At the end of Qin, I became a son of the plane

Chapter 530: Yinzhou’s Current Situation and Ineffective Involution
The high grain production capacity of the starting city is one of the important factors. The high production capacity of potatoes and corn is one of the reasons. The Governor's Office attaches great importance to reclamation. Farmers who come to the New World will be provided with tools such as iron plows and shovels as long as they are willing to farm. The Governor's Office will also send tenants to help. The farmers who reclaim the land only need to pay 10% of their income to these tenants as a reward in the coming year.

Moreover, the wild buffaloes of Yinzhou also solved the problem of insufficient labor. Xu Aimin and his team had always been in the territory of Maya, and had never seen large livestock here, so at the beginning, they thought that there were no large livestock such as cattle and horses in the New World, and they also wanted to transport some buffaloes and cattle from Dahan to the New World.

When the Governor's Office expanded its exploration of the New World, they learned that there were countless bison in the grasslands of the New World, and their size was not inferior to that of yaks on the plateau. The locals planned to domesticate these bison into oxen.

The following year, the Governor's Office recruited 1000 herdsmen from the desert and used various means to capture thousands of bison. Most of these New World bison were wild and difficult to train, and eventually became beef jerky and ended up in the stomachs of the people of the Starting City. Only the calves were given nose rings and began to learn the skill of plowing under the whips of the Han farmers.

It's no wonder that once these New World bison are domesticated, one can be as powerful as three or four. Two Yinzhou bison harnessed to an eight-ox plow can plow 1 acres of land in a day. Although Yinzhou bison have various defects, their best advantages are their great strength and endurance, and they are deeply loved by Han farmers.

Every farmer who owns Yinzhou cattle treasures them very much. The comfort of their cowshed is better than that of local farmers' houses. They have to do the daily cleaning and feeding themselves and take good care of the cattle. Their status is even higher than that of the Yinzhou natives.

At the same time, the discovery and domestication of these wild cattle also solved the problem of transportation in Yinzhou, which was very important for the trading city of the Starting City. After all, the cargo transported by wheelbarrows was limited, and transport ships could only be used along the coast. The transport capacity of oxcarts was twenty times that of wheelbarrows. Whether it was transporting goods at the starting level or transporting minerals and grains in the vassal states, these Yinzhou cattle were indispensable.

Moreover, the bodies of those unruly fellow Yinzhou cattle made extremely important contributions to the Han Dynasty's development of the New World. Yinzhou cattle once became the most important source of meat in the New World.

Because Xu Aimin and his men found that there were too many bison in the New World, so many that they could not imagine, and once they thought that this was a continent of bison. Originally they wanted to capture bison for farming, but it eventually became a hunting activity. The Governor's Office hunted tens of thousands of bison in a year and obtained tens of millions of pounds of bison meat. In the New World where prices are high, the price of bison meat is close to that of the Han Dynasty. In a sense, the Starting City can be said to be a city on the back of a bull.

Starting city, meeting hall.

Liu Ruyi said, "Governor, we are hunting here. A soldier from Qianqu captured 200 calves and killed 120 bison. While we were hunting, a tribe from Yinzhou was willing to join the governor's office. There are more than 200 people in this tribe, and they are now outside the city."

Xu Aimin nodded and said, "Master, please register the merits of our soldiers and notify the farmers who applied for oxen to come to the Governor's Office in three days to draw lots to decide who will own the calves."

Chen Mai said: "Yes!"

Then Xu Aimin looked at Jin Di and said, "The Yinzhou tribe will be handed over to you, Sima Jin, to settle them. Spread them out and place them in different pastures. At the same time, you must pay attention to their education and make sure they learn Chinese within a year."

Jin Di thought for a moment and said, "Please ask the Governor to send a few more teachers to the ranch. This year, the eight ranches of the Governor's Office have already resettled tens of thousands of Yinzhou natives, and the original teachers are no longer available."

Xu Aimin thought for a moment and said, "I will send another eight teachers from the starting city to the ranch."

In addition to being the grain center and trade center of the entire New World, the starting city is also a pastoral center.

The pastoral industry of the Starting City has to start with those 1000 herdsmen. In the beginning, Xu Aiming found more than 1000 herdsmen in order to domesticate the bison from the New World. However, near these bison herds, there were also many indigenous tribes. They all followed the migration of these bison and used these bison as their food source.

