The Han culture is spreading strongly in Southeast Asia

Chapter 343: You? You don’t deserve the surname Li!

Tokyo, Shanxi Prefecture, Guangwei County, Shunhe Township.

Ruan Zhuang, dressed in green official uniform, was on a high platform, guarded by more than thirty soldiers, and was shouting harshly at several tied-up guys.

"Your ancestor, Li Yin, was an accomplice of the traitor Li Li. For more than a dozen generations, you have been living off the blood and sweat of the people of Shunhe Village, and you are still not satisfied even after scraping away three feet of land.

Today, King Rende has restored order, and this is the day you will die. Confess quickly, and you may have a safe and complete body."

The people who were scolded were all descendants of the Li family, a wealthy family in Shunhe Township. The five branches of the Li family all lived in Shunhe Village, and their fields occupied more than 60% of Shunhe Village.

Ever since King Mo entered the Northern River, they were doomed, because their ancestor Le Ngan was one of Le Loi's ninety-three founding heroes and also Le Loi's distant cousin.

The people below were all extremely excited. They didn't quite understand what Ruan Zhuang was saying, but they all understood two things.

First, Le Loi is not a good person, and nothing good will happen if you get involved with him.

Second, after the county magistrate has finished scolding them, they can divide the land of the Li brothers.

Therefore, as soon as Ruan Zhuang finished speaking, the people below began to make a fuss, cursing Le Loi and the Le brothers, and exaggerating the oppression they had suffered in their daily lives.

Some people even ran up and started beating them up to avenge the bullying they had suffered at the hands of the Li brothers in the past.

Ruan Zhuang looked to the left. The village elder of Shunhe Township was a poor student who was admitted to the same school as him. He just didn't pass the imperial examination. He was appointed as the village elder by submitting a letter to the king.

Behind the village elder, there were two people with excited expressions. They were also selected from humble backgrounds and would serve as village chiefs in the future.

Mo Zibu naturally would not divide the land of the Li brothers equally among the people below. These more than 4,000 acres of land needed to support three village chiefs first.

Each Muramasa household was given 200 mu of land, making them the leaders of the village. The rest would then be distributed to the villagers as a favor.

"Village Elder Zhao, please invite these three village chiefs to perform martial arts tests first." Ruan Zhuang said, waving his hand.

Village elder Zhao agreed with a smile on his face. Immediately, a strong man recommended by the locals and two poor men appointed by the court came to the flat ground of the village market.

There was a strong man in the local village. With both hands, he lifted a 30-jin stone lock. Then he exhaled and practiced using the stone lock as a weapon for half a minute, making the onlookers cheer.

The other two Muramasa appointed by the court were not to be outdone. One of them fired a musket, three shots in a minute, and all three shots hit the target from a distance of eighty meters.

One man was good at using a spear. He shouted loudly and the spear shot out like a dragon. Just from a distance, it seemed that the spear was unstoppable.

The villagers were frightened and retreated one after another, with fear in their eyes. In the countryside, the game of power is so simple. Whoever is strong and dares to fight and kill will be obeyed by others.

After the martial arts performance, seeing that the three men had established their authority and intimidated the people, Ruan Zhuang immediately announced their approval, and then carefully instructed Zhao Xianglao and the three men, saying:

"From today on, the three of you, like Elder Zhao and even me, are officers bestowed by the king's grace.

Therefore, the king has required that everyone must go to private schools to learn the Three Hundred Thousand, understand Chinese and Vietnamese pronunciation, know where their ancestors came from, and know the difference between themselves and the Muong and Cham slaves. The heavy responsibility now falls on your shoulders. You must remember this and not make the slightest mistake."

In today's Annan, most of the lower-class people have already started speaking Jiaozhi dialect. This cannot be corrected in a short period of time. Even if it needs to be corrected, there is not enough money to do it in a short period of time. Basic education at the grassroots level is very expensive.

So Mo Zibu adopted a compromise plan. As an official, even at the level of Muramasa, you must be able to do it, otherwise the 200 acres of land will not be given to you.

As for the common people at the bottom, the policy was to make them memorize the Three Hundred Thousands, and these Three Hundred Thousands did not require them to be literate, but only to be able to pronounce them.

For now, this is a subtle influence. The real spread of Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation depends on the next generation of children.

Afterwards, amid the cheers of the crowd, Ruan Zhuang announced the crimes of the Li brothers and began to divide their property equally. The people below were ecstatic and beat them up, making the Li brothers scream in pain.

