The Imperial Age with the Resurgence of Han Style

Chapter 239 Strategic Focus

On November 1730, 11, it was late autumn in London. Rainfall was increasing, and a cold current from the north had recently invaded, making city residents feel a chill throughout their bodies. The fallen leaves on the streets and the moisture on the ground gave people a different kind of desolation and loneliness. The gray sky and distant fog add a sense of mystery. In such a city, people wear thick coats and scarves and rush around, and the rhythm of life has gradually entered the preparation for winter.

The streets were lined with old buildings, their roofs all touching each other, making them look crowded. Due to age, the building has also begun to show cracks and fading. But even so, these old buildings still exude a calm and solemn beauty.

In the corners of the city, there are also some small parks with some tall oaks, maples and elms planted in them. The leaves of these trees slowly turn to yellow and red in the autumn wind, making people feel warm and romantic. Sometimes, the sun shines through the gaps in the leaves, elongating the shadows of the trees and illuminating the entire park golden.

When night falls, the city starts to look a little weird. The yellow light from the street lamps casts a faint light through the corners, leaves and cracks in the windows, while the cold night adds a sense of depression and fear. At this time, many people began to rely on candlelight and gas lamps to survive the long nights.

"Sir Nelson, the two newly commissioned steam warships of the Navy will be held at a delivery ceremony at the Thames Pier at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. General Rickon hopes that you can come and deliver a speech to the naval officers and soldiers present." Royal Navy of England Nevis Malcolm, secretary of the committee, handed a letter of invitation to its chairman, Johann Nelson, Earl of Ormont.

"How did these two steam battleships perform during the half-year sea trials?" Count Aument opened the invitation and looked at it, then gently placed it on the table and asked casually.

"According to feedback from the Navy, these two steam warships have overcome many problems existing in several previous test ships. In terms of reliability and stability, they are almost comparable to the steam warships in service in the Qi Navy."

"That's great!" A satisfied smile appeared on Earl Ormont's face, "Then in the next ten years, our Royal Navy can gradually phase out sail warships and completely replace them with steam warships. In this way, our Kingdom of England It will become the second country in the world to fully equip steam warships after Qi."

"Sir..." Nevis Malcolm hesitated.

"Oh?" Earl Allmont looked at Nevis Malcolm in surprise, "He has...different views on the future construction of the Royal Navy?"

That's right, while the Kingdom of England was still bargaining with Qi over how to build its first domestic railway, the Kingdom of Ireland rushed ahead of its archenemy and built the entire railway line from Dublin to Cork, which is more than 240 kilometers long. It was handed over to Qiguo Railway Company for construction to accelerate the optimization and upgrading of transportation and logistics facilities in the Kingdom.

"Sir, General Rickon has different views on the future construction of the Royal Navy?"

"how?"

Dozens of inches of armor and huge-caliber artillery were no less fast and maneuverable than a steam sail warship. During the battle with the Royal Navy warship, it was like a heavily armored cavalry, bravely breaking into a group of unprotected farmers. , rush in and harvest as much as you want.

"When our strength is not enough to defeat the enemy, we should restrain our edge, restrain our ambitions, hibernate our strength, and wait for a suitable opportunity. Yes, we need to wait, wait for a long time, and maintain our due Strategic focus.”
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On November 1730, 11, two motor sailing ships flying the flag of Qi entered the port of Tangier, preparing to load and unload cargo.

"But how can our kingdom's finances support the development and construction of ironclads?" Earl Aument smiled bitterly. "The heavy debt burden, the huge amount of compensation, the relief of countless unemployed workers, and the ongoing domestic railway construction... ..., huh, I think we may not have the extra financial resources to build a luxurious ironclad ship in the short term.”

Yes, a few years ago, the people of Qi mobilized several ironclad ships to come to Europe. In the several large sea battles they experienced, these ironclad ships seemed to be the real overlords of the sea, and they were an invincible existence, allowing many Royal Navy sailors to sail The warships were helpless on the battlefield and had little power to fight.

Both ships are affiliated with the Mediterranean Trading Company. One ship is called the "Qiyue", which carries a large amount of goods transferred from India and Hanzhou via the Suez Railway. There are tea, silk, porcelain, handicrafts, various hardware, machinery, equipment and other industrial products, as well as coffee, cocoa, palm oil and other South Sea tropical products. There are hundreds of kinds of commodities, with high prices and large quantities. Target They are local middle- and upper-class consumer groups, such as Moroccan royal nobles, high-ranking officials and wealthy businessmen, and tribal leaders.

"But, Sir..."

"So, I think that under this situation, as long as our Royal Navy maintains a maritime force second only to Qi, it will be enough to protect the overseas interests of our Kingdom of England."

"..." Upon hearing this, Earl Ormont's expression suddenly froze.

"Sir, General Rickon said that wooden battleships are completely vulnerable to ironclads. Whether they are traditional sailing battleships or sailing battleships equipped with steam power, they have no chance of winning when faced with an attack from ironclads... …The Anglo-Qiyi War a few years ago fully demonstrated all this.”