When the Han army was catching bison, they first set up a fishing net formation, and then used muskets and explosives in succession with extremely great momentum, driving the bison herds into their own traps. Basically, they were able to harvest hundreds of bison each time.

After hearing the sound of gunpowder, the natives of the New World were so shocked by the Han army that they knelt down on the spot. Many tribes followed the Han army directly to the starting city.

If the Maya Empire was a primitive agricultural country, then these tribes on the grassland were primitive nomadic tribes. Except for the fact that they did not have iron swords and the size of their tribes was smaller than that of the desert, their other customs were not much different from those of the desert herdsmen.

The nomadic indigenous peoples of the New World not only had hatred for the Mayans, they were also less civilized, less organized, and found it more difficult to adapt to life in the original cities.

Finally, it was the Xiongnu Jin Di who proposed to Xu Aimin that several pastures could be established on the outskirts of Qishi Town to accommodate these natives who had defected to the Han Dynasty, and at the same time let them graze to provide livestock for the envoys.

He believed that the situation in the New World was completely different from that in the Han Dynasty. The Han Dynasty was densely populated and land was an extremely precious resource. Farming could best utilize these land resources to produce more food.

However, the New World is vast and sparsely populated, with wilderness everywhere. The population of the entire New World is only around tens of millions. Even if the people of the major vassal states are included, there are only more than 500,000 people in the Han Dynasty. It can be said that talent is the most precious resource.

It takes too much manpower and material resources to reclaim farmland, but if it is grazing, basically no manpower and material resources need to be invested in construction. All you need is herders who are willing to graze. At this stage, the advantages of grazing are greater than farming. The Governor's Office should establish some pastures to utilize the land outside the starting city.

Xu Aimin agreed with Jin Di's words and established eight ranch towns on the outskirts of Qidian Town. They mainly raised Yinzhou cattle, and also gave some sheep and horses brought from the Han people to them for breeding. These towns were managed in a militarized manner. They were both herdsmen and soldiers of the Han people, protecting the rural areas outside Qidian City from harassment by other indigenous peoples.

At this time, Liu Yun, a soldier, said with an embarrassed look on his face: "The Mayan king Guyu asked the governor for help, saying that the princes of the Han Dynasty were plundering the people of Maya, and Maya would go to war with those princes."

"Let the Mayan king comfort the nobles of Maya, and this governor will also restrict the recklessness of the vassal states." Xu Aimin couldn't help but feel a headache, and even blamed his father a little for constantly driving the vassal states to the New World, which was causing trouble for him.

Since the establishment of the Northern Yin Continent Governor's Office, the Han Dynasty has sent three groups of princes to establish a total of 65 vassal states in the central area of ​​the New World. These new vassal states are scattered throughout the land of Central Yin Continent.

Those vassal states on the periphery are fine. They are far away from the Mayan Kingdom and there are no conflicts between the two sides. These vassal states can make money by developing local specialties and shipping them back to the Han Dynasty.

Just like the vassal states established by Cao Xing, although he did not find gold and silver mines, he found the specialty saltpeter, and it was almost endless in his vassal states. Saltpeter was the most important raw material for gunpowder, and now the vassal states of the Han Dynasty had established more than a dozen silver mines. The gunpowder they needed for mining was almost endless. It was also the most important raw material for making fertilizers, and the Han Dynasty's demand for fertilizers was endless, even in the New World.

Last year, Cao Xing imported 200 shi of grain into their capital, and the capital's grain production capacity increased by % that year. This was when a large portion of the saltpeter was used as gunpowder for mining. If all of this batch of saltpeter was made into potash fertilizer, it would be able to increase the grain supply to the starting city by more than million shi.

The most important thing is that this batch of potash fertilizer also became the most important raw material imported into the Han Dynasty. One million stones were imported into the Han Dynasty that year, and Cao Xing made tens of millions of dollars, which was basically pure profit. The cost was just to let thousands of people continue to mine. The captains of the Han Dynasty did not want to waste their positions, so they usually went to Cao Xing's vassal states to buy saltpeter. It can be said that although the price of potash fertilizer is not as expensive as silver, the money earned by Cao Xing is not necessarily inferior to those vassal states with silver mines.