As for their property, each of the three village chiefs received 200 mu, and the rest was divided equally according to the number of people, with each person getting about two to three mu.

Although it may not seem like a lot, this is in the Red River Plain, where rain and heat occur at the same time, irrigation is convenient, and three crops can be harvested a year. A family of five can live a very good life with 14 or 15 acres of land.

As for other things, from houses to furniture, farm tools, and even rice straw and firewood, they were all divided equally.

The Li brothers would first be sent to the army to do hard labor. After the hopeless future and heavy physical labor completely crushed their will, if they were not dead, they would be arranged to settle in the Andai area.

Because if you directly ask them to go and settle, these people will definitely feel extremely resentful, and it will cause trouble if they go.

But if they are allowed to go through hell and then be pardoned, most of them will be overwhelmed by the huge surprise of being saved from a desperate situation and any dissatisfaction and resentment will be washed away. Even if there is still resentment in their hearts, most of them will not dare to show it. This is human nature.

Taiyuan Prefecture, Daci County, Anqing Township.

This place is located on the north side of the Red River Plain. A little further north is the Tongshan Mountains which connect to Gaoping. Therefore, it is extremely important and is also a key area for registering the people that Mo Zibu pays special attention to.

"Catch him, catch this Cham slave!" Angry roars rang out on a slope. Twenty or thirty farmers, armed with sticks, dung forks and hunting bows, and their own vicious dogs, chased after him wildly, howling.

The target of their pursuit was a very strong man who looked only eighteen or nineteen years old, but was much bigger than the farmer who was chasing him.

A hunting dog pounced over and bit the strong man's calf. The strong man screamed, turned around, grabbed the dog's neck with one hand, lifted it up, and then threw it heavily onto the stone next to him.

The overly aggressive hound howled and was thrown to the ground, causing its brain to burst. This showed how much force was used in this throw.

However, the strong man was delayed like this and was immediately caught up by the farmers behind him. Seeing that he could not escape, he roared and rushed towards the farmers instead.

These farmers were short and thin, and their fighting ability was still lacking. One of them accidentally caught a strong man and used a club to knock the twenty of them back. "Cham slaves, stop being so arrogant! Your Han grandfather is here!" With a loud roar, a villager who had acquired 200 acres of land rushed over, spear in hand.

The two men's fighting abilities are equal, or in other words, if they were to fight one-on-one under normal circumstances, Muramasa would not be able to defeat this strong man.

It's just that the strong man had just been chased all the way and had lost too much physical strength. His calf was bitten by the dog and was still bleeding.

Muramasa had the villagers cheering for him, so after a few rounds, the strong man was knocked to the ground by Muramasa.

Then the villagers rushed forward and tied up the strong man tightly. Many children also came over and kept throwing clods of earth at the strong man's head, singing, dancing and shouting.

'Kill you, you Cham slave! Kill you, you Cham slave!'

The strong man was beaten with wounds all over his body, but he was still retorting, "I am not a Cham slave, I am not a Cham slave, it is you bastards who are harming me!

I'm going to Tokyo to seek justice from the King. I'm not a Cham slave. My father said that my family is the Longxi Li family, a noble family that came from the north and moved south. We are the Longxi Li family that has blood ties to the Tang Emperor!"

"You? You!" A long-faced villager heard this, turned the hatchet in his hand over, and hit the strong man on the mouth with the handle of the knife, making his lips bloody and swollen, and he couldn't speak.

"You are worthy of the surname Li? Even I, a Han Chinese who is officially recognized as a member of the Li family, dare not claim to be a member of the Longxi Li family. How dare you!"

"That's right, he must be a Cham slave who came from the south with Le Loi, otherwise how could his ancestors have been favored by Le Loi?"

"Yes, these people are too bad. They use the offspring of Mang Nu and Cham Nu to be our masters, and they also instigate us to fight with the northerners. They are too bad!"

"I heard that the king will soon retake Guangdong and Guangxi. By then, Songjiang cloth, sugar, pottery bowls, and iron pots from Guangzhou will be much cheaper and affordable for everyone."

"Yes, yes! By then we and the Yankees from Guangdong and Guangxi will be one family. They won't be able to sell us out of our money. As long as we get an iron pot, we won't have to cook with leather pots anymore."

A group of villagers were talking excitedly, full of beautiful visions for the future.