"Sir..."

"Yes, Sir."

"Tell me something." Earl Orment leaned his body gently on the soft leather chair.

The second ship is named "Qingxing", and the cargo category is relatively simple. They are all large-ticket commodities such as rails, steel plates, and locomotive parts. Its target customer is not Morocco, but Ireland, so it only stays here briefly.

"Ironclad ship?" Earl Allmont's eyes widened. "Does General Rickon know how difficult it is to develop an ironclad ship? Does he know how much it costs to build an ironclad ship? According to the information revealed by the people of Qi, one The cost of building an ironclad is over 100,000 pounds! This amount of money is enough to build two or three large first-class battleships.”

"General Rickon believes that in addition to equipping the necessary steam battleships, the Royal Navy must also invest large sums of money in research and construction...ironclad ships."

"I know that the generals of the Royal Navy are very reluctant to the outcome of the war two years ago, but we must admit that the gap in strength between us and Qi is very large. Whether it is economic or military, we have We cannot fight against the Qi people who are becoming increasingly powerful." Earl Omont interrupted Nevis Malcolm and continued to lobby, "Even if we master the construction technology of ironclad ships, we are really capable of fighting against the Qi people. Maritime arms race? Oh, that is unrealistic and will drag our Kingdom of England into a situation of catastrophe. To put it more pessimistically, even if we in England work hard to develop for another twenty or thirty years, we may not be able to challenge it. The power of the people.”

Oh God, this isn't a fair fight at all.

Of course, with the poor finances of the Kingdom of Ireland, it is impossible to spend a large amount of money to repair this railway. The only way is to transfer the land management rights and mining areas along the railway to the Qiguo Railway Company. After the railway is opened to traffic, its operation The rights and most of the income rights naturally belong to the people of Qi.

But the Kingdom of Ireland doesn't care. As a small country with a small population, it is perfectly normal for it to sacrifice some domestic rights and cede some interests in order to survive independently.

At least, the people of Qi State invested a large amount of real money in the Kingdom of Ireland and carried out vigorous construction. No matter what, it played a due role in promoting the improvement of Ireland's strength.

Well, it’s much better than the English’s crushing oppression and ruthless plundering!
Tangier is generally called by Moroccans and Europeans to this important port city on the south bank of the Taiwan Strait, but people in Qi like to call it Dehua Port.

Four years ago, the great Sultan Ismail of Morocco died of a serious illness and died in Baba Mansour Palace. With the secret help of the Qi State, the eldest prince Dahab successfully eliminated the power of the black slave army. He also executed several brothers who competed for the throne, and finally succeeded to the throne of Sudan.

In order to repay the people of Qi, the new sultan of Morocco, named Ahmed I, not only sent a large number of armed "volunteers" to follow Qi to fight against the Kingdom of England, but also, at the request of the people of Qi, sent troops from Tangier to Tianmen ( Today's Ceuta) all the land along the Mediterranean Sea was leased to Qi for 99 years, giving the Qi people complete control of the entire south bank of the Strait (Strait of Gibraltar).

Coupled with the Kingdom of Spain, which has established a deep "friendship" with Qi due to its joint war against Britain, it can be said that the western end of the Mediterranean has been covered by Qi's forces, posing a fatal threat to the entire Mediterranean coastal countries and regions. Not to mention, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire and the Qi State have maintained a traditional friendly relationship for seventy years. They are almost de facto allies. Moreover, because they are short-handed, they tacitly agree that the Qi people have seized the territory. The many political, economic, military and other rights and interests of the Egyptian provinces are blocked on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea.

During the Qi-British War, the Qi navy captured the island of Malta, which was stolen by the British army, and subsequently used it as a key naval supply point in the Mediterranean. Although Qi and Britain reached a peace agreement after the war, the Qi people did not evacuate the island. At the same time, they rejected the Knights Hospitaller's request to return to the island, and openly incorporated the island of Malta into Qi's overseas colonial territory.

This island was severely damaged when the British army invaded. Not only was the wealth of the Knights Hospitallers looted, but many villages and towns on the island were also ravaged by the poor and rude Scottish Highland soldiers. As a result, the residents of the island fled by boat and headed for Sicily and the papal territory.

After the Qi people occupied Malta, they implemented a period of strict military control. They not only prohibited the island residents from gathering in groups, but also restricted Catholics from performing religious ceremonies such as worship and church prayers to prevent these barbarians from communicating with foreign countries and subverting the rule of the Qi people. .

Against this background, the already small number of residents on the island once again experienced a wave of large-scale exodus. In less than three years, the total number of residents on the entire island was only more than 2,000. desolate.

The island of Malta is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, adjacent to Italy, less than 100 kilometers away from the Kingdom of Sicily, and only over 280 kilometers away from Tunisia. It is an important transit point in Europe and Africa. In terms of military strategy, the island has always been a battleground for military strategists as a naval base and is known as the "Heart of the Mediterranean".