At the same time, someone in Nanyinzhou discovered a new specialty, rubber. Pang Yuan established his own vassal state directly near a rubber forest. He absorbed the local indigenous people and used them to help him tap the rubber.

10 barrels of rubber can be imported to Dahan every year, which can bring million yuan of wealth to Pangyuan. The key is that Pangyuan not only sells rubber, but also sells rubber tree seeds and rubber seedlings.

Since the Han Dynasty entered industrialization, the demand for various glue materials has been growing rapidly. The Han Dynasty has Eucommia ulmoides and rubber raw materials, as well as cow glue, horse glue, fish glue, and all items that can be used as glue are extremely expensive. For example, the price of Eucommia ulmoides glue in the Han Dynasty is more than 3000 coins per stone, but there is still no market for it. The major machinery factories in the Han Dynasty are constantly scrambling for these glue sources.

The emergence of rubber disrupted the Dahan rubber market. First, the yield of rubber trees is more than ten times higher than that of eucommia gum. Second, the rubber brokerage gardens in Pangyuan have almost no costs. They are naturally grown rubber trees and only need to be harvested.

This resulted in the fact that even though the rubber from the New World had traveled tens of thousands of miles across the sea, its cost was still lower than that of Eucommia ulmoides gum.

More importantly, the major plantations of the Han Dynasty and the vassal states that planted Eucommia ulmoides rubber could clearly feel the overwhelming cost advantage of rubber over their Eucommia ulmoides rubber, as well as the more than ten times production capacity advantage, which they could not catch up with even if they wanted to.

Faced with this situation where they were unable to defeat the enemy, the major vassal states and cash crop owners of the Han Dynasty decisively chose to abandon Eucommia ulmoides gum and embrace rubber trees. As a result, in Southeast Asia and in the south of the Yangtze River, the major vassal states and major cash crop owners all placed orders for rubber seeds and seedlings with Pang Yuan.

The price offered by Pang Yuan was one hundred coins for a seed, and three thousand coins for a rubber tree seedling that could grow to adulthood. This was not just selling rubber tree seeds, it was simply selling gold.

But even with such an outrageous price, the major vassal states of the Han Dynasty were still scrambling for Pang Yuan's rubber seeds. There was no other way, since he was running a unique business. These seeds and rubber saplings once again brought Pang Yuan hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth, and the cost he paid was just to find some natives to collect seeds under the rubber trees, and to dig some saplings in the wild, put them in wooden barrels and bring them to the Han Dynasty.

The above two are relatively successful vassal states. Even if they did not find gold and silver mines, they still developed rapidly relying on local specialties. There are already tens of thousands of vassal states and tens of thousands of educated indigenous people. It can be said that the entire vassal state is showing a thriving development trend.

But there were only a few such vassal states. The only purpose of most of the vassal states coming to the New World was to find gold and silver mines. It just so happened that there were so many gold and silver mines in the New World. So far, more than a dozen gold and silver mines have been found by these vassal states. The output of these gold and silver mines is either high or low, but each one is incomparable to the Han Dynasty's homeland.

Manpower is needed to open mines and to build vassal states. It costs 20,000 to 30,000 coins to transport a Han citizen from Linzi to the New World. Up to now, there are only a few thousand citizens in the vassal states in the New World. The ships going to the New World have limited cargo space and can only carry 20,000 to 30,000 people each year. Among the dozens of vassal states, each can only get a few hundred people.

These princes of the Han Dynasty naturally turned their attention to the Mayan Kingdom. Although it was just a primitive city-state, there were millions of people scattered across the region, which made it a natural source of human resources.

Therefore, in order to save costs, the princes of the Han Dynasty recruited people from the Mayan Empire. They even married the tribal chiefs and city lords of the Mayan city-states to directly pull these people out of the Mayan system.

Maya was originally a primitive country with a feudal system. The tribal chiefs and city lords had great power. After being instigated by the princes of the Han Dynasty, the entire Maya country was on the verge of disintegration.

The old king of Maya did not sit still and wait for death. He originally planned to teach these outsiders a lesson. After several years of communication, the Mayan nobles also understood that these outsiders were not gods at all, but people from another continent. After several years of communication, the Mayan country also had some ironware, and their weapons had also been significantly improved, which made the Mayan king feel that he had the strength to teach them a lesson.

