1627 Rise of the South China Sea

Chapter 2157
Through the explanations given by civil affairs officials, Xiu Nian roughly understood the political status and development direction of overseas colonial areas like Zhoushan in Haihan Kingdom.According to his understanding, Zhoushan's environment is somewhat similar to that of the Hirado Clan. It is also far away from the center of the country, and it also uses transnational trade as its main industry. It also has a strong local armed force.However, the armed fleet stationed in such a trading port is enough to overthrow the well-known Hirado Navy in Japan. It is conceivable how powerful the military strength of Haihan Kingdom is.

Knowing that Zhoushan is thousands of miles away from the capital of Haihan Kingdom, which is two or three times farther than the journey from Hirado to Zhoushan, Xiu Nian is inevitably a little disappointed, which means that Zhoushan is nothing but Haihan. It is just a trading port hanging overseas under the name of the country.And there are at least four or five overseas colonial areas like Zhoushan between here and the mainland of Haihan.

"You should feel very lucky to be assigned to Zhoushan. If you are sent to the colonial areas 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 a military base. If you go there, you will be sent out." Let you dig the soil with the hoes, and you may dig until the day you put it in the coffin! How can it compare to our place, which is called Zhoushan, but it is actually a mountain of gold and silver! As long as you work hard in the future, let alone food and clothing, and your wife and shade You also have a chance!"

The civil affairs officials responsible for training them ostentatiously reminded the trainees to cherish their good luck. Compared with the difficult conditions in the northern colonial areas, the affluent Zhoushan can be regarded as a paradise on earth.

Everyone, including Xiu Nian, still had doubts about the second half of the civil affairs official's description. They entered the immigration camp directly from the pier before they disembarked from the boat and had no time to experience the prosperity of Zhoushan. "Mountains of gold and silver", indeed, there is no sense of reality.

Of course, this kind of training is not just to make big cakes 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 is in charge of the new immigrants and who should obey their orders? This is something that the government must let the new immigrants understand.

After being resettled in the local area, the production and living of the immigrants will be arranged by the local village head or town head, and the Japanese civil affairs personnel are mainly responsible for communication and coordination.In terms of public security, it is under the jurisdiction of the local police. At the same time, the young and strong immigrants may be recruited by the government 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 allow new immigrants to master, it largely depends on the personnel who are undergoing management training, including Xiu Nian.

Xiu Nian's ability to read and write came in handy. Others could only memorize what the civil affairs officials said, but he could apply for a pen and paper to transcribe the training content by himself.As the saying goes, a good memory is not as good as a bad pen, this move is enough for Xiu Nian to leave others behind.

Among the immigrants introduced by Haihan, there are usually several types of people who can obtain special treatment.One is the young and strong who voluntarily enlist in the army, the other is the professional craftsman with production skills, and the third is the scholar with a certain cultural foundation.

For Haihan's social system, the adult literacy rate is only about [-]%, and there is still a long way to go to eliminate illiteracy. It will take at least two to three generations to popularize basic education among the people.In this environment, educated people are still a scarce resource, and they will be favored by officials from the moment they register their personal data.

The official attitude is generally inclined to arrange for these people to enter educational institutions or bureaucratic systems for employment, so as to maximize the use of talents and resources.Therefore, scholars who immigrated from Daming to Haihan, even if they have not obtained any honors, as long as they have a certain level of literacy, they have a great chance of being able to get a part-time job in the grassroots organizations of Haihan.

Among the foreign immigrant groups who do not understand the language, there is an outlier like Xiu Nian, which is simply good news for grassroots civil affairs officials.They can save a lot of energy in communicating with the new immigrants, they only need to give orders to Xiu Nian, and he will 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 grades: A, B, C, and D. More than [-]% of people will be classified into the last two grades, and Xiu Nian's situation can basically ensure that they will be classified into B grade, and the future is bright. .As for those who can be classified into the first class, it is really rare. Generally, only a few people with certain social status and influence, or who have huge wealth, can have the opportunity to become a member of the first class immigrants.Usually, such characters do not need to go through the immigration camp, and there will naturally be special channels for them to quickly obtain Haihan nationality.

However, civil affairs officials will certainly not disclose these arrangements to the trainees prematurely, so as not to affect the normal training and distribution process.If Xiu Nian worked in the civil affairs department for another year or two after being naturalized, then he would have the right to know the secrets of the civil affairs department.

The civil affairs department conducts half-day training for these selected reserve personnel every day, and in the rest of the time they have to receive the most basic queue training with other immigrants.This part of the training is to use military personnel as instructors. The purpose is not to train these immigrants into militias, but to get them used to obeying and executing orders without compromise.

This kind of training helps new immigrants quickly adapt to the local social system, and it also makes it easier for the civil affairs department to manage them.

Although the basic queue training content is very boring, no immigrant dares to take it lightly, because any distracted performance on the training ground may cause them to lose a meal of the day.

The amount of exercise in this kind of training will not be too large, but the end of the training means that Xiu Nian's work has just begun. He needs to explain the various systems and regulations that he has just learned today to the immigrant group he is in charge of.It is not easy for the immigrants to understand these things. There are many things that Xiu Nian has not understood thoroughly, and it is really a very brain-consuming thing to answer the various questions raised by others.

However, it is said that the time to stay in the immigrant camp will not be too long. The higher authorities are already arranging specific resettlement sites for the Japanese immigrants. Xiu Nian can only encourage herself to grit her teeth and persist for a few more days.

Three days after returning to Zhoushan, Shi Diwen went to Zhujiajian Island to send off Xu Jiajun who was about to return to Fujian. When he came back, he received a telegram from the Datongjiang base to report the progress of the trial of the prisoners of war.

