Bringing the Railway to Daming

Liu Kuandao said, "The first question, of course, is how the Three Feudatories of Jin Daining feel about this matter, and whether they will be strongly dissatisfied? If the court causes the Three Feudatories of Jin Daining to become disloyal because of this, is it worth it?"

Zhu Xiong Ying said, "As early as when the Emperor established the system of establishing vassal states overseas, the court set a rule that for the first twenty years after the establishment of a vassal state, unless the Emperor specially permitted it, the territory could not exceed five hundred li in radius."

"In addition, before the three vassal states of Ning in the Jin Dynasty prepared to attack England, they also consulted the court about this matter. I told them that the three vassal states could attack England, but could not take it as their territory."

"Of course, once the imperial court takes control of the British Isles, it will also grant certain benefits to the three feudatories. For example, the treasures they seize during their attack on the British Isles will be the first benefit."

"In the future, each of the three vassal states can obtain a port in the British Isles, which can be leased at a low price for a hundred years. This is another benefit."

"In addition, when the court enfeoffs new princes to the British Isles in the future, it will also provide certain compensation to the three princes or help them fight."

Upon hearing this, Liu Kuan realized that Zhu Xiong Ying had long harbored ambitions for the British Isles, and that it was not a spur-of-the-moment decision.

He said, “Since His Majesty and the three vassal kings of Jinning have already discussed this matter, then there is no problem. However, there is a second problem: which two vassal kings does His Majesty intend to enfeoff to the British Isles? If they are unwilling, the court cannot forcibly designate them, can it? After all, there has never been such a precedent before.”

Zhu Xiong Ying smiled and said, "Teacher, don't worry, there are definitely candidates - one of them is the 20th Imperial Uncle, Prince Han, who, like Yun Wen, has accumulated enough military merits and is about to choose a fiefdom."

“I spoke with him, and he was willing to establish a vassal state in the British Isles. Next was the 21st Imperial Uncle, Prince Shen. Although his military achievements were still somewhat lacking, he also agreed to establish a vassal state in the British Isles.”

"At that time, I plan to designate a portion of what is now Scotland as a new overseas military command, while my two uncles will establish vassal states on the approximate territories of what was originally England and Ireland."

Given the current situation, if a vassal king establishes a vassal state in the British Isles, it will be difficult for him to expand outwards in the future.

Because their expansion was directed only towards the European continent, Africa, and the Americas.

Furthermore, given the twenty-year time limit, it will likely be quite difficult for them to find suitable overseas territories when they expand into Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the future.

But since both Prince Han and Prince Shen had been persuaded by Zhu Xiong Ying, Liu Kuan naturally wouldn't interfere and immediately said, "It would be a good thing if His Highnesses Prince Han and Prince Shen were willing to establish their own fiefdoms in the British Isles."

At this moment, Zhu Xiong Ying sighed again: "In fact, our Ming Dynasty's vassal states currently have quite strong military strength overseas. We may not be invincible in war, but our win rate is very high."

"Only in terms of European education, we are still lacking – the languages ​​of the European countries are very different from ours, and they have been influenced by the culture and thought centered on Quechua for thousands of years, so it is really not easy to assimilate them."

"It is thanks to the European barbarians' pursuit of profit and power that Chinese has been promoted quite well among the various European tribes."

Liu Kuan laughed and said, "Our Chinese language is a much more advanced and sophisticated language than the languages ​​of European countries."

Zhu Xiong Ying became interested upon hearing this and asked, "Oh, could you give an example, teacher?"

Liu Kuandao said: "Our Chinese language belongs to pictographic writing, that is, ideographic writing, while the writing systems of Western countries today, such as English, belong to phonetic writing."

"Most of the phonetic writing systems in Western countries evolved from the Latin alphabet. Take English as an example. In later times, there were 26 letters. All words were formed from these 26 letters, and then sentences were formed from the words. It seems very convenient."

Zhu Xiong Ying nodded subconsciously, thinking it was indeed quite convenient.

Liu Kuan then changed the subject, saying, "However, this means that as the world develops rapidly and new things constantly emerge, English must create new words to express those things."

"Therefore, in later generations, the West has glorified English and other languages ​​rooted in the Latin alphabet as languages ​​that are constantly evolving, and conversely, claimed that Chinese characters have stopped evolving." "This is actually a deliberate attempt to portray the shortcomings of languages ​​like English as advantages, and to smear Chinese characters."

"Take English as an example again. Every new word means that others have to learn a new word. According to later statistics, there were only 140,000 words in English in the 16th century, but by the time I traveled back to the time, there were already 2 million words in English."

"And because there are only 26 letters to sort, many new words become very long and complicated. The word with the most letters has as many as 45 letters."

"Your Majesty can imagine what that scene would be like."

200 million words?

Is the longest word composed of 45 letters?
Although Zhu Xiong Ying hadn't studied English or Latin in order to understand Western countries, she still had some knowledge of them. Thinking about it now, she suddenly felt a chill run down her spine.

Before Liu Kuan could even speak, he couldn't help but say, "If there are two million words, doesn't that mean that many Westerners in later generations might not be able to learn all of them in their entire lives? No, even learning half of them would be extremely difficult, wouldn't it?"

Liu Kuan smiled and said, "Your Majesty is right—if knowing 60 percent of the words in a language is used as the standard for judging whether someone is illiterate, then many people in countries where English is an official language in later generations would be illiterate."

"It's just that they only use a few words in their daily language, so they don't have a deep understanding of it. But when it comes to complex communication, expressing complex meanings, or involving many new things, this huge shortcoming will be exposed."

“But our Chinese language is different—although new characters are constantly emerging in Chinese, the speed is extremely slow, because most new things can be expressed by forming new words with the existing Chinese characters.”

"Therefore, before I came to the Great Ming, there were only a little over nine thousand Chinese characters, not even more than ten thousand."

"Furthermore, the vast majority of words and things can be accurately expressed using only two or three thousand commonly used Chinese characters."

"Even when other countries began to develop artificial intelligence, Chinese characters played a key role, enabling my country to catch up and surpass Europe and the United States in this field."

"Subsequently, even some Western celebrities and self-media began to publicly state that Chinese characters have advantages over languages ​​derived from the Latin alphabet, such as English, in some aspects."

Zhu Xiong Ying smiled and said, "If the Western nations knew about the advantages of our Chinese characters over Latin alphabet languages, it would be much easier for them to spread Chinese characters and our Chinese culture."

"Why don't we have the teacher write a related article and send it to the Western nations by telegram?"

Liu Kuan never expected that his enthusiastic speech about the advantages of Chinese characters would lead to this task for him.

He immediately declined, saying, "My knowledge of writing is really limited. Why don't Your Majesty select a learned scholar who is well-versed in the beauty of Chinese characters, and have him learn about various Western languages ​​with Latin alphabets, and then discuss them?"

Zhu Xiong Ying thought Liu Kuan was being lazy again.

But as Liu Kuan's student, he also knew that Liu Kuan's writing skills were indeed very average, even worse than many court officials, let alone compared to those learned scholars and literary celebrities.

He then sighed, “This is a great opportunity to become famous all over the world. Since the teacher is unwilling, I will have to find someone else.”

"This matter should not have been done by me in the first place," Liu Kuan said, then hesitated slightly before adding, "However, speaking of the Latin alphabet, I think it is time to introduce Pinyin and simplified Chinese characters to accelerate the improvement of literacy rates among the people of the Ming Dynasty." (End of Chapter)