Daming Yuanfu

Chapter 1517 Portuguese (Part [-])
A large Portuguese galleon sailed slowly into Dingnan Port under the "escort" of four warships of the Siamese Squadron of the Nanyang Fleet, which was eyeing a tiger, and then passed through a certain unit of the First Town of the Dingnan Defense Force for inspection. Finally approved: "Ambassadors".

The captain of the Grandura, Pedro de Difradish, accompanied the special envoy of the Governor of Goa, Alfredo de Burgos, to disembark successively.A rather "modern" port appeared in front of them, which seemed to have been basically completed.

Although the location of Dingnan City built by Jinghua is dozens of miles south of Bangkok in later generations, the location of Dingnan Port is surprisingly consistent with the "anchorage outside the port" of Bangkok Port in later generations. It is about [-] kilometers to the north, so it is actually a river port, which can only berth [-] tons of ships, and its large ships leading to all parts of the world need to berth at the "anchorage outside the port", that is, the estuary port.

Gao Wushi thought it was such a hassle, so he moved the location of Dingnan City directly to the south, almost directly building a river mouth city.However, the planning of Dingnan City not only has a large area, but also copied the capital city model that Daming was used to, dividing the city into three parts: the outer city, the royal city, and the royal palace, with a total of "three rings" from the outside to the inside.

The outer city of Dingnan City has not yet formed, so there is no need to introduce it too much. Let’s say that the "Siam King City"-that is, the location of the inner city, is probably located on the "Bang Nam Peng" river peninsula in the southeast of Bangkok in later generations, covering an area of ​​about 40 square kilometers.

The term "river peninsula" is quite interesting. It is actually because the Chao Phraya River took a sharp turn there, forming a peninsula, which the locals call "Bang Nam Phang".The peninsula is characterized by its large area, but the part connecting the land is very "thin".In other words, there is only one not-wide land route connecting the "mainland" itself. [Note: Friends who are interested can take a look at the terrain of "Nampang Floating Market in Samut Prakan" on Baidu Maps. ]
Such a peninsula is obviously very suitable for land defense. In terms of land defense alone, it may even be more exaggerated than the famous "City of World Desire" Constantinople.Moreover, the Chao Phraya River near the mouth of the sea is wide enough, at least for now there must be no seagoing ships of [-] tons—that means that any warship of Jinghua can enter it as an auxiliary surface defense.

It can be said that after the construction of the royal city (inner city), even if the outer city of Dingnan City rebelled, the rebels would not be able to enter the inner city—unless the Han soldiers in the inner city also rebelled. Serve it right.

Forty square kilometers is not small.Let’s compare it this way: the Forbidden City in Beijing (basically the Forbidden City in the Ming Dynasty minus the Three Seas) covers an area of ​​72 square meters, equivalent to 0.72 square kilometers.That is to say, the nominal Siam King City and the actual Dingnan Inner City have an area as large as 55 Beijing Forbidden City.

For comparison, the initial area of ​​Beijing in the Ming Dynasty was 670 meters wide from east to west, and 310 meters deep from north to south. The actual area was 540 million square meters, or 35.2 square kilometers.

However, in the 26th year of Jiajing, the Ming court decided to repair the outer city of Beijing.It was originally planned to build an outer city on all sides, with a total length of more than 32 miles. However, after the construction of the southern part of about [-] miles in the [-]nd year of Jiajing, the construction was suspended due to human and financial difficulties. Convex plan with outer city.

At this time, the south outer city of the capital was about 900 meters wide from east to west, and about 200 meters deep from north to south, with three gates in the south, one gate in the east and one in the west, and two gates in the north.Three north-south streets and one east-west street perpendicularly intersect to form a network of arterial roads.

After the construction of the Outer City, Beijing's urban central axis extended southward to Yongdingmen, with a length of 600 meters and an urban area of ​​250 million square meters, or 62.5 square kilometers.

However, it must be noted here that the northern city of the capital at this time was called the inner city, and the southern city was called the outer city. It was already a "complete body".As for the 40-square-kilometer "Siam King City" that Jinghua is currently building, it is only the inner city of Dingnan City, and the outer city has not yet started construction. There are only a few sets of different design plans for Gao Yushi to review.

It is precisely because of the huge area that the cost is also huge.

We must know that in the early years of the Ming Dynasty, especially during the Yongle period, the court was really poor, and it was "free of labor" (guard soldiers), but even then, only 35.2 square kilometers of Beijing City were built.

