Dragon Sea Empire

Yin Feng inspected the east, west, north, south, and north counties of Luzon Island for several consecutive days. He first inspected more than a dozen newly opened schools in Manila, including elementary schools, middle schools, technical schools, government affairs academy branches, and several foreign schools. The island is now vigorously recruiting indigenous people to study Chinese culture. Chinese and Chinese characters are compulsory. As long as the indigenous people who go to school can experience a complete Chinese cultural education, they can be recruited to work in Chinese companies or town guards after graduation. , Yin Feng specifically stipulated that the aborigines who believe in Catholicism must enter the Tibetan school to study.

Originally, during the Spanish rule, the Spanish Catholic Church undertook the work of civilizing the indigenous people. Therefore, there are many churches throughout the Philippines. In the future, all Catholic churches will be under the unified jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture and Education of the tutelary government, and many small churches will be demolished.

Those Dominican and San Franciscan missionaries lurking in various tribes played a very bad role in this Japanese and Pampanga Catholic rebellion. Yin Feng ordered all churches in the rebellious area to be burned down and demolished. All the non-Jesuit missionaries were expelled from Luzon Island, and he placed the Catholic Church under the jurisdiction of the Luzon Governorate. In fact, he was controlling the number of churches in order to control the number of indigenous Catholics; Encouraging newly arrived immigrants to marry indigenous people, Yin Feng plans to start the cause of national assimilation from both cultural and racial aspects, and take advantage of the number of millions of Chinese immigrants to completely sinicize the Philippines in a short period of time.

Later, Yin Feng checked the production of copper cannons at the Manila Cannon Factory: the Philippines is a place where copper is produced, so Yin Feng set up the cannon factory directly on the shore of the inner lake in Manila, and used waterwheels as power to cast copper cannons. Several gunpowder factories powered by windmills.

The Chinese have inventions such as hydraulic overturning. Water power is mostly used in agriculture, and rarely used in handicraft production, let alone wind power. These waterwheels and windmill power devices are not traditional Chinese technology, they live in the lowlands by the sea The technology brought by the Dutch, Yin Feng vaguely remembers, in another time and space, the Dutch waterwheel, windmill power machinery, has been used until the 19th century, it can be seen that the red hair must have a lot of research on these power systems.

The steel guns used experimentally on the northern front are made of multi-layer steel rolled barrels. As a result, they are neither economical nor have any outstanding performance improvements. The reason is that although the Chinese company has The high-quality iron ore in Shilu, the problem is that the old-fashioned steel frying method can not provide high-quality steel, nor can it cast integral seamless steel pipes, so it can only make small cannons. Now steel cannons are costly and laborious, and the effect is not good. Generally speaking, therefore, Yin Feng ordered to suspend the development of steel cannons. The weapons research department organized some people to study steelmaking methods first, and the rest of the scientific research force turned to research rifled guns.

China has always been a copper-deficient country, but now Yin Feng has the Philippines, a copper-producing archipelago, and the copper supplied by Japan every year, which is enough for casting guns. Smoothbore guns are still dominated by copper.

He then came to Manila, a basement in the center of the former capital city of Manila. This was the secret mint of the Chinese Company. Three Jewish businessmen, three Dutch goldsmiths, one British silversmith, and more than ten Chinese craftsmen were working Get together and study several newly minted and upcoming Chinese coins, including gold coins, silver coins, and copper coins. According to the actual situation at that time, the Chinese coins adopted the silver standard, and the denominations of silver coins were 1 yuan, 5 yuan, and 10 yuan. Wait, the size is bigger in turn. The ratio between silver coins and gold coins is 20 to 1 according to the market price at that time. There will not be too many gold coins in the plan, and they will only be used in overseas transactions. Copper coins are auxiliary coins. 1 cent, 10 cents, etc., 100 cents of silver coins are one yuan, and one tael of silver is now 10 yuan of silver coins, which is 100 cents of copper coins.

Yin Feng has no experience in financial currency, so there are Jews and Dutchmen here. The British silversmith was a prisoner of war in the hands of the Portuguese. He was a talent discovered by Li Lihua from Macau. British silversmiths came to mint coins mainly because the standard of silver coins in the Middle Ages in Europe was the so-called standard of England. At that time, although people could already extract high-purity silver, pure silver was too soft and could be broken by hand. From a point of view, the best ratio of silver coins should be 92.5% silver and 7.5% copper. The silver composed of this composition is also called standard silver, which is the standard casting silver in medieval England. Until the 21st century, Britain still Standard silver was used to make silver coins. Of course, British history has also used low-standard silver. From 1544 to 1551, Henry VIII had successfully reduced the fineness of silver coins. The copper content in this silver coin was so high that in 1549 Shillings cast from this material were reprimanded as "rosaceous".