By the way, there is one thing that the dynasties in the Central Plains did quite harshly, which was that after failing to take back Annan, they strictly restricted the transmission of various technologies and key minerals to Annan.

To the extent that even now, the prosperous Red River Plain only has enough food, but the smelting, tea-making, weaving, sugar-making, and ceramic industries are still very backward and are completely unable to meet the daily needs of the people.

Merchants who were able to trade with Annan often used sky-high prices to guarantee themselves huge profits. The only cheap goods that could be obtained through tribute were basically only enough for the upper class to enjoy, and the lower class had no chance of getting them.

To the extent that an iron pot was extremely precious for ordinary people, most people still used leather pots, and there were not many bowls and other things for eating. White sugar and fine Songjiang cloth were simply the most luxurious things for ordinary people.

Mo Zibu also took advantage of this plan to publicize that after the war, the people of Beihe would be able to buy affordable Guangdong products, which really attracted the imagination of many poor people.

And such things were happening all over the Beihe River controlled by Mo Zibu.

At this time, Beihe had a population of only more than three million, excluding Caoping and Lang Son, which were not under Mo Zibu's control, and the minority settlements in the northwest near Yunnan.

You have to know that if you really want to feed a large number of people in a good place like the Red River Plain, even with the current agricultural level, ten million is definitely not enough, so there is no shortage of land. If there is no cultivated land, the people can be allowed to cultivate the land that was previously reserved for them by the rich and powerful.

Now that 70% of the high-ranking families have been overthrown and the large landowners who account for 20% of the total population have been eliminated, everyone has benefited.

The prestige that Le Loi had gained over hundreds of years seemed to be blown away by the wind and rain in an instant. For the people at the bottom of society, having enough food and clothing is the eternal theme.

In early October, Mo Zibu once again announced several extremely shocking benevolent policies.

First of all, I, King Mo, announced that as long as one person in each farmer's household can recite the Three Hundred Thousand, he will forgive all the family's previous debts, whether it is interest owed to the nobles or taxes owed to the court.

Secondly, Mo Zibu announced that starting from the year after next, the court would allocate funds to build water conservancy projects in Beihe free of charge. In a place like Beihe where the water network is dense and crisscrossed, water conservancy projects are more important than anything else.

Mo Zibu cleverly set it up for the year after next in order to win people's hearts.

You can imagine that the people of Beihe must have been extremely looking forward to it when they knew that the water conservancy project would be built the year after next. However, at this time, the Qing Dynasty suddenly sent troops and disrupted the process. How angry they must have been.

In this kind of anger at having their good deeds ruined, who would still remember the Li family or Lord Zheng? They must have all been eager to help Mo Zibu defeat the Qing Dynasty so that King Mo's promise to build water conservancy projects could be put into practice.

Finally, Mo Zibu announced that he would levy an additional education tax on the people. The amount would not be much, only 50 kilograms of grain per household per year.

What is this tax used for? It is used to set up a private school in each township, and each township will select dozens of capable children to start learning Chinese and Vietnamese pronunciations.

This was compulsory education in later generations, but at that time, it was a training school for reserve officials, because only those who could speak Chinese and Vietnamese were qualified to become officials.

Once this tax is collected, every farmer will feel extremely uncomfortable because they have to provide 50 kilograms of grain every year to pave the way for other people's children.

I believe that under this kind of mood, farmers will be more enthusiastic about letting their children learn Chinese and Vietnamese pronunciations to take advantage of others.

Mo Zibu no longer has any hope for the Beihe farmers who are now over 25 years old, as they can no longer learn Chinese-Vietnamese dialects. However, the next generation can still be saved.

As soon as these three points were announced, Mo Zibu seemed to be able to hear the cheers of the people in the royal palace in Tokyo, and the hearts of the people were rapidly turning towards me, King Mo.

Of course, there were still many noble families and large landowners who were persecuted by King Mo's policies and secretly fled to Lang Son to seek refuge with Nguyen Van Hue.

Among the registered citizens, the quality of the officials below was uneven, and they made many false cases, favored relatives, and even embezzled money for their own benefit.

But the general direction is still good, and in this era, you can only ask for a general solution.

Of course, in fact, I, King Mo, still have many means to use, but there is no time now. After stabilizing the hearts of the people in Beihe, the most important thing is to deal with the interference of the Qing Dynasty. This is the major event that will determine the future of the Xingtang Kingdom!
(End of this chapter)