Now Jinghua is building a new city that is bigger than Beijing at that time almost by itself. Isn't this cost a lot?
Of course, Emperor Yongle's labor was free, and Jinghua's labor cost was not much.Jinghua's main labor expenditure is on technical personnel, some from Ming Dynasty, and some from Italy, France, and German states.As for the real coolies, most of them are Siamese locals, and these people do not need to be paid by Jinghua.

What do you mean you don't need it?It means that the local nobles in Siam provide these labors to Jinghua for free, and at the same time they are grateful to Jinghua for this.

Well, it sounds weird, but it's not, it's true.Because these people are essentially serfs of the nobles, but serfs do not have work all year round, and the nobles have to support them when there is no work to do in their spare time.

It’s different now. The nobles can send their serfs to Dingnan to work for Jinghua during the slack season. Although Jinghua doesn’t pay wages, it manages the food, and basically manages enough. Two sets of clothes will be issued after three months of work (coarse cloth and short dozen) )... This is simply a living Bodhisattva!
Now many nobles in Siam even hate that their territory is too far away from Dingnan City, so that some food is wasted on the way to send the serfs there, which is more cost-effective than those noble territories around Dingnan City.

Now that the "Siam King City" is mentioned, I have to introduce the nominal "Siam Palace" by the way.

In the eyes of Gao Yushi, the royal palaces of the countries in the southern border are all a bit sloppy. Even though they like to put gold leaf on the palace buildings to show the grandeur of the palace, but... the area is too cramped, how can Gao Yushi It doesn't look like atmosphere.

Gao Yushi has no interest in such things as gold leaf, and even thinks that this practice will cause many troubles in the management of the palace.In contrast, he still prefers the "stone style" of European architecture, but in aspects such as the symmetrical design of the central axis, the main hall should be wide enough and have raised stone steps, etc., his aesthetic concept is biased towards the idea of ​​Chinese northern gardens.In addition, for places with lakes, he also prefers the style of Chinese gardens.

As always, Huang Zhiting determined the design of the "Siam Palace" completely in accordance with the high pragmatic aesthetics.She referred to the old map of Constantinople, the capital of Eastern Rome, proposed by Gao Pragmatism and drawn by Italian designers from memory, and arranged the "Siam Palace" at the top of the peninsula on the peninsula of the Bangnam Peng River.

The wonderful thing is that this piece is just in the north - in the Chinese cultural tradition, the residence of the ruler faces south, so Huang Zhiting is very satisfied with this.

And here is another place that surprised Gao Yushi, that is, there happened to be a lake in this area—in later generations, that place was a national park in Thailand (the lake and the surrounding woodland).

Well now, this area is directly designated as the imperial garden in the palace.And Gao Yushi also gave the lake a new name, called "Siming Lake".I don't know whether his "Siming" is for the Ming Dynasty court, or to commemorate Huang Zhiting's old Guangxi "Siming Mansion".

After all, Siming Lake sounds a bit like Siming Mansion - many Fujianese in the Nanyang Fleet are especially sure.

However, the division of "Siming Lake" into the "Siam Palace" also made it difficult to control the area of ​​the palace, and the land drawn out in the end was much larger than the Forbidden City-almost eight times larger.

According to this area, the Siamese Palace must not be built as densely as the Forbidden City, otherwise Jinghua will not be able to afford it no matter how rich it is, so Gao Yushi decided to stuff some administrative agencies and military facilities into it according to the report from Nanjiang. Going to the palace caused another division of the palace.

Counting from the north to the south, the left is literary and the right is military, the buildings of the administrative organs are on the left, and the garrison is on the right—in the future, there may be a palace guard independent of the garrison system.

Of course, the palace guards are still completely gone. Currently stationed here are Huang Zhiting's own 8000 guard wolf soldiers, and the [-] named "Liu Family Army" left by Liu Xin.These [-] people are considered to be the most core defense force in Dingnan City at the moment.

[Note: Although the guard army bears the word "guard", this naming method is the same as the Jinghua Craftsman School, which is a kind of deceit in itself. They have always been built according to the idea of ​​​​the field army, and they will not be assigned to be responsible for the defense of the inner city. . ]
The King City of Siam on the "river peninsula" is less than 15 kilometers away from the Chao Phraya River estuary port. The distance in the middle is the expected outer city area of ​​Dingnan City. Because it is to be built, only two roads along the river have been built. The east and west sides of the Nanhe River.