Zhonghua Company now has a large amount of silver reserves, has the practical experience and network of banks and bank accounts, and has a good reputation at home and abroad, and is fully capable of issuing currency. The ratio of one to one, in terms of the armed strength, silver inventory and reputation of Zhonghua Company, should be no problem to promote. Yin Feng wants to issue banknotes, but Zeng Qi, Xu Hongji, and Huang Cheng and other board members have expressed their opposition : The main reason is that the Daming Banknotes issued in the early years of the Guo Dynasty, due to improper issuance, the actual currency value of the banknotes fell to less than one percent of the face value, and finally its value was not as good as wipe paper, so the banknotes were sold in the Ming Dynasty. It has a bad reputation among the public and the public. The Chinese company issued promotional banknotes as transaction currency from the very beginning, and I am afraid that it will be opposed by domestic merchants and ordinary people.

Yin Feng inspected the newly opened plantations and farmlands in central and southern Luzon one after another, and then returned to Manila. On the edge of the inner lake, he met a group of infantry soldiers of the Chinese Army who were camping and training. He jumped off his horse with great interest. Chatting with the soldiers, in the eyes of Xu Hongji and others: Yin Feng is a little less domineering, but his popularity is unmatched, especially his close-to-people style, which completely belongs to the ancient sages' style of "having fun with the people" .

While Yin Feng was chatting with the soldiers, a four-wheeled carriage rushed towards Manila City. On the four-horse carriage was Yin Feng's own "Yin" flag. The pattern of sailing boats, this is Yin Feng's special carriage, and now in Manila, there is only one other person who can use it: Li Lihua.

Yin Feng came to Manila with only Li Lihua, following the gossip from Taiwan since October; Li Lihua will officially become the wife of Yin Feng’s captain and President Yin’s leader. Members of the Fujian merchant faction were a bit disappointed, but one of Yin Feng's hardcore direct descendants: the Manila survivor faction, most of them supported Li Lihua, especially those Catholics, an important part of the Chinese army and navy, and most of the coastal Danmin faction supported Li Lihua. He regarded Mai Wan'er as the main wife, so he was a little disappointed.

Li Lihua was basically satisfied, except that she could not hold a formal ceremony in the church, she had nothing else to ask for.

The carriage came to a stop in front of Yin Feng, a black bodyguard jumped out of the carriage, opened the door, and Li Lihua, who was dressed in a dress and long skirt, jumped out of the carriage. But at this moment, Yin Feng was accompanied by a group of civil servants from the guarding mansion of Lu Song. Xu Hongji and other literati couldn't accept this kind of behavior, so they hurriedly avoided, bowed their hands, turned and walked away.

Yin Feng went up to meet him, and seeing Li Lihua's worried face, he hurriedly asked, "What happened?"

Li Lihua is currently in charge of Nanyang intelligence in addition to working in some charitable associations. She has inherited Li Dan's property and a large part of Li Dan's contacts in various places in Nanyang. Moreover, six years ago, she personally participated in the She is well-known in Nanyang for rescuing Chinese refugees in danger, so Yin Feng can't do without her when it comes to Nanyang affairs.

"It's Java, news came from the Portuguese that our company's business in Semarang has been captured by the king of Madalan,"

At the end of 1617, the ambitious Van Petersson Kun began to serve as the third governor of the Dutch East India Company. He was originally the commercial supervisor of the East India Company. After the Dutch were defeated by the Chinese Company five years ago, Batavia The city was besieged by the native troops of Banten and Cirebon. It was under his leadership that they attacked and drove away the native troops and stabilized the situation. The headquarters of the Dutch East India Company was the political institution for the Dutch to rule Java and even the entire East Indies colony. foundation, so they can maintain a stable situation after the big defeat.

Occupying and managing Bacheng cost the Dutch a lot of money and energy. In the early days, the area was sparsely populated, lacked food supplies, and had no wood to build ships and houses. The surrounding area was a desolate swamp, rare villages were inhabited, and floods occurred during the rainy season. , Tigers, wild boars, rhinos, etc. are often seen, and at the same time, they are also faced with hostility and threats from the local Muslim kingdom. The Dutch transported huge stones from the quarry on the Coromandel coast of India, and cut teak from Zabala in East Java. Collect coral stones from the local area, and recruit a large number of reliable and hard-working Chinese laborers from China to build the prototype of Bacheng on the ruins. The main construction projects of Bacheng, such as the excavation of canals and drainage channels, the construction of houses and harbors, Most of the construction of the city walls and protective fortresses was contracted by the Chinese. The Chinese workers were familiar with brick making and bricklaying techniques, which was highly praised by the Dutch.

Van Petersson Kun took advantage of the five-year peace period, relied on the temporary good relationship with the Chinese, and relied on the hard work of the Chinese. Dutch-style canals, castles, city halls, Christian churches, Latin schools and market areas were successively built. Appeared in Batavia.

In order to enrich the population, the Dutch East India Company began to recruit a large number of Chinese people, and the Chinese company is also implementing a large-scale immigration plan. Therefore, in a short period of time, Batavia has rapidly prospered relying on the hard work of the Chinese people.