The coalition forces captured a total of more than [-] prisoners of war on various islands in Hirado, but more than half of them were farmers and soldiers temporarily organized by the Hirado domain, and their military value was not great.Among the remaining captives were a very small number of warrior officers, who were brought back by Qian Tiandun to the Datongjiang base for further interrogation.

Although this battle won the final victory without any suspense, for Haihan, because the real key figure Tian Chuansuke and others were not captured, the relationship between Shibazhi and Hirado Fan, as well as the relationship between Hirado Fan There are still many questions that have not been answered in the various overseas layouts before.And through interrogation of prisoners of war after the war and some documents found from Tagawasuke's mansion, the military may be able to obtain some valuable information to confirm whether Haihan's series of actions against the Hirado clan can receive what they deserve. Effect.

From the attempted attack on the son of Korea on Hainan Island, to a series of gun-related cases in Liaodong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian and other places, the Haihan intelligence department and the military continued to track clues, from the Philippine Islands to Liaodong, and repeatedly mobilized elites. Armed attack, and after paying a considerable price, they gradually pieced together the clues and tracked down the Hirado clan and the Shiba Zhiyu Party.

But until the Executive Committee decided to send troops, although the evidence Haihan possessed all pointed to Hirado, there was still no solid evidence to prove that Hirado was behind the previous series of cases.

However, judging from the large amount of new evidence obtained after the war, Hai Han's deduction at that time was basically correct. It was indeed Tagawasuke of the Hirado Domain who planned a series of attacks against Hai Han and the Fujian Xu family in collaboration with the Shibazhi Remnant Party.

According to the current investigation, the Military Intelligence Bureau has already sorted out the general context of the timeline of the incident.After the Battle of Miyako Island in 1633, some of the [-]th Shiyu Party who escaped by chance arrived in Hirado, and obtained the official asylum of the Hirado Domain by virtue of Zheng Zhilong's relationship during his lifetime, and began to take root in the local area and start anew.

In order to be able to avenge their hatred, the Eighteenth Zhiyu Party relied on its previous smuggling trade relationship with the Spaniards, and spent a lot of money to buy a large amount of arms from the colonial authorities in Manila in batches. Later, it even bought the technology for making guns and artillery. , and began to develop weapons and equipment locally.

This is also the reason why Haihan's 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 already been defeated and retreated to the depths of the South China Sea at the time of the incident, used the weapons It was sold to the coastal areas of Daming, and even sold to the Qing army in Liaodong.

It wasn't until the Hirado Clan surfaced that the intelligence agencies gradually realized that it might not be the Spaniards in the South China Sea who directly provided these weapons, but the Eighteen Zhiyu Party, which had been eyeing the coast of Daming.

The ledger copied from Tagawasuke’s mansion finally confirmed this point, and it recorded the transaction content 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, and it is very likely that Tagawasuke treated it as a profitable industry.After all, Haihan, as the largest arms dealer in East Asia in this era, knows how profitable the arms business will be.

Judging from the books, the Hirado clan sold at least two hundred muskets, four small-caliber guns, and some ammunition to Yangzhou salt merchants.Fortunately, when the military took action in Yangzhou, the opponent did not have time to use all their weapons in stock, otherwise the personnel who participated in the operation at that time would probably have paid a greater price in casualties.

However, if action had not been taken in time at that time, and the Yangzhou salt merchants had been delayed for a few months to train a larger musketeer team, or even gunners, the consequences would have been disastrous.With the strength of Yangzhou salt merchants, once they have tasted the sweetness, it is not entirely impossible to invest a lot of money to organize a private army.

The number of weapons sold to the Qing army also greatly exceeded the expectations of Haihan's intelligence department.Although the Marine Corps sneaked into the enemy's rear and wiped out a musketeer unit of the Qing army, judging from the records in the books, the Qing army actually purchased enough muskets to form a musketeer unit of the same size.What's more terrible is that from the accounts, there is a large amount of money paid from the Qing Dynasty without indicating the content of the sale. The Military Intelligence Bureau believes that this means that the Qing Army may have introduced the manufacturing technology of guns and artillery from the Hirado Domain.

Although the weapon manufacturing technology mastered by the Hirado Clan is still far behind that of Haihan, if the Qing army is allowed to manufacture weapons on a large scale and form an organized musket force, it will definitely have a great impact on the Liaodong front. threaten.

According to the interrogation of the captured weapon craftsmen, there is another bad news. Hirado’s weapon manufacturing workshops are not limited to Hirado Island. At least there is a workshop in Kyushu that specializes in making muskets.And this confession is also consistent with the fact that the coalition forces failed to find a gun manufacturing site on Hirado Island. At that time, they only found a workshop for casting guns in Jingchuan, and they did not find a gun manufacturing site until the end of the war.

This also means that the Hirado clan is likely to successfully retain the ability to manufacture muskets, and the coalition forces' attack on the Hirado clan will also be greatly reduced.

The telegram also raised a very dangerous possibility, that is, the remnants of Hirado, who had been hit hard, would try to get in touch with the Qing Dynasty and reach some kind 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 still the Korean Peninsula between the two countries, and the navigation capabilities of the Qing Dynasty have been completely lost under the continuous suppression of Haihan for years, and they are even far inferior 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 only Haihan's unilateral speculation, and theoretically there are still possibilities for multiple development directions.For example, in the original plan to attack North Korea's heir Li Yi, Haihan's intelligence department believed that certain forces in North Korea might be involved in it. It is a complicated situation, but it is a pity that no more intelligence information has been obtained on this.

(End of this chapter)