In order to control this strategic location, Qi State not only built a large number of military facilities on the island and turned it into the most important naval base in the Mediterranean region, but also spared no effort to immigrate to the island. Less than two years after the end of the Qi-British War, more than 1,800 immigrants from the mainland and the East became official residents of the island.

Previously, whether it was the several overseas governor-general territories of Yinzhou or the newly established vassal state of Chen, everything seemed to be extremely difficult in the process of development and immigration, and the increase in population and accumulation of strength were also extremely slow.

Why?

This is entirely caused by the government’s different emphasis on various overseas territories!

Whether in the eyes of His Majesty the Emperor or under the macro-planning of the cabinet government, Qi's core interests lie in Nanyang, the mainland, and the Indian Ocean.

What is Yinzhou?
What is Chenzhou worth mentioning?
With Qi's strong national power, as long as it is an area that the emperor and the cabinet attach great importance to, they will definitely spare no effort to develop and build it.

Didn’t you see, the Ryukyu Islands, the Strait of Malacca, Ceylon, India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, Egypt, Qianzhou (now South Africa), as well as the Tuoshan Islands (now the Canary Islands) and the Shaohua Islands (now the Buddha) in the Atlantic Ocean Cape Islands) and Siling Islands (today’s Azores Islands) have received focus and strong support from the Ministry of Overseas Colonial Affairs and the Ministry of Immigration. They not only allocated large sums of special funds for development and construction, but also spared no effort to immigrate to the above areas. Activity.

For example, before the Qi-British War broke out in the Luoshan Islands, the total number of Han immigrants was only more than 1,500, and they could not completely suppress the more than 10,000 Spaniards and Berbers on the islands.

However, as the war progressed, the importance of the Tuoshan Islands suddenly became apparent, attracting great attention from the government and the military.

After the Qi navy expelled the invading British fleet from the Tuoshan Islands, a large number of supplies and immigrants were transported there. By the end of last year, the Qi immigrant population in the entire archipelago had surged to more than 9,000 people. There are families of navy and army officers and soldiers, and the total population exceeds 10,000.

As for Yinzhou, because it is too far away, it has little economic value - well, well, at least there are relatively high-value minerals such as gold, and it requires a population and a market without a market (compared to the Indian Ocean Rim, which is more Due to its dense population and huge market (the market on the east coast of the Pacific is almost negligible), it did not receive much special attention from Qi.

Under this situation, it is naturally impossible for the Qi government to waste limited funds and carry out large-scale official immigration activities in Yinzhou.

As for Emperor Taizu once mentioned that the Yinzhou Continent was an emperor's endowment and a place chosen by heaven, but now, not many people believe it.

Find a gold mine, get some furs, and cut down some trees. It's great. You can open up endless farmland. It won't become the so-called chosen land, right?

Except for a small number of river valleys and plains on the west coast of Yinzhou that are suitable for colonization and immigration, they are all high mountains and ridges. The continuous East Kunlun Mountains extend from Linzhou to the Xuanzhou Peninsula, with a depth of nearly 5,000 kilometers from north to south, and hundreds to thousands of kilometers from east to west. kilometer.

There are large plains in the central part of Yinzhou, and there are also several large rivers passing through it, but the climate environment is also harsh, with cold waves and strong winds blowing from time to time. What's even worse is that due to the geographical environment, the central plains area is also very harsh. There are frequent tornadoes.

According to the expedition teams that investigated, the Indians in the central Yinzhou area also lived a miserable life, and their agricultural cultivation was in a mess. After encountering various bad weather, they often had no harvests throughout the year.

As for the east coast of Yinzhou, after more than a hundred years of colonization and management by English immigrants, it appears to be prosperous, with abundant people and material resources, and the living standards of residents are much higher than those in England.

But that's all. Given their level of development and the restrictive policies of the English government, their future is very limited.

Moreover, even England, which has a large industrial base, cannot withstand our Qi attack. So can the future potential of the British colonial territories exceed that of their mother country?

After the Qi State merchant ship "Qiyue" unloaded its cargo at Dehua Port, it began to load supplies.

In fact, there isn’t much to buy in Morocco, but considering you can’t return home empty-handed, right?

That would be a waste of transportation capacity and uneconomical. Moreover, it would be too dangerous for the ship to be empty, so it would have to be loaded with something to ballast it.

So I could only pinch my nose and purchase some local products, mainly grain, phosphate, lead, anthracite, leather, and Moroccan slave girls. I packed them full and planned to transport them to Egypt for sale.

Egypt now has some state-invested leather processing plants, ore refineries, coal processing plants, etc., which can process some minerals.

In addition, as Egypt’s cotton planting area expands year by year, the food gap is also getting larger and larger. Therefore, there is a huge demand for grains from Morocco and other Mediterranean countries.

As for the female slaves, they were naturally to meet the needs of many bachelors in various overseas territories of Qi State.

Well, in this world, all goods are in demand. Even if there is no demand, Qi people will try their best to create demand, and everything can be transformed into wealth.

(End of this chapter)