The Imperial Age with the Resurgence of Han Style

Chapter 367 Wilderness vs. Wealth
On January 1736, 1, a light rain covered the vast southeastern plains (i.e. the La Plata Plain), making the lush meadows on the plains appear even greener. The endless green continued to spread into the distance, as if it was Mother Earth's most beloved child.

In the fine rain and mist, mottled light and shadows are cast, and the crystal light dances on the grass tips like stars. The breeze blows, the grass ripples, and the cattle and sheep in the distance are like moving flowers dotted on the green canvas.

"Yo ho!"

Marco Meoni wore a rough canvas shirt, a wide-brimmed hat, and a belt around his waist. He rode on horseback, wiped the rain off his face, waved his whip with his right hand, and cracked it in the air, startling the nearby bison herd and scattering in both directions. The neighing of the bison and the shouting of the hunters echoed and intertwined on the grassland.

"Marco, I think you should put on a raincoat. Otherwise, you will get sick from the rain." An old horse that looked sick came up to him. The horse Vigor Bovolenta, who was wearing a raincoat and a cloak, gently pulled the reins. His bronze face was full of vicissitudes of life as he looked at the lively young man in front of him.

"Since I'm sick, I can just stay in the camp and rest. Maybe I can even get a bottle of soju from the leader." Marco replied with a grin.

"Marco, I'm sure that if you use the excuse of being sick to slack off in the camp, you won't get a bottle of liquor from the leader, but a good beating." Mavigor Bovolenta shook his head and said, "Don't think that just because the leader is usually kind to you, you can act recklessly and forget your identity and status."

"Okay, okay, Mr. Bovolenta, don't always act like a second-in-command." Marco said with a bitter face: "Of course I know my identity and status. In Qing, although everyone is equal in law, in reality, we are all second-class people, only slightly better than those Indian natives. But does it matter? Even in the European continent, which country does not have ethnic discrimination and which place does not have oppression? At least, in Qing, we can all have enough food and drink. Well, I think that in this regard, Qing is far better than many European countries."

Marco Meoni was an Italian from Naples. He was tempted by the gold rush in Brazil, scraped together a ticket and boarded an immigrant ship to Brazil without knowing why.

However, the cunning and greedy captain sold all of these immigrants as indentured servants to the Rio Grande region, where they became hard laborers in Portuguese mines and plantations, and needed to serve their masters day and night for eight years before they could gain their freedom.

As he waited in despair for his tragic death on the plantation, the war between Qing and Portugal broke out, and he was "liberated" when the Qing army invaded Rio Grande.

In the subsequent battles, these liberated plantation indentured servants and mine workers were hastily armed, and then, under the threat of the Qing army's bayonets, they launched round after round of attacks on the Portuguese, eventually reaching the upper reaches of the Uruguay River and occupying the Rio Grande.

Marco Meoni was undoubtedly lucky. During the months he was reduced to cannon fodder, except for an arm stabbed by the Portuguese, he was completely safe and sound and survived the war safely.

In order to consolidate the newly occupied territory, in addition to forcibly expelling upper-level Portuguese colonial officials and large plantation owners in the Rio Grande region, the Qing Kingdom also implemented a large-scale population replacement, relocating tens of thousands of immigrants in the area to Yizhou, Xiazhou, and further south, Mozhou (now Patagonia). They were replaced by a large number of "old citizens" from the Qing Kingdom and new immigrants.

Marco Meoni was settled in Kaiping County of Xiazhou (now Mar del Plata) along with a group of "surrendered people" and was allocated 100 acres of land for a fee - yes, these lands required a certain fee to be paid to the government, but it could be repaid in installments each year. Moreover, the land price was very cheap, only three cents per acre, equivalent to less than one tael of silver.

However, after experiencing the miserable life on the plantation and having seen battles and killed people as a cannon fodder, he really didn't like to restrict his fate to the land.

It just so happened that a retired Qing officer formed a hunting team to hunt bison on the vast southeastern prairie and obtain precious hides. He immediately signed up to join and temporarily left his land uncultivated (the Qing government stipulated that land that had been left uncultivated for three consecutive years would be reclaimed).

Two hundred years ago, the first Spaniards to arrive in the Southeastern Great Plains tried to settle there, but the poor environment, chaotic organization, and government indifference led to the failure of their colonization, and they had to choose to leave.

However, after the Spanish immigrants left, the oxen they brought with them were scattered throughout the grasslands. With few threats from natural enemies, the population expanded rapidly and gradually spread to the entire southeast prairie, gradually forming a large herd of bison.

