1635 Han style rises again

Chapter 858 The Scary Machine

January 1671, 1, the year of Xinhai, the first year of Daqi Hanxing, the 18th year of Guangde in Ming Dynasty, and the 17th year of Kangxi in Puppet Qing Dynasty.

In the past year, many great events of great significance have taken place.

In Europe, the talented French Foreign Minister Hugues Leonard managed a series of outstanding diplomatic achievements. At the beginning of 1670, he first bought the Swedish Parliament and got Sweden's promise to abandon the Anglo-Dutch-Swiss triangle alliance and maintain neutrality.

Later, following the will of Louis XIV, he proposed to King Charles II of England to jointly attack the Netherlands with France (part of the war funds provided by France) and carve up most of its territory.The two parties hit it off and signed the "Secret Treaty of Dover".King Charles II of England formed an alliance with King Louis XIV of France and planned to jointly attack the Netherlands two years later.

At the same time, France also bribed and instigated the Dutch neighbors, the Archbishop of Münster and the Archbishop of Cologne, and promised that once France sent troops, they would also launch an attack on the Netherlands and provide the French army with transportation and logistical support.

The complacent Dutch are still immersed in their imaginary European hegemony, and they don't care about the situation surrounded by powerful enemies.Relying on their monopoly business network, developed financial means, and huge trade surplus, they think they have controlled everything in Europe.Food and textiles in France, fishing, timber, and bonds in the UK, ironware in Sweden, daily commodities in Germany, and material transportation in Spain... All commercial interests have the deep participation of Dutch financial and commercial capital.

As far as Britain and France are concerned, the Dutch home is full of gold and silver, and the pockets are bulging, which is tantamount to a "dog meat bun" that makes people slander. Then fast!
In the ancient land of the East, the Manchu and Qing Tartars who once occupied the Central Plains were finally expelled from the pass, fled to Monan in a hurry, and after some internal fighting, split into two.

A part dominated by the princes of the Eight Banners, detoured through the desert, trying to return to Liaodong, and resume the former separatist regime.The Eight Banners forces of the Manchu, Mongolian and Han, dominated by the puppet Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty, stayed in Guisui, preparing to continue to unite with the Mongolian forces, accumulate strength, and peek inside the pass.

After the Ming army recaptured the area south of the Great Wall, they temporarily stopped their troops and began to turn their attention to the tens of thousands of Qing remnants in Shaanxi and Shanxi. unity.Afterwards, the army was gathered, entered Shanhaiguan, entered Liaodong, and pulled out the foundation of the purge.

Considering the weakness of the cavalry, the Ming army plans to rest for several years after unifying China, and form a large-scale cavalry corps, imitating the examples of Hongwu and Yongle in the past, and carry out a large-scale attack on the grassland forces. , in order to completely eliminate the hidden dangers in the north.

According to the information provided by the Qi people about the north, the Mongolian Junggar tribe in the northwest region (Galdan won the Taiji position of the Junggar tribe in 1670) has begun to integrate the Oirat Mongolian forces, and will gradually change the loose alliance into monopoly power. The khanate is rapidly expanding in strength.It is estimated that within a few years, the entire Western Regions will be conquered, and the sword will be pointed at Mobei.

At that time, a powerful Mongol Empire will once again be formed.If I, Ming Dynasty, do not step up the internal integration, and clean up Liaodong and Monan first, and completely annihilate the forces of the Qing and Monan Mongols, then when the Junggar Khanate goes south, I am afraid that the old events of the Mongolian and Yuan Dynasties will be staged again .

In addition, further north of Mobei and Junggar, there is a more powerful Raksha State. Judging from the map provided by the Qi people, its territory spans tens of thousands of miles, like a huge dark cloud covering China The northern part of the mainland makes people feel an unspeakable suffocation.

The Qing Dynasty, Monan Mongolia, Mobei Mongolia, Junggar, Hehuang, Hexi Corridor (Wu Sangui), and Uzang. Looking around, the unified Ming Dynasty is surrounded by powerful enemies, and the surrounding situation is still relatively severe.

Under such circumstances, the soon-to-be-unified Ming Dynasty still cannot do without the support of Qi State, whether it is the firearms they provide or the food they support.Even my Daming's overseas trade cannot do without the influence of Qi.

Porcelain, silk, tea, raw silk, medicinal materials, furs, bristles, tung oil... produced in the Ming Dynasty were transported away by the Qi people one by one, and then exchanged for a large amount of gold and silver.

It is said that through decades of trade, the Hanzhou silver dollar from Qi State is warmly welcomed by merchants and common people in Ming Dynasty because of its beautiful shape, uniform specifications, difficulty in forging, easy transfer or carrying, and better quality than other foreign silver dollars. , A large number of coins are flooded among the people, circulated in the market, and used in parallel with traditional broken silver and copper coins.

Under this trend, the Hanzhou silver dollar has gradually replaced the Spanish silver imported during the Wanli period, and has become the main source of precious metal currency in the Ming Dynasty.

In view of this, the Daming Household Department once considered introducing the minting machines and technology of Qi State to mint all the scattered silver coins circulating in Daming into Hanzhou silver dollar coins, so as to achieve the purpose of unifying the domestic currency.