But the Mayan king wanted to fight, which was exactly what the Han princes wanted. In the past, they could only plunder the Mayan people secretly, but now that they were at war and had fallen out with each other, they could now plunder the Mayan people openly.

The Han princes in Zhongyin Province formed a coalition of more than 3 princes and directly defeated the -strong army of the Mayan king. The coalition then pursued and surrounded the Mayan capital. If it were not for Xu Aimin's mediation, the Mayan Kingdom would have probably disappeared.

After the defeat in this battle, the old Mayan king was forced to abdicate and was sent to the Han mainland by Xu Aimin. The new Mayan king was succeeded by Prince Guyu. At the same time, Xu Aimin also helped the Mayan Kingdom retain 5 cities. But from then on, the Mayan Kingdom, which originally had millions of citizens, was reduced to only one-tenth of its original size. A large number of city-states broke away from the rule of the Mayan Kingdom and became cities of the Han Dynasty's vassal states.

These vassal states of the Han Dynasty quickly completed the process of swallowing an elephant. The population of the small vassal states, which originally had only a few thousand or tens of thousands of people, expanded tenfold in an instant. They no longer lacked manpower for mining, and they also had people to develop other industries such as agriculture, animal husbandry, and handicrafts. Compared with the vassal states that faced the mines, they now finally looked somewhat normal.

But as the saying goes, fortune and misfortune go hand in hand. After annexing a large number of Mayan city-states, these vassal states expanded rapidly. There was no shortage of manpower for mining and smelting, and the output of silver and gold increased rapidly. But soon these vassal states of the Han Dynasty found that although they mined more, they did not seem to make any money at all.

Last year, the amount of silver imported from the New World to the Han Dynasty exceeded 120 million kilograms, and the amount of gold exceeded gold. This was the year with the largest amount of precious metals supplied from the New World to the Han Dynasty.

Such a huge amount of silver even shocked Xu Aimin. He was not an economic novice, and he knew that gold and silver could be used as currency in the Han Dynasty. If such a large amount of silver flowed into the Han Dynasty, it would definitely affect the economy of the Han Dynasty.

But he soon found that he was worrying too much. The import of so much silver into the Han Dynasty did have an impact, but the impact on the Han Dynasty was not great, because Xu Fan replaced the position of gold and silver on the currency with paper money. The Han Dynasty basically used paper money for large transactions, and the only precious metal currency still in circulation was copper.

In fact, this situation is inevitable. In the feudal era, Chinese civilization had advanced productivity and lacked money and precious metals as equivalents for thousands of years. In the economic terms of later generations, China has been in a state of economic deflation for thousands of years.

Now that the Han Dynasty has Xu Fan's plug-in, production efficiency has increased dozens of times. If precious metals are still used as currency, deflation is simply unimaginable. Using paper money to maintain economic operations is an inevitable trend.

Therefore, the only impact of the gold and silver imported from the New World on the Han Dynasty was that the Han Dynasty's economy gained a huge market with paying capabilities. Now the Han Dynasty ships tens of billions of dollars worth of goods to the New World every year, and at the same time, the New World also ships tens of billions of dollars worth of goods to the Han Dynasty every year. This in turn has greatly promoted the development of the Han Dynasty's industry.

But the fact that it had no impact on the Han Dynasty did not mean that it had no impact on the vassal states of the New World. When silver could not be used as currency, it could only circulate for luxury goods and decorations, and the market was greatly reduced. Such a huge amount of silver poured into the Han market, causing the price of silver in the Han Dynasty to change every year. At the beginning, a catty of silver was worth 3000 coins, but the year before last it was only worth around 2000 coins, and last year the price of a catty of silver had fallen to around coins.

The plummeting silver price made the vassal states of the Han Dynasty wail incessantly. Their wealth instantly shrank to only one-third of its original value. Moreover, in the foreseeable future, the more silver they mined, the faster the price of silver would fall.

Is this fair? The harder they work to mine and refine silver, the lower their income is. And their income will continue to decline in the future. So what is the point of their hard work in mining?
So the princes of the Han Dynasty who had silver mines united together. This year, the number of people mining was reduced by more than half. At the same time, they began to restrict the import of silver and put more people into building the vassal states.

(End of this chapter)