The Imperial Age with the Resurgence of Han Style

Chapter 221 Golden State

In the thirteenth year of Shaoning (1699), when a group of new immigrants were digging ditches near the Guangfeng River (today's Sacramento River in the United States) to build water conservancy, they accidentally discovered a shiny piece of metal on the river bank. After identification by colonial officials and scholars, they unanimously believed that the metal was gold.

Within the next few days, more immigrants found varying amounts of gold on the river banks and in the creeks. The size, fineness, and quality of the gold were no less than those of several in Hanzhou. Gold mined from gold mines.

After hearing the news, the Xuanzhou Governor's Office immediately mobilized 400 rural soldiers and blocked the gold mining area in Guangfeng area. It was kept secret for the time being in an attempt to cover up the discovery. It also sent a speedboat back to the mainland to urgently report to His Majesty the Emperor and Cabinet Government.

However, the plan of the Xuanzhou Governor's Office did not succeed. Rumors about the gold began to spread throughout Yinzhou, and spread to Northern Ming, Japan, Qin, Southeast Asia, and Hanzhou mainland with the merchant ships leaving the port.

The news even spread to the British colonial territories on the east side of the continent and the Spanish colonial territories in the south, and even to Europe, making everyone excited.

Out of the yearning for gold and the desire for wealth, the people who came to Xuanzhou to pan for gold were not just nearby residents. By the fifteenth year of Shaoning (1701), the news had spread almost all over the world. In order to get rich, a large number of Gold prospectors began to flock to Xuanzhou.

The first batch of gold diggers to come to Guangfeng were the people under the jurisdiction of the Xuanzhou Governor-General. They gave up the crops in the fields, the cattle and sheep grazing, and the work in the factories. They took their families and went to the gold mines. District, doing their best to mine gold.

Although the Xuanzhou Governor's Mansion tried its best to prevent gold prospectors from mining gold at will, the crazy gold prospectors, driven by their inner greed, ignored the prohibition at all.

When the situation developed in the end, what made the Governor's Mansion even more helpless was that the recruited rural soldiers had just ended their duty period and threw down their muskets, picked up shovels, pickaxes and screens, and followed the surging gold mining crowd. , and also participated in this feast of wealth division.

According to this law, all prospectors who apply for a piece of land in the Governor's Palace, and after approval, their ownership is only valid while the land is mined.

Seeing that the order of the gold mine was becoming increasingly chaotic, the Xuanzhou Governor-General simply carried out standardized management and rectification of the entire mining area in accordance with Mexican mining laws.

Nearly all early gold diggers were richly rewarded, and they were able to collect large amounts of gold with ease—even gold-mining laymen could collect enough gold to change their fortunes.

Those gold prospectors who spent all their life savings and arrived in Xuanzhou found that they could only dig gold using more professional mining technology and equipment. This must have been very painful for them - as individual gold prospectors, they did not have professional mining skills at all. Means and no ability to purchase advanced equipment. Their frustration quickly turned to hostility and accusations.

First, most gold diggers had to borrow money or spend all their life savings to make the journey - with the Qi royal family and cabinet government stepping in to set up obstacles, both at sea and on land, to prevent more gold diggers from coming. Arrive at Xuanzhou.

In the early days, gold mining was relatively easy. The force of crustal movement over thousands of years piled gold to the surface of Mount Xihua (now the Sierra Nevada), where it was then carried downstream by rivers and finally settled in the gravel beds of rivers and streams. Gold prospectors can pan for gold directly in streams and river banks, and can even pick out gold flakes and nuggets directly with their hands.

But it was all worth it - if the gold diggers arrived early enough, almost everyone made a fortune.

It is estimated that the average value of the gold discovered by a gold digger every day at that time was ten to fifteen times the daily wage of a local worker in Hanzhou.

Although the gold reserves in rivers and streams are astonishing, numerous gold prospectors quickly dug up all the easily mined gold. By the sixteenth year of Shaoning (1702), most of the gold that gold prospectors could find had been mined, which meant that people had to use more complex and difficult mining methods.

In the Yinzhou area, after all, there is no grassroots management system like the local one, and there is no standing army in the hands of the local governor, so there is no way to stop the influx of gold diggers. Under the temptation of gold, if it is forcibly banned, I am afraid that it will be backlashed by these crazy gold diggers.

