Xinshun 1730

Chapter 692 Depreciation From Zero To One

"Donkeys, those who don't know what to do, they don't go away, they go backwards. Why do you think it's necessary? Gunpowder is also quite expensive."

Du Feng couldn't help cursing a few words as he looked at the Dutchman walking this way with a white flag in the distance.

The staff officers and adjutants around him were all laughing, because until now, no one in Dashun had died, except for the hardest combat engineer who had dug a hole for a long time.

Then the pit dug is not used yet, and it has to be buried back after the handover to improve the defense system of the castle.

After complaining about the Dutch, Du Feng couldn't help but patted his head again, regretting: "It's a pity. If the war started a month earlier, we could still get a lot of spices and money. Back then, Hou Jing led us to fight the Raksha people At that time, it was the time when the rhubarb dealer in Rakshasa brought the silver. Now the Dutch ships have already left with the cinnamon, so it is estimated that there is not much silver..."

Shaking his head in frustration, the officer next to him was also quite distressed. If the war had started a month earlier, the cinnamon purchased in Ceylon would have been piled up here. Everyone would share one cent, so why not share one hundred and ten taels of silver per person?
Adding these troubles out of thin air, I felt a little more resentment towards the Dutch who came to surrender out of thin air.Fortunately, military discipline can still be maintained. Du Feng restrained the officers and led them to accept the surrender of the Dutch.

The tone is still relatively gentle, but Du Feng is not so gentle in terms of the substantive surrender conditions.

"We said at the beginning that you should surrender directly and give you the honor of being defeated. But if you insist on fighting, if you fight to the end and fight to the last person, that's fine. But since you didn't surrender at the beginning, you also If it’s not hard to the end, there’s an argument for that.”

"We will turn around and attack Jaffna. In addition to Jaffna's castle, you should have five castles on Ceylon Island."

"You bring people, go and bring all the troops in the castle to surrender. We can also give you the dignity of honor and defeat, and keep your belongings and personal property. If you can't, then we won't accept the surrender."

"The meaning of surrender may be beneficial to the attacker. It will reduce the casualties of the attacker and achieve the purpose of the war. But... you have also seen that we have no casualties at all, so you have no room for bargaining when you surrender, just It's just a gift from heaven."

After seeing Dashun's siege capabilities and the pit-digging skills of those elite combat engineers, the Ceylon governor's mentality has undergone a huge change.

Indeed, the citadel of Jaffna could not be held.And it might be easier to attack than that.Once Jaffna and Colombo were lost, the remaining castles were all inland, and they were all on guard against the Sinhalese, and there was nowhere to escape.

Fleeing to the Sinhalese, why not be caught and killed by the Sinhalese for revenge?
"Yes, Mr. Commander, we will follow your suggestion, and the Dutch army in Ceylon will choose to surrender. You are right, these bastions cannot hinder your country's army at all. However, please issue a copy of the A written statement to ensure our personal property is protected and a deadline as to when we will return to the Netherlands."

"I think, I'm afraid that the whole of Southeast Asia will fall into the hands of your country, and we have no other place to go except to return to the Netherlands."

As the governor of the colony, he still has some political sense, and he also has a somewhat general view.Now that Dashun has captured Ceylon, Southeast Asia is definitely not in the hands of the East India Company.Otherwise, with the throat stuck, what's the use of asking for a Ceylon?
Guessing this, Du Feng smiled, thinking that Nanyang is much worse than here.The Marquis of Whale wanted to kill a chicken to show the monkey, but he would not persuade him to surrender over there, but he wanted to destroy all the fortresses in a daze.

Otherwise, the people over there surrendered directly, but the local chiefs would not know whether Dashun could fight or not, and they couldn't see it clearly, I'm afraid they didn't know the heights of heaven and earth.

Perhaps for the sake of performance, some completely unnecessary siege methods will be used, such as digging tunnels to bury gunpowder, and blowing them up directly.Maybe, even invite the local chief to visit.But you know, as long as you dig a hole and bury gunpowder to blow up the wall, there will really be no place where the city wall collapses.

"You guessed it right. Nanyang has been a tributary state of China since ancient times, and China will take it back. However, I can only guarantee that your personal belongings will not be moved. As for when you will return to the Netherlands, you should know. The purpose is for politics, and you captured people will become bargaining chips."

"You better hope that the board of directors of the company is willing to pay enough for you. Like, ransom?"

Having said that, Du Feng also knew in his heart that it was impossible for Dashun to ask for things like ransom.There will definitely be something more important than the ransom, and they may even be released directly in order to express the goodwill of cooperation.

But when the governor of Ceylon heard the word ransom, his face suddenly became ugly.

The company pays the ransom?
The board of directors will not pay this money. It is very likely that the captured people will raise money from their own families. When the company hired them, the contract signed did not have such a thing as paying the ransom after being captured.

Moreover, if the entire Southeast Asia is lost, what is left of the company?As soon as the news reached Amsterdam, it was feared that the company's stock would collapse, triggering a sell-off frenzy.

Thinking of this, the face of the Governor of Ceylon became even more gloomy. He managed to get to the middle and upper levels of the company—the Governor of Ceylon, who is very likely to be a candidate for the Governor of Batavia—and as a result, he might end up with nothing now.

Almost all of my property is the company's stock, counting on the company's annual dividends.Now, the company is about to go bankrupt, and those enviable stocks before him are probably going to be worthless, right?
Originally, every Dutchman who owned shares in the East India Company was convinced that this thing was no different from gold and silver.The dividends of more than 18.00% that have lasted for a hundred years have never stopped, which has established the awareness of the Dutch that paper is money.

But now, if he had known this earlier, he might as well have exchanged all his stocks for gold and silver.

