain. They are also far away from the center of the country, they also have transnational trade as their main industry, and they also have strong local armed forces. However, the armed fleet stationed in such a trading port is enough to defeat the famous Hirado navy in Japan. One can imagine how powerful the military strength of the Haihan Kingdom is.
Xiunian was inevitably a little disappointed when he learned that Zhoushan was thousands of miles away from the capital of Haihan Kingdom, two or three times farther than the distance from Hirado to Zhoushan. It's just an isolated trading port overseas under the name of the country. As for overseas colonial areas like Zhoushan, there are at least four or five other overseas colonial areas between here and the mainland of Haihan.
"You should feel very lucky to be assigned to Zhoushan. If you are sent to the colonial area in the north, the local conditions will be much more difficult than in Zhoushan. It is either a mining area or a war zone, or it is a military base. If you go there, you will be exposed. Let you dig the soil with the hoe, and you may dig it until the day you put it in the coffin! It's nothing compared to our place, which is called Zhoushan, but is actually a mountain of gold and silver! As long as you work hard from now on, let alone have food and clothing, and a wife. There is also a chance!”
The civil affairs officials responsible for training them ostentatiously reminded the students to cherish their good luck. Compared with the harsh conditions in the northern colonial areas, the affluent Zhoushan can be regarded as a paradise on earth.
Everyone, including Xiunian, was still doubtful about the second half of the civil affairs official's description. After disembarking, they entered the immigration camp directly from the dock before they had time to experience the prosperity of Zhoushan, so they were not convinced by what the civil affairs official said. "Mountains of gold and silver" really doesn't have any real sense.
Of course, this kind of training is not just about painting a pie for the students. The main content is to teach them how to abide by Haihan's social rules, and then these future grassroots civil affairs officials will teach these common sense to ordinary Japanese immigrants.
Under the unshakable principle of allegiance to the Executive Committee, who will manage the new immigrants on a daily basis and whose instructions they should obey are things that the official must let the new immigrants understand.
After being resettled to the local area, the production and life of the immigrants will be arranged by the local village chief or town chief, and the Japanese civil affairs personnel are mainly responsible for communication and coordination tasks. In terms of public security, they are under the jurisdiction of the local police. At the same time, young immigrants among the immigrants may be officially recruited and receive training from the local militia.
What can be done, what cannot be done, and what must be done, instilling these basic rules into new immigrants as soon as possible can save the grassroots a lot of trouble in the subsequent resettlement process and daily management. As for how much these rules can be mastered by new immigrants, it largely depends on those who are receiving management training, including Xiunian.
Xiunian's ability to read and write came in handy. Others could only memorize what the civil affairs officials said, but he could apply for paper and pen to copy down the training content himself. As the saying goes, a good memory is not as good as a bad writing. This trick is enough for Xiunian to leave others behind.
Among the immigrants introduced by Haihan, there are usually several categories of people who can receive special treatment. One is the young men who voluntarily signed up to join the army, the other is the professional craftsmen with production skills, and the third is the scholars with a certain cultural foundation.
For Haihan's social system, the adult literacy rate is only about 10%, and literacy work still has a long way to go. It will take at least two to three generations to popularize basic education among the people. In this environment, literate people are still a scarce resource and will receive official favor from the moment they register their personal information.
The official attitude is generally to arrange for these people to enter educational institutions or the bureaucracy for employment, so as to maximize the use of talents and materials. Therefore, scholars who immigrated to Haihan from the Ming Dynasty, even if they have not obtained any honors, as long as they have certain literacy skills, have a high chance of getting an official position in Haihan's grassroots institutions.
Among foreign immigrants who don't understand the language, there is an outlier like Xiunian, which is simply good news to grassroots civil affairs officials. They can save a lot of energy in communicating with new immigrants. They only need to give orders to Xiunian and let him translate them into a language that the new immigrants can understand.