Secondly, gold diggers, who are mainly men, have to leave their hometowns in search of wealth, leaving their wives to raise their children and the elderly alone, and assume all family responsibilities that should be borne by their husbands.

Early gold diggers also benefited from Xuanzhou's broad and loose regulatory environment. Because it is too far away from the mainland of Hanzhou, the entire Yinzhou area has not received much attention from the cabinet government. The management model also adopts a limited autonomy model. Except for a few dozen core colonial officials sent from the local area, the local government basically Most of them appointed residents with some reputation as civil affairs officers. Although the legal system they cited came from the mainland, they also drew on some of the traditional systems of southern Spanish Mexico based on their own actual conditions.

Some gold prospectors began to unite and use irregular small kiln mining, that is, digging 6-13 meter deep shafts along the creek, and digging tunnels in all directions from the bottom of the well to obtain deep gold deposits. Or divert an entire stream to access the gold at the bottom of the exposed riverbed. In the eighteenth year of Shaoning (1704), some gold prospector alliances began to purchase explosives and use blasting methods to mine gold-bearing rocks.

Since the 14th year of Shaoning, many people have come here in search of gold. By the fifteenth year of Shaoning, the number of gold diggers had exploded, and people who heard the news began to arrive from all over the world.

Although the rewards of reaching Xuanzhou are great, for many people, even Qi people, the price of the journey is also huge.

In the early days of the gold rush, finding gold was as easy as taking candy from a baby, but now as gold reserves dwindle, the work increasingly requires extremely detailed steps and more investment to continue.

These gold diggers are not only people from Qi, but people from Northern Ming, Qin, Luzon, Wei, England, Spain, France, Germany and other countries and regions have also come here. In the fifteenth year of Shaoning alone, about 60,000 people poured into Xuanzhou, of which about 20,000 were from other countries.

The gold diggers in Qi believed that gold diggers from other countries had robbed them of the gold that should have belonged to them. Robbery, killings, attacks, confrontations... Various violent activities occurred in endlessly throughout the gold mining area, which once caused huge chaos in the Guangfeng area.

In order to curb gold mining by outsiders, the Xuanzhou Governor-General announced the implementation of a foreign mining tax in the first year of Taiping (1705). All foreign gold diggers engaged in gold mining (except those employed by domestic mining companies) must submit a monthly report to the Governor-General. The government pays ten yuan in gold coupons, or the equivalent in gold.

People got rich in different ways during the Xuanzhou Gold Rush, some were honest and some were despicable, but no matter what, one of the biggest winners was the Xuanzhou Governor-General. Before the gold rush began, Xuanzhou was just a remote territory too far away from the mainland of Hanzhou. It was a symbol of the empire's vast territory. It was sparsely populated and had little hope. The countless immigrants and exiled prisoners who were sent there were all unknown. Frustrated by his fate.

Land reclamation, logging, fishing, everything is so monotonous and primitive.

However, the emergence of gold and the turbulent flow of people brought by the gold rush caused Xuanzhou to suddenly burst into great vitality in a short period of time. The population size increased from less than 20,000 people to more than 100,000 people in just a few years, making it a bustling place.

Although Xuanzhou benefited greatly from the discovery of gold, it was Huaiyuan City that really benefited. In the thirteenth year of Shaoning, when gold was first discovered, the city had only about 2,400 residents. At first, the discovery of gold did not help the city, and was even a bad luck - in fact, people left here one after another in search of gold and the dream of making a fortune, turning the city into an empty city in an instant.

However, it quickly rose again and developed into a prosperous city. With the arrival of many gold prospectors and businessmen, the number of local residents surged to 30,000 in Shaoning's 16th year, making it the largest city on the west coast of the Yinzhou continent.

In order to meet the growing needs of immigrants, new industries have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, including hotels, restaurants, craft shops, teahouses, carriage shops, as well as many factories and trading companies.

With a prosperous city, strong demand, and abundant finances, Huaiyuan's infrastructure was quickly improved. Urban streets, sewer pipe networks, and uniform residential apartment buildings, especially the opening of regular routes to Hanzhou mainland and Ryukyu, made Huaiyuan a prosperous city. The region is more closely and frequently connected with the outside world.