It can be said that when the Ming Dynasty was about to be unified, no matter in terms of military pressure or economic and trade aspects, it was not allowed to immediately create a rift with the Qi State on the immigration issue criticized by the gentry.

Furthermore, two years of large-scale wars have almost turned the northern regions of Jianghuai, Henan, Hebei, and Shaanxi into a wasteland, and people's livelihood has also been greatly damaged. Millions of refugees are in urgent need of assistance.But relying on the fiscal revenue of Ming Dynasty and being in a war period, how can there be extra financial and material resources to relieve such a huge number of refugees.

That being the case, why not let the Qi State exchange food for immigrants for the time being, which can alleviate the pressure of disaster relief to a certain extent, allow countless refugees who are starving for food to find a way out, and at the same time obtain a large amount of material support from the Qi State to maintain the previous decades. situation of friendly cooperation.

Compared with the huge and spectacular war scenes in the mainland of China, the battle of Java in the Nanyang region seemed relatively trivial.As the overlord of the region, the Qi State launched a war of annihilation against this former Nanyang country on the grounds that the Matalan Sultan Kingdom brazenly killed hundreds of Chinese and Qi businessmen.

The Qi State dispatched only a dozen warships from the navy, and more than [-] troops from the army invaded the Kingdom of Mataran, and the war lasted less than two months before forcing it to surrender voluntarily.Subsequently, the kingdom that had almost unified the island of Java was severely dealt with.Mataran ceded almost one-third of the territory to the Qi State. At the same time, with the support of the Qi State, a Yogyakarta Sultanate was established in the southern region centered on Yogyakarta.The two ports of Semarang and Ciraza were occupied by the Qi State in the name of lease, and the capital Surakarta also allowed the Qi State to garrison, changed the name of the country to the Solo Sultan Kingdom, and placed it under the "armed protection" of the Qi State .

This war of low intensity and short duration shook all the kingdoms in the Nanyang region.The Kingdom of Mataland, with a population of more than 300 million, could not be attacked by Qi, so it crawled at the feet of Hanzhou so neatly.Let me ask, how can the many Tubang kingdoms, which are far weaker than Matalan in terms of population and force, dare to challenge the great power of Qi?
After hearing that the king of Qi had ascended the throne and proclaimed himself emperor, almost all the Nanyang land-state kingdoms either personally or sent important royal officials to carry a large number of valuable gifts and sailed to the mainland of Hanzhou and to Chang'an City to express their congratulations and respect.Even in far away India, Aurangzeb, the emperor of the Mughal Empire, sent a team of envoys to Hanzhou to congratulate Emperor Daqi.

Whether it is the treacherous regional situation in Europe, or the vigorous unification war on the mainland of China, even the war of annihilation launched by our Qi State against the natives, as a 20-year-old man living in the suburbs of Guangxin (now Banbury, Australia), For Tang Yongzhong, a young farmer, none of this matters.Because, there is nothing like earning more extra income for the family to make him invest too much energy.

Guangxin is the main agricultural and animal husbandry production area in Southwest China, surrounded by natural grasslands, plus the vast mountainous area dozens of kilometers away in the east, where hundreds of thousands of cattle and sheep are raised, among which there are cattle and sheep that have been bred and improved in Hanzhou for more than ten years Spanish Merino sheep provide sufficient wool raw materials for more than ten wool textile factories in Guangxin and Guizhou (now Perth, Australia).

In the vast southwestern area of ​​Hanzhou, farmers practice mixed agriculture under the planning and guidance of many agricultural technology experts. From January to June every year is the wheat planting period, that is, the busy farming period. Many farmers’ sheep will come Free grazing on the delimited pastures, July-October is the wheat growth period, that is, the slack period, but this happens to coincide with August-October is the sheep shedding and shearing period, November-December, wheat matures and harvests wheat During the busy farming season, sheep can graze in the harvested wheat fields, and wheat planting and sheep breeding form a virtuous ecological cycle.

Farmers from all over the world not only shear their sheep and sell them to merchants or wool textile factories during the slack season, but also use this time to do some odd jobs in wool textile factories in the city to sort out and purchase sheep for the factory. A lot of wool that comes.

During this period, there was no special wool carding machine, and these tasks could only be done manually.Workers use their fingers to pull the tufts apart, loosen and extract foreign matter before blending the fibers.

Don't think that combing wool is a light job. It requires workers to gradually master their carding skills through years of operation. It can be said to be a relatively technical operation.Some skilled workers can even get double the salary of textile workers.

Relying on his skilled wool carding skills, Tang Yongzhong would come to the wool textile factory in Guangxin City to card a large amount of wool raw materials during the slack season every year, earning an extra income on a piece-by-piece basis.The shopkeepers of several factories once persuaded him to give up dozens of acres of land in the countryside and enter the factory to specialize in this work.