The civil affairs department has a special rating system for new immigrants, which is divided into four levels: A, B, C and D. More than 90% of people will be classified into the last two levels. Xiunian's situation can basically guarantee that he will be classified into level B, and his future is bright. . As for those who can be classified as Class A, they are really rare. Generally, only a few people with a certain social status and influence, or with huge wealth, have the opportunity to become one of the Class A immigrants. Usually, such people do not need to go through the immigration camp. There will naturally be special channels for them to quickly obtain Haihan nationality.
However, civil affairs officials will certainly not reveal these arrangements to training recipients prematurely, so as not to affect the normal training and distribution process. If Xiunian works in the civil affairs department for one or two years after naturalization, then he will have the right to know the secrets of the civil affairs department.
The civil affairs department conducts half-day training for these selected preparatory personnel every day, and the remaining time they have to receive the most basic queue training together with other immigrants. In this part of the training, military personnel serve as instructors. The purpose is not to train these immigrants into militiamen, but to make them accustomed to obeying and executing orders without compromise.
This kind of training helps new immigrants quickly adapt to the local social system, and also makes it easier for the civil affairs department to manage them.
Although the basic queue training content is very boring, no immigrants dare to take it lightly, because any distraction on the training ground may cause them to lose one meal of the day.
The amount of exercise in this kind of training is not too large, but the end of the training means that Xiunian's work has just begun. He needs to explain the various systems and regulations he just learned today to the immigrant group he is responsible for. It is not easy for immigrants to understand these things. There are many things that Xiunian himself cannot fully understand. It is really a very brain-consuming task to answer various questions raised by others.
However, it is said that the stay in the immigration camp will not be too long. The superiors are already arranging specific resettlement sites for Japanese immigrants. Xiunian can only encourage herself to bite the bullet and persevere for a few more days. After that, maybe the rest of the day will be better.
Three days after returning to Zhoushan, Shi Diwen went to Zhujiajian Island to see off Xu Jiajun who was about to return to Fujian. When he came back, he received a telegram from the Datong River base, which reported the progress of the trial of prisoners of war. The coalition forces captured more than 2,000 prisoners of war on various islands in Hirado, but more than half of them were farmers and soldiers temporarily organized by the Hirado clan, and their military value was not great. Among the remaining prisoners were a handful of samurai officers, who were brought back to the Datong River base by Qian Tiandun for further interrogation.
Although this battle won the final victory without any suspense, for Haihan, due to the failure to capture the real key figures Tagawasuke and others, the relationship between Hachishiba and the Hirado clan, as well as the Hirado clan There are still many questions that have not been answered in the various previous overseas layouts. Through the interrogation of prisoners of war after the war and the search of some documents from Tagawasuke's mansion, the military may be able to obtain some valuable information to confirm whether Kaihan's series of actions against the Hirado Domain have received the due response. effect.
Starting from the attempted attack on the crown prince of Joseon on Hainan Island, to a series of gun-related cases that occurred in Liaodong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian and other places, the Haihan intelligence department and the military continued to follow clues, from the Philippine Islands to Liaodong, and repeatedly used elite personnel to After an armed attack and paying a heavy price, the clues were gradually pieced together and traced to the heads of the Hirado clan and the Shiba Shiba Yu Party.
But until the Executive Committee decided to send troops, although the evidence in Haihan's possession all pointed to Hirado, there was still no solid evidence to prove that the Hirado Domain was the mastermind behind the previous series of cases.
However, judging from the large amount of newly obtained evidence after the war, Haihan's inference at the time was basically correct. It was indeed Tagawasuke of the Hirado Domain and the Eighteen Shiba Yu Party who planned a series of attacks against Haihan and the Fujian Xu family.
Based on the current investigation results, the Military Intelligence Bureau has figured out a rough timeline of the incident. After the Battle of Miyakojima in 1633, some members of the Eighteen Shiba Party who had a chance to escape arrived in Hirado, and relied on Zheng Zhilong's connections during his lifetime to obtain official asylum from the Hirado clan, and began to take root in the local area and start over.
In order to avenge their hatred, the Eighteenth Chi Yu Party relied on its previous smuggling trade relationship with the Spanish to spend a lot of money to purchase a large number of arms in batches from the colonial authorities in Manila. Later, they even bought the technology for making muskets and artillery. , began to develop weapons and equipment locally.