Gold and silver will still be gold and silver for 1 years, but the stock of the East India Company may be a piece of waste paper from now on.

"Hey!"

Thinking of this, the governor of Ceylon couldn't help sighing.He didn't lament the company's failure, but lamented his own fate. After struggling for most of his life, he finally got to this point and lost everything all of a sudden.

Even if he is released in the future, the company may go bankrupt, and his own stocks will become waste paper.

In the Netherlands, without money, there is no status.

Even if it is the Orange family, with great martial arts and established the orange national color of the Netherlands, don't they still say that if they are driven out by the consortium, they will be driven out?
Seeing him sighing there, Du Feng didn't know that the other party was thinking about the stocks he held, and thought it was because he was depressed because of the loss of Ceylon, so he comforted him: "Don't worry, there is a saying, The sky is falling, and there is someone taller. In terms of status, you are not a director of the company, nor the governor of Batavia. What are you worried about? If you surrender, you surrender. You are miserable."

This kind of consolation is better than no consolation. The governor of Ceylon said helplessly: "Your country is going to capture even Batavia, so what is there to talk about with the company? I am afraid the company will no longer exist, and your country will keep us. These captives are useless."

"We are company employees, not government troops. Your country may not understand the difference, and I hope your diplomats will figure that out."

Du Feng smiled and said: "Don't worry, if the company really collapses and there is no party A to negotiate with, we won't keep you. It's useless to keep you, right? The Junggars picked up a few Swedish prisoners of war , as a baby. We are different. If it was more than ten years earlier, maybe I could be an instructor, but now, there is no need."

Dashun's current army has basically formed a system.Once a system is formed, it can reproduce and expand itself.

Whether it is the army, navy, or the soon-to-be-established Academy of Sciences, Dashun follows this system.

Find people from the outside, teach the first group of people, and use the first group of people to teach the second group of people.Once the system is completed, it can operate on its own. The most difficult thing is the first batch of people.

Just like Renat, who was regarded as a treasure by the Junggar tribe, if he was in Dashun 20 years ago, if Dashun wanted to reform the military, he could still be the founder of the new artillery, but if it is now, he would be an artillery soldier at most gunner.

The reason why Du Feng mentioned this was that before he came to Ceylon, Liu Yu told them another similar story when he was talking with them face-to-face.

This story is closely related to Ceylon, and it is also closely related to the relationship between Dashun and Ceylon.

This time Dashun wanted to gain a firm foothold in Ceylon, so it was natural to attack the Dutch with heavy blows, but it still focused on wooing the Kandy Dynasty.

Ceylon is mountainous, and the inland areas are difficult to control, and Dashun is temporarily unable to completely conquer Ceylon, so it is necessary to establish a good relationship with the Kandy Dynasty as much as possible, to ensure the peaceful coexistence of the two sides, and to obtain the franchise rights of cinnamon and betel nut.

But if Dashun wants to engage in diplomacy with the Kandy Dynasty, it needs a special group to get closer, that is monks.

Ceylon is a Buddhist holy place where the tooth of Shakyamuni is enshrined.The new king was an offshoot brought from India according to the feudal succession law. He originally believed in Hinduism, but had to convert to Buddhism in order to maintain the system.And because of this, he has to appear more fanatical than others, because he will definitely bring a bunch of relatives and cronies with him when he comes from India, which will inevitably cause dissatisfaction among the nobles; It's unstable.

Therefore, the king will definitely promote Buddhism to win over the monks.Although the Buddhism of Dashun was not the same as the Buddhism of South Asia and Southeast Asia, they were all insiders, and sending monks to visit made it easier to get closer.

At the very least, it is easier to get closer than missionaries who believe in God.

Liu Yu doesn't understand Buddhism, but there are so many temples in Dashun, and there are still a few groups who can interpret Sanskrit. The imperial court recruited monks to engage in religious diplomacy, and the great monks would come forward.

Of course these monks also knew about Ceylon, or the kingdom of lions.Because it involves an important historical event in Chinese Buddhism, the bhikkhuni issue.

This bhikkhuni issue is the same as Du Feng's system issue.

According to the precepts, when a woman is an official nun, she needs to find ten bhikkhunis to take the precepts, and then receive the full precepts from the bhikshus, which is the so-called two-part monk's precepts.

And there must have been no bhikkhunis in China before, so they fell into a strange circle:

Want to be a nun?Find ten nuns to be ordained first.

However, if there are not ten nuns, how can you become a nun? If you can’t become a nun, how can you save ten nuns?

If you want to save ten nuns, start from scratch, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eighty, ninety.

But there are not ten nuns at the beginning, so how can we break through from zero to one?
The top ten have the highest value, even priceless.Once the threshold is exceeded, it begins to depreciate wildly.

Therefore, according to the "teaching law" of Buddhism, those nuns are illegal.It wasn't until the Southern and Northern Dynasties that Tessaro of Ceylon came to Jiankang to solve the problem of this vicious circle, so that Chinese nuns met the definition of the teaching law.

Because as long as the identities of 10 bhikkhunis are resolved, 10 can become 1 or 10.And if the identities of the [-] nuns cannot be resolved, they will never be able to break through from zero to one.

Not many people in Dashun's officialdom knew about this matter.But in the Buddhist circle, everyone must know it. After all, this is a big event. Without this event, the nuns in all dynasties in China would be fake.

So this time, Dashun found a few eminent monks, and took this as an opportunity to realize their dream of worshiping the real Buddha's tooth in the circle, so as to close the relationship with the Kandy Dynasty.

Of course, it is best to take the opportunity to interfere in Kandy's internal affairs. You, a king from South India, have an unstable foundation and the nobles oppose it. Don't you just need to find a backer?Come to pay tribute to the Celestial Dynasty, and the Celestial Dynasty covers you.

(End of this chapter)