More than 20 years ago, after the Qing Kingdom seized this vast plain with lush grass and water, it was delighted to find that there were millions of bison scattered across the plain. With the nourishment of abundant grass and water, almost all of them were fat and strong, like moving "meat racks"!
An adult bison can reach 3.5 meters in length and weigh more than 1 ton. This huge beast has basically no natural enemies in nature, so it has been able to migrate freely and worry-free for more than years and continue to reproduce.

According to conservative estimates, the number of bison living on the southeastern prairies is as high as 300-500 million. Of course, the upper limit may be 800 million or even more (during the same period, the number of bison roaming the Great Plains of North America was about 5000 million).

Although the Spanish colonists and gauchos who previously lived in the area would hunt tens of thousands of bison every year, this number had little impact on the reproduction of the huge bison population.

The Spaniards and the local gauchos hunted bison for meat. A small number of people would skin the bison, process it with simple nitre and then sell it to traders, but in general, the frequency and scale of hunting were very small.

After the Qing Kingdom seized the southeastern prairie, it quickly turned its attention to the large herds of bison.

This is simply the wealth bestowed by God on Qing Kingdom!
Although bison fur is not as valuable as mink or sea otter in North America, it is still a big advantage in the eyes of hunters. Larger bison skins are sold at a wholesale price of 2 to 4 gold yuan each, and the retail price at the production and processing end is as high as 10 to 15 gold yuan.

From 1720 to 1730, large buffalo hides were shipped to Yongding City (now Buenos Aires) each year.

From 1730 to 1734, this number rose further to between and sheets per year.

If the hunting site is close to the immigrant town, after the hunted bison are skinned, a large amount of beef will be sold to beef wholesalers or local residents at a very low price, thereby increasing the profits from hunting.

However, when the hunting spots were located deep inland, far away from the immigrant villages and towns, the hunters would simply abandon the killed bison in the wilderness, leaving them to rot or become food for many carnivores, causing regret for countless immigrants who had worked hard to fill their stomachs.

When profit is the priority, there will always be brave men.

On the southeastern prairie, there is a very inspiring story about a gaucho known as the "buffalo butcher". With his skillful horse-handling skills and incredible luck, he single-handedly killed 1,300 buffaloes in a year and made a profit of nearly 4,000 yuan.

Stimulated by money, during the slack season, hunters would, as usual, spend dozens of yuan to purchase equipment and go hunting in groups in the wilderness where bison roam, in the hope of earning a considerable amount of extra income.

The professional hunting team that Marco Meoni joined was better equipped, had a larger team, and a clearer division of labor, so the benefits were naturally more generous. On average, they could kill 300 to 500 bison a month, and each person could get 20 to 30 yuan, which was a high-paying job in Qing. This was definitely much better than digging for food in the soil. Of course, hunting bison was not without risks. If you were not careful, you would be knocked off your horse by the crazy bison, and then trampled into a ball of meat paste, with no bones left.

As for sleeping in the open air and braving the wind and rain, that was a common occurrence.

In the wild, if you accidentally catch a cold, it might cost you your life.

Even on the uninhabited grasslands, it was not uncommon for conflicts and fights to occur due to competition for bison herds or coveting each other's wealth.

Although Qing's cowhide trade was not as popular as that in North America, it still attracted the attention of merchants from various countries, especially those wealthy merchants from Qi. Relying on their special trade status and convenient sales channels, they quickly gained dominance over the cowhide trade in the entire region.

After years of trade, merchants from Qi State established a small triangular trade circle in the South Atlantic, in which cowhide from Qing State played an important role.

The merchants of Qi State first loaded cheap items such as grain, cloth, knives, felt and small handicrafts from Qianzhou area (now South Africa), and arrived at the Gulf of Guinea along the west coast of Africa. They exchanged them for gold and black slaves from the local black tribes, then crossed the Atlantic Ocean and sailed to Portuguese Brazil, selling the black slaves to Portuguese plantation owners and mine owners. They then purchased sugar, mahogany and ore from Brazil, and sailed downstream to Qing State. After selling the goods, they loaded Qing State's local specialties such as cowhide, seal skin, yerba mate tea, etc. onto ships, and finally returned to Qianzhou to sell them, completing a successful closed trade.

In order to better develop and utilize the bison resources on the southeastern prairie, five years ago, the Qing Dynasty continued to build the previously built Zhong (Zhongjing) Jun (Junzhou) railway line northward, crossing the prairie and extending it to Yongding. It also established several cattle product processing plants along the line to handle large quantities of cow hides, beef and cow bones (cow bones can be ground into powder as high-quality fertilizer).