This is also the reason why the Haihan Intelligence Department was misled at the beginning. The weapons seized during the investigation pointed the direction of the investigation to the Spaniards, but no one could explain how the Spaniards, who had been defeated and retreated to the depths of the South China Sea at the time of the incident, used the weapons. They were sold to the coastal areas of the Ming Dynasty and even went as far as Liaodong to be sold to the Qing army.
It was not until the Hirado clan surfaced later that the intelligence agencies gradually realized that those who directly provided these weapons might not be the Spaniards in the South China Sea, but the Shiba Shiyu Party who had been eyeing the Ming Dynasty coast.
The account books copied from Tagawasuke's mansion finally confirmed this, which recorded the transaction contents of weapons secretly sold by the Hirado clan to the outside world. Judging from these written materials, the number of weapons sold by the Hirado clan far exceeded Haihan's original expectations. It is likely that Tagawasuke operated it as a profitable industry. After all, Haihan, as the largest arms dealer in East Asia in this era, knows very well how profitable the arms business can be.
Judging from the account books, the Hirado clan sold at least two hundred muskets, four small-caliber cannons, and some ammunition to Yangzhou salt merchants. Fortunately, when the military took action in Yangzhou, the other party did not have time to use all their inventory of weapons. Otherwise, the personnel participating in the action at that time would probably have paid a greater price in casualties.
However, if timely action had not been taken at that time and it had been delayed for a few more months to allow the Yangzhou salt merchants to train a larger musketry team and even gunners, the consequences would have been disastrous. With the strength of the Yangzhou salt merchants, once they taste the sweetness, it is not completely impossible to invest heavily in organizing a fully-organized private army.
The number of weapons sold to the Qing army greatly exceeded the expectations of the Haihan Intelligence Department. Although the Marine Corps sneaked behind enemy lines and eliminated a Qing army musketry unit, judging from the records in the ledger, the number of muskets actually purchased by the Qing army was enough to form another musketeer unit of the same size. What's more terrible is that from the accounts, a large amount of money paid by the Qing Dynasty did not indicate the content of the sales. The Military Intelligence Bureau believes that this means that the Qing army may have introduced the manufacturing technology of muskets and artillery from the Hirado Domain.
Although there is still a clear gap in the weapons manufacturing technology mastered by the Hirado Domain compared to Haihan, if the Qing army starts to manufacture weapons on a large scale and forms an organic musketry unit, it will definitely have a great impact on the Liaodong front line. threaten.
According to what was learned from the interrogation of the captured weapon craftsmen, there is another bad news. The weapons manufacturing workshops of the Hirado Domain are not only on Hirado Island, but there is at least one workshop in Kyushu that specializes in manufacturing muskets. This confession is also consistent with the fact that the coalition forces failed to search for a gun manufacturing location on Hirado Island. At that time, they only found a gun-making workshop in Kagawa, and they did not find a gun-making place until the end of the war.
This means that the Hirado Domain is likely to have successfully retained its ability to manufacture muskets, and the effectiveness of the coalition's attack on the Hirado Domain will also be greatly reduced.
The message also raised a very dangerous possibility, that is, the remnants of the severely damaged Hirado clan would try to get in touch with the Qing Dynasty and form some form of military alliance to fight against the common enemy Haihan.
Of course, this possibility will be limited by the navigation capabilities of the two parties. After all, there is a Korean Peninsula between the two countries, and the Qing's navigation capabilities have been completely lost due to the continuous suppression of Haihan in recent years, and are even far inferior to A weak country like North Korea. If you want to establish a long-term and stable sea route, you must first try to break through Haihan's military blockade in the Yellow Sea.
However, this is just Haihan's unilateral speculation, and there are still possibilities for multiple development directions in theory. For example, in the original plan to attack Joseon Crown Prince Li Zhi, Haihan intelligence department believed that some forces in Korea might be involved. This means that the Hirado clan's allies in Northeast Asia may not only include the Qing Dynasty, but there may be more. It’s a complicated situation, but unfortunately, no more intelligence information has been obtained yet.
(End of chapter)