1627 Rise of the South China Sea

Chapter 3809

Shi Diwen himself was a beneficiary of this form of marriage. His wife in this time and space, the mother of his eldest son Shi Chengwu, was the family of Qu Yutong, the former prefect of Ningbo.

This marriage not only created many conveniences for Shi Diwen to act locally, allowing Hai Han to use Ningbo Prefecture as a springboard to open up trade channels in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions, but also made Ningbo Prefecture the first prefecture in East China to defect to Hai Han.

Qu Yutong's connections in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions also provided Shi Diwen, who was short of manpower at the time, with a large number of experienced bureaucrats, allowing Shi Diwen to quickly build a local governance system.

Qu Shengfeng, who has now taken over the position of director of the East China Region of the Security Department from Lin Nan, is the son of Qu Yutong. This personnel appointment is certainly not a coincidence. It is equivalent to allowing Shi Diwen to take control of the local Security Department's intelligence network in his own hands.

Practices like this have become the norm among time travelers. Most of the marriage partners are former officials of the Ming Dynasty or local wealthy clans. After all, the support that these well-established people can provide is far beyond what ordinary people can provide. As a result, many families have become the new elites of the new dynasty.

During the socializing process, Shi Diwen discovered that many people were concerned about his experiences during his overseas inspection. Their purpose was obvious, which was to find out whether there were any opportunities to make a fortune in Hai Han’s overseas colonies in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.

As a supporter of the sea power theory, Shi Diwen is very happy to let domestic businesses go abroad and expand overseas. This will not only allow for the development of future generations to occupy key areas and mineral resources in advance, but also prevent these businesses from competing for domestic resources and internal consumption.

Therefore, when responding to relevant inquiries, Shi Diwen patiently introduced the various information that the other party wanted to know, and said that if necessary, he could contact the Sing Tao authorities and the Special Operations Division on their behalf, so that businesses could establish direct contact channels with local senior officials.

This is indeed a great help for those who want to go overseas for business. They found Shi Diwen to consult about these situations because they did not have any information channels in this regard. If Shi Diwen could come forward to act as a matchmaker, it would definitely save them a lot of trouble.

In a short time, Shi Diwen had persuaded several people to arrange the sea investigation.

This also surprised Schneider, who was in charge of business management, and he felt that Shi Diwen had snatched the work that should have been done by him.

After the banquet, the work of the Executive Committee in 1659 came to an end. After that, there will be a short three-day New Year's Eve holiday, and then we will enter the year 1660 of the Haihan calendar.

The three-day New Year's Eve holiday was a new rule that was enacted after Hai Han moved its capital to Hangzhou. During this period, except for the military and police agencies that maintained emergency operations, most government offices would be closed, with only a very small number of staff on duty.

People will also take advantage of this time to organize activities to celebrate the coming of the New Year. In big cities like Hangzhou, the festive atmosphere is even better than that of the traditional Lunar New Year.

However, the people who had the most comfortable and relaxed time during the three-day festival were not ordinary people, nor were they high-ranking Hai Han officials who finally had time to spend with their families and grandchildren, but someone else. The Hai Han flag was hung on the roofs and eaves of many places in and outside Hangzhou, but there was a place at Yongjin Gate in the west of the city that seemed out of place with this atmosphere. There were no decorations and the gate was closed, and it was obvious that there was no plan to open the door to welcome guests during the festival.

The people living nearby were not surprised by this at all, because the plaque hanging on the former Salt Transport Office explained the reason - the Ming Embassy.

This was the third year that Yue Shizong, a Langzhong of the Ministry of Rites, had been serving in Hangzhou. The ambassadorial position, which seemed glorious and not subject to the control of the court, seemed to be an excellent job. However, the three years in office were the most embarrassing, or even the darkest, years of his life.

When he first took office, he encountered the assassination of Zhu Zhongyun during Hai Han's National Day. Before he could mediate a result, Hai Han, in the name of revenge, simultaneously launched wars against the Ming Dynasty in Liaodong, Shandong, and East China.

Although the war lasted only more than three months, it ended with the Ming Dynasty suffering heavy losses. Not only did it lose a large amount of territory during the fighting, but it was also forced to sign an armistice treaty with the Hai Han army that was at the gates of Beijing, admitting defeat, ceding territory, and paying huge compensation, suffering huge losses.

Although the assassination and the subsequent war were not Yue Shizong's responsibility, as the Ming Dynasty's ambassador to Hangzhou, one can imagine the pressure he was under during that period.

After the ceasefire was finally reached, the relationship between the two countries slowly entered a period of détente. In 1658, Hai Han held the Zhoushan Military Forum with great fanfare, inviting officials from many countries to discuss, visit and inspect the Hai Han army's navy and army, and also to promote a wave of weapons and equipment.

Yue Shizong also attended the event on behalf of the Ming Dynasty, but he was very uncomfortable throughout the whole process.

He had personally seen the many advanced equipment of the Hai Han army, and could basically confirm that its strength far surpassed that of the Ming army. But what made him even more uneasy was that even Korea and Annan, vassal states that had previously submitted to the Ming, had now changed sides and joined Hai Han, and their military strength seemed to have surpassed that of the Ming, their former suzerain.

To put it bluntly, Hai Han provided them with weapons and equipment and personnel training, allowing these countries' military strength to grow rapidly. The Ming Dynasty had also briefly received such treatment in the past, but now it has lost the qualification to even spend money to buy Hai Han equipment.

If any one of Hai Han's thugs is more powerful than Ming's, how can Ming achieve its goal of defeating Hai Han and regaining lost territory?
But after a subsequent inspection trip to Japan and witnessing the outbreak of the Japanese civil war, Yue Shizong realized that Hai Han had actually been lenient towards the Ming Dynasty. Otherwise, they could have easily created civil unrest and continued to weaken the Ming Dynasty by simply following Japan's tactics and supporting a few local military leaders or peasant armies.

However, just after returning from his inspection in Japan, Hai Han launched an offensive against the north bank of the Yangtze River in Nanjing. Although Yue Shizong tried his best, he was eventually captured by Hai Han in the end, and the entire Yingtian Prefecture fell into Hai Han's hands.

However, this time Yue Shizong was commended by the court for his contribution in stopping the war in Hangzhou. Only he himself knew that it was not because he successfully persuaded Hai Han, but that Hai Han was not prepared to start another full-scale war. The offensive launched in the direction of Nanjing was just an action by two young senior officials, Shi Chengwu and Tao Hongfang, to show off their military merits. They stopped after conquering two counties.

The court's commendation made Yue Shizong even more uncomfortable. He realized that the Ming Dynasty had become the object of Hai Han's demands, and it was simply unrealistic to rely on diplomatic means to stop Hai Han's ambitions.