Thousands of tons of beef were simply pickled, air-dried or canned, then transported to the port by rail, and then shipped to Spanish American territories, Portuguese Brazil, and even the West Indies, in exchange for a large amount of gold and silver currency for the Qing Kingdom.

"I heard that our country of Qi has developed a freezing device that can quickly freeze freshly slaughtered beef and then transport it to consumer markets hundreds or thousands of kilometers away."

In the temporary camp, the hunters lit a bonfire, set up an iron pot, and stewed a pile of beef and potatoes in it. Although there were a lot of seasonings in the pot, mixed with beef, it exuded a strong aroma, but eating beef for a long time still made their stomachs feel a little uncomfortable.

Oh my God, I never thought that one day we would eat so much beef that we would vomit!

"Really?" Marco looked at his companion in surprise, and then asked in halting Chinese: "Han, since Qi has... this technology, should we in Qing... bring it in soon, and then sell the beef we hunt... directly to the neighboring Portuguese and Spanish, or even to the European continent?"

"... Most likely." Han Zhaoqing used a stick to pull a potato out of the campfire, rolled it on the grass for a few times to cool it down, then peeled off the dark potato skin to reveal the scorched yellow potato fruit inside, and blew gently at the surface. "I don't know if this freezing technology can be installed on a carriage. In this way, we can load the beef onto the carriage and store it temporarily. When a certain amount is accumulated, we can transport it to nearby towns and sell it to beef processing plants. It's not like now, where the bison we hunted with great effort are just given away to the hyenas following us."

As more and more professional hunting teams appeared on the prairie, many auxiliary industries emerged, one of which was the emergence of many beef middlemen. They followed the hunting teams in countless horse-drawn carriages, picking up the skinned bison carcasses at very low prices, and after simple processing and pickling, they quickly rushed to the nearest town and then sold them to beef processing plants.

Although these beef middlemen do not make much profit each time, the "supply" of goods is constant and the profit accumulates into a flow. At the end of a month, the profit they make may not be less than that of professional hunters.

This made the hard-working "cowboys" very depressed, so they called these beef middlemen "prairie hyenas" in a very harsh way, who specialized in picking up "rotten food" for a living.

"If one day I can no longer ride a horse or wave a whip, I will also be like them, driving a big cart to this vast grassland, following the hunting team, and picking up those freshly killed buffaloes."

"Tsk! You're really hardworking. You're already old, why are you still working?" Han Zhaoqing laughed, "When I'm old, I can count on my children and grandchildren to take care of me, and live a carefree life. Maybe I can even return to Hanzhou and live a life like a god."

"What you said is really enviable." A European-Indian man held a large iron spoon, scooped a spoonful of beef soup from the pot on the shelf, blew hard a few times, and tried to drink it. "Oh, by the way, Hanzhou is so good, why did you run all the way to Qingguo?"

"I committed a crime in Hanzhou." Han Zhaoqing curled his lips and stuffed a few bites of the roasted potato in his hand into his mouth. "Do you think I want to come to Qingguo? Damn it, if I hadn't committed a crime and was afraid of being sent to some remote island to do hard labor, how could I have ended up here. This damn place has an even sparser population than our inland Hanzhou. I can ride for several days without seeing a village or town. Such a large piece of good land is wasted!"

"Oh, poor Han, you must have committed a serious crime, otherwise you wouldn't have come to hide in Qing." Mavigor Bovolenta said with some gloating: "Tell me, if the people of Qi found you, would they arrest you and punish you?"

This Han man from Qi State was trusted by the leader of the hunting team because he was smart and knowledgeable. Less than a year after joining the team, he had become the second-in-command of the entire team, which aroused the jealousy of everyone.

It is said that he received eight years of education in Hanzhou and was able to read and write, understand newspaper news, read books and periodicals, and calculate and record the costs and benefits of the hunting team. Therefore, he was highly valued by the leader.

Perhaps it was because they had committed crimes in Hanzhou that they dared not live in large towns and ports, so they hid inland and followed a group of illiterate hunters to hunt bison.

Otherwise, with his background as a native of Hanzhou and having received eight years of education, he could easily find a decent job in a big city.

It is really hard to imagine that in Qi State, there are millions of people like Han Zhaoqing who receive more than eight years of formal education every year, and there are also hundreds of thousands of senior elites who graduate from universities.

This may be the confidence and foundation for Qi to dominate the world.

And what is the situation in our Qing Kingdom?

(End of this chapter)