But more than 20 years ago, he came to Qi State with great hardships and divided [-] mu of land, which has been relied on as a lifeblood. If it was easily abandoned, Tang Yongzhong, who was born in a poor family, would not be willing!
Therefore, Tang Yongzhong rejected several woolen mill shopkeepers' proposals to abandon farming and work, thinking that with his own craftsmanship, he could earn ten or eight Hanzhou silver dollars every year during the slack season. Coupled with the crops in the field and the dozen or so sheep raised at home, the life of a small and medium-sized landlord comparable to that of the Ming Dynasty was also passed.

Then, when chatting with the three girls who came back from work in the city today, Tang Yongzhong was shocked when he mentioned that the wool spinning factory had newly introduced a machine that could card wool.

"Why, in the future, the wool in the factory will not need to be combed by people?"

"I saw the machine, and the combed wool is not only fluffier, but also much faster than humans." The third daughter Tang Chengyan said: "However, the machine still requires two people to operate, but the wool processed every day is almost The workload of seven or eight people."

"After that, will we still have odd jobs like us in this factory?" Tang Yongzhong asked unwillingly.

"I think most of the mills don't need human hands to comb those wools."

"Hey, won't there be an opportunity to earn extra income from now on?" Tang Yongzhong said with a bit of disappointment on his face, "I'm still thinking about saving some more dowry and bride price for you and your younger brothers. .”

"Father, I work in a factory and earn three yuan almost every month..." Tang Chengyan had an unnatural expression on his face.

"Hey, you don't know, now that a man marries a daughter-in-law, the dowry price is getting higher and higher." Tang Yongzhong shook his head and smiled bitterly, "You said this is a good job, why is it replaced by a machine?  … ...This goddamn machine shouldn't exist!"

In many factories in Qi State, the use of machines can not only replace higher-skilled labor with less-skilled labor, but more advantageously, it can save labor. human productivity.To a factory owner, adding machinery is not much different from adding manpower.

Since the cost of machines is lower than that of workers, he does not need to increase workers, or even use fewer workers. As long as there are machines, more products can be produced.

From the perspective of the traditional relationship between people and tools, the emergence of machines does not replace people, but endows tools with the skills that people have, and tools become a part of machines.Although machines still require humans to operate, they no longer require human skills.Workers' skills have been transferred to machines, and workers and tools have been completely separated since then. Without machines, workers may be useless.

In the past, people generally made utensils according to the appearance of nature. For example, the ancient Chinese compass cart must use a carved figure to indicate the direction. This wooden figure is not a real person; similarly, there are dragon boats and wooden horses.Therefore, in that period, various utensils were really only imitations of nature.

With the development of the times and the advancement of science and technology, some technologies full of rationalism have been separated from nature. The invention of the wheel is an outstanding case of this early attempt at separation.

In Qi State, as a tool of function and efficiency, the innovation of machinery also started under this situation, steam engine (or part) replaced horse, steel (or part) replaced wood, cement replaced stone, and telescope, microscope , clocks, various precision instruments...

In the domestic machinery manufacturing industry, there was once a bold prophecy circulated by His Majesty the Emperor, "In the future, people will eventually manufacture such machines. Huge ships require several people to steer and drive them. The speed is so fast that even if the sailors become It is difficult to reach a group of people; the manufactured chariot does not need to be pulled by animals, but can reach amazing speed; the manufactured aircraft flies in the sky like a bird, and passengers can sit comfortably in it and think about any problem; Driving on the bottom of the sea or river without fear of being submerged in water; a small machine that can transmit sound for thousands of miles as in the myth..."

The emergence of machines, especially the widespread application of steam engines, provided an opportunity for a leap in the industrial development of the entire Qi State, and the entire industrial production efficiency was greatly improved.

In traditional economies, people are the main, if not the only, source of motivation.The strength of the human muscles constituted the main driving force of ancient societies.Especially in China, because of the abundance of human resources, it is cheaper, making the cost of manpower far lower than the cost of animal power, even water power and wind power.

However, man is a fragile animal. Compared with many animals, human body is not strong.The continuous power that a person can generate is only about 0.1 horsepower; in a very short period of time, it may reach one horsepower.It can be said that the main driving force of ancient society was always the insignificant 0.1 horsepower of human beings.It took 10 people 20 years to build the Pyramid of Khufu in ancient Egypt, and 39 years to build the Mausoleum of Qin Shihuang.

Compared with ancient China, medieval Europe was far ahead of China in machine power technology.Wind- and water-powered mills were pretty much the only known industrial machines of that period.Wind power and water power belong to natural power and do not require cost, but the disadvantage is the limitation of the natural environment.However, this opened up a wellspring of ideas for building powered machines.

Before the development of the steam engine, many factories in Jianye and Heishan, the earliest industrial bases in Qi, had to be located beside rivers with large water flow. Therefore, the industry was confined to a local area, and even the transportation was extremely inconvenient. It is also often affected by changes in the amount of water in the rainy and dry seasons.

When the practical steam engine appeared, the layout of Qi's industry changed dramatically, and it was no longer limited to geographical conditions and natural forces.

The purpose of all machines is liberation.If it is said that water power liberated manpower, then the steam engine industry that is currently being gradually promoted in Qi State has liberated geographical restrictions and gained a kind of freedom for industry.

(End of this chapter)