It is not just infrastructure that is booming. Xuanzhou has also built a number of roads, municipal squares, temples, schools, libraries, etc. In order to meet the needs of more new immigrants, agriculture also began to develop on a large scale.

In fact, for many, agriculture was the real treasure of the Gold Rush. Those gold diggers who gained huge amounts of wealth had little interest in all kinds of expensive food, and paid very generously in large sums of gold and silver when purchasing.

As the gold supply slowly dwindled, those who invested time and money in agriculture began to profit greatly from the gold prospectors who came to Xuanzhou and stayed.

Of course, those who benefited were also the Qi State and the cabinet government. A rough estimate is that in the first five years of the gold rush, more than 1688 people (most of them returned to their hometowns with their wealth after the gold rush) came to Xuanzhou in search of gold, and a total of about 7.5 tons of gold were mined. It is worth about million yuan (based on the gold standard implemented by Qi State in , one gold yuan note is equivalent to grams of pure gold), most of which flowed into Hanzhou itself and became one of the many wealth accumulated by Qi State. one.

Unfortunately, some people succeed by stepping under the feet of others or by sacrificing the common good. In the gold rush, two things suffered - the environment and the natives.

As gold becomes harder to find, the means and methods of mining it become more destructive, which may have had a lasting impact on Xuanzhou's geography.

Gold miners initially used pans to dig for gold, but as finding gold became more difficult, they began building large dredgers to dig in rivers and streams; using explosives to blast open hillsides to expose the gold. Nearly every mine is built by blasting large amounts of rock.

Hydraulic mining carried over from Hanzhou itself caused irreparable damage to the land. This method uses a steam engine to pressurize to form high-pressure water, spray it onto the gravel layer, and wash the gravel and gold inside into the washing tank, allowing the gold to settle at the bottom.

The problem with this approach is that it causes pollutants such as gravel, silt and metals to flow into rivers and creeks, clogging nearby waterways and harming agricultural production in the Xuanzhou Valley (now the Central Valley).

In addition to the damage caused during the actual mining process, the measures taken to sustain mining activities are equally damaging. For example, in order to meet water needs in dry months, several large mining companies will build dams and change the flow direction of rivers. For another example, in order to build an artificial canal system (used for the transportation of equipment, daily supplies, and gold) and maintain the operation of mine boilers, a large amount of forest must be cut down for fuel. In order to save costs, mines often refuse to spend money on benefits. Ning (now Vancouver Island) to purchase coal.

Although these geographical environments have been severely damaged, they are nothing compared to the experiences of local indigenous people.

In the early days of the gold rush, the influx of large numbers of immigrants led to temporary shortages of food and many other materials, prompting these gold diggers to set their sights on local indigenous people.

From being sneaky at the beginning to blatantly using force to plunder food, livestock, furs, and cloth (obtained through exchange with immigrants from Qi in the early days). This behavior gradually spread from the gold diggers in the original British North American Territory to the entire gold mining community. The greedy desire aroused by gold destroyed the character and morality of countless people.

In order to enclose land and mine gold, some mines use violent means to expel indigenous people and drive them out of traditional hunting areas and settlements. The once harmonious relationship between immigrants and natives in Xuanzhou disappeared in an instant.

In order to defend their homeland, the natives began to attack the invading gold diggers, but they were retaliated and massacred by the other parties, resulting in numerous casualties. During the ten years of the gold rush, at least 10,000 natives died directly from various attacks and reprisals by the gold rushers.

In these shocking and tragic cases, the Xuanzhou Governor's Office adopted a tacit attitude.

Perhaps, in the eyes of colonial officials, the disappearance of a large number of indigenous people would be more beneficial for outsiders like them to "legally" occupy this vast land.

According to the practice of Qi people, any place with a red yellow dragon flag is the territory of Qi. Therefore, the forests, grasslands, mineral deposits, and cultivated land within the territory are all public land owned by the government in theory, and can be granted according to the Land Grant Law. ", sold to any immigrants coming to Yinzhou at a "suitable" price, allowing the local government to obtain a large amount of land revenue from it, thereby further developing and constructing the colonial territory.

The follow-up processing of the land without an owner and the land with an owner is somewhat easier, isn't it?

(End of this chapter)