The port itself is on the west side of the estuary, so Captain Pedro and Special Envoy Alfredo also took the "Hexi Avenue" to the north.Although Jinghua checked them very closely, he did not deliberately make things difficult. They even arranged a carriage for the northward journey.

Sitting in the carriage, the two communicated directly in Portuguese to avoid being overheard by people outside the carriage.

Captain Pedro didn't take the initiative to ask for words, it was the initiative of Special Envoy Alfredo.This middle-aged special envoy in his forties is a civil servant with a standard aristocratic style. It is said that he was the secretary of King Sebastian I in his early years.

His characteristics are also in line with the former "King's Secretary". When he is cold, he can make people dare not offend, and when he is warm, he can make people feel like a spring breeze.

The official Captain Pedro who is enjoying the spring breeze at this moment, because Alfredo special envoy first boasted his credit for "mediating negotiations" when he was in Manila, saying that he not only made special contributions to retaining more interests for the Spanish-Portuguese monarchy , and "enabling us to face the arrogant Castilians without shame or flinching".

Pedro's praise for him was very useful, and he described the situation at that time to Special Envoy Alfredo again in words that seemed modest but were actually boastful.

Mr. Special Envoy was not dissatisfied, let alone impatient. After listening to him with a smile on his face, he nodded and said: "Your description of the Chinese is very detailed, especially their arrogant and conceited faces. .I fully understand the anger you and the other gentlemen felt at the time."

"However..." Mr. Special Envoy changed the subject and said seriously: "I hope you can judge one thing: Is the Chinese sea power really so strong that Spain and Portugal cannot defeat it together? Please forgive me It’s rude, because you must know that the governor and I must confirm this point again and again before we can make the right choice.”

"Ah, of course I understand." Captain Pedro smiled wryly: "We never expected to meet such a powerful opponent in the Far East."

The captain paused and said helplessly: "Did you know that as early as the 20s (152X), our Kingdom of Portugal and the Ming Empire had a sea war. Lost."

"Oh?" Mr. Special Envoy frowned, "I don't seem to have heard of this."

"To be exact, we won first and then lost." Captain Pedro said, "I didn't personally experience what happened at that time, and I heard it from others. That naval battle was called the Battle of Tuen Mun or the Battle of Tuen Mun." In the beginning of the war, the navy of the Ming Empire was very bad at the beginning. Not only was the hull small, but it was not equipped with artillery or even muskets.

But shortly after our victory in the first conflict, due to the mutiny of the Chinese sailors on the ship, our guns, artillery and even the hull structure were leaked to the Ming Empire Navy, causing them to imitate the old Clark ship very quickly.

However, as far as I know, although they were able to fight back with firearms on board after that, they finally won the naval battle by relying on their superiority in numbers and taking advantage of the wind to set our sailboats on fire.

But it is different on land. Their force advantage has become so great that we cannot make up for it with our quality advantage. In the end, most of our fleet was wiped out, and all the camps on the shore were destroyed. The remaining remnants fled to the open sea, so the Ming Empire The army recaptured Tuen Mun. "

"Number advantage..." Special Envoy Alfredo frowned, nodded slightly, and asked again: "But I heard that in this Philippine naval battle, the Chinese not only still have an absolute numerical advantage, but also In terms of quality, they are no longer at a disadvantage, and even...the Castilians said that those Chinese warships with hard sails have an advantage over our warships in the South China Sea. I wonder if they are saying this for themselves make excuses for their failures.”

"I'm afraid not, Mr. Special Envoy." Captain Pedro sighed, and said, "Although I didn't see the battle directly, judging from the damage of the captured warships of the Castile Navy, they did suffer severely and even fatally.”

Mr. Special Envoy was silent for a moment, and asked ponderingly: "Is it possible that the commander of the Castile fleet made a mistake?"

"Sir, I believe that the quality of the Portuguese navy is higher than that of the Castilian navy, but at the same time I also believe that the gap is not too big." Pedro said seriously: "Castile The naval fleet was not only defeated in the open sea, but was even beaten by the Ming Empire Navy near the port. I believe you can clearly understand the meaning of this—are their two commanders idiots?"

Envoy Alfredo was silent for a long time before he breathed a sigh of relief and nodded heavily: "I understand, thank you for your frankness."
-
Thank you book friend "Cao Mianzi" for your support, thank you!
Thanks to book friends "Cao Mianzi", "Lu Senah", "Book Friends 20170107012220447", "Grey Iron Wing" for their monthly support, thank you!
(End of this chapter)