New Shun 1730

"It must have been seven or eight years. I had just graduated from the new school. I remember reading in the newspaper that Korea had opened a new trading port."

"At that time, I had been admitted to a junior college. My family said that it was useless to continue studying, so they asked me to do some business. They said that Korea had opened a port, so they asked me to go and try my luck. The one who is close to the water gets the moon first. My family used to do some business. I have a distant uncle who served in Busan for several years and can speak Korean. So he went there to do business."

Whether it was the new school, the junior college, or the newspaper, they were all unfamiliar to the hitchhiker.

But it was precisely because the peddler went to the new school, and because of the gold that the hitchhiker risked his life to bring out from the gold mine, the class of the two people was closer, and they could talk and laugh together.

If he had studied the Four Books and Five Classics, and passed the exam instead of the junior college but the Jinshi, the huge gap in status between the two people would not have allowed them to have the opportunity to talk to each other.

The small vendors did not look down on the hitchhiker. It was very simple. Those who took passenger ships these days must have a net worth of more than a few hundred taels.

Real coolies, workers, and lower-class immigrants did not take passenger ships. Instead, they were piled up in cargo ships that seemed to transport slaves and ran around.

Since they could take passenger ships, they were considered to be of the same class.

No matter how the money came, even if it was robbed by bandits, as long as they were not caught, according to the values ​​of several regions involved in the capitalist market system of Dashun, including Weihai, it was worthy of a high look.

Making money is the real skill. Who knows if you will be pardoned one day and become a respectable factory owner.

Especially Dengzhou Prefecture was the starting point for Liu Yu to build the navy, and it was also an important source of navy and marines for Dashun. This was the atmosphere. Many veterans who participated in the war against Japan and the conquest of Nanyang became rich, and they always used burning, killing, looting and stealing as capital to brag about at the wine table.

They often say things like "I was in Wandan, Nanyang... the military discipline officer beat us, and those cowards shouted, but I didn't say a word."

Commerce, industry, plunder, wealth, these things subtly influence the three views of these areas at the forefront of the Dashun social transformation.

The popularity of muskets, especially flintlock guns in these places, made equality between people possible.

New education also played a very terrible role in this. Although the new school does not teach ideological systems, on the contrary, it still teaches the Three Character Classic, Thousand Character Classic, and Analects, but the objective scientific explanation of the material world itself is quietly shaping the three views of this group of people.

The "newspaper" mentioned by the small vendor also adds some explanations hidden in the new three views to many things.

For example, the opening of Incheon Port seven or eight years ago mentioned by this small vendor, the newspaper did not only report the incident itself, but also explained in a deeper level why the port was opened.

The cause was ginseng, one of the "Three Treasures of Goryeo" at that time.

A group of people from Korea crossed the border to collect ginseng, catch martens, and shoot deer.

Actually, this is normal.

But the problem is that there were also a group of Shandong people collecting ginseng there at the time. The people from Korea didn't collect ginseng, so they chose to rob.

They ambushed the ginseng collectors from Shandong and killed twelve of them. One of them was good at fighting and ran away when he saw that the situation was not good.

After running away, they gathered two or three hundred people to fight the group of people on the opposite side.

The conflict between the two sides has been going on for a long time. Ginseng has become a high-end medicinal material since the middle of the Ming Dynasty, and the price has been rising. In addition, Dashun began to immigrate to Liaodong in the early stage in light of the lessons of the late Ming Dynasty; Korea also sold ginseng to Japan before, and this thing can be exchanged for Japanese silver.

Therefore, the ginseng collectors on both sides often meet in the border area, and conflicts are common.

To put it bluntly, no one in the ginseng collection business is a good bird, and everyone is brave and aggressive. Moreover, the place where ginseng is collected is remote, just like when Liu Yu was robbed when he went to Yongning Temple, no one cared even if he killed someone.

Once they started, there would be a lot of trouble.

The incident was too serious, and the court intervened, which resulted in an even bigger incident...

Because the place where the two sides fought, or the village where the decisive battle took place, was in Dashun.

And that village was basically full of Koreans.

Dashun was furious and punished several officials in the border area and conducted a comprehensive investigation of the border area. As a result, there were many more Koreans in some places than in Dashun.

This is also a normal phenomenon.

First, Dashun directly launched trade with Japan. Korea had been doing well by monopolizing Sino-Japanese trade as a middleman.

Since Liu Yu monopolized trade with Japan, he directly cut off trade between Korea and Japan.

Then there were issues such as the invasion of Japan, the opening of Busan and the garrisoning of troops, which made the traditional society in Korea disintegrate rapidly.

Korea is not Dashun. With Korea's small peasant economy concept, how can it withstand the emerging capital group of Dashun that has eaten Northeast China, Southeast Asia, and even Europe?

Cotton cloth, porcelain, silk, ironware, farm tools, books, small commodities, cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, glass, etc., within a few years, almost all the precious metals accumulated by Korea's previous trade with Japan were taken away.

The yangban nobles also wanted to live a good life, so what should they do? Continue to exploit the peasants and collect more tribute rice.

Korea is different from Dashun.

It's like the Sino-Western trade at this time. Suppose, just suppose Dashun has no military industrial foundation at all, and wants to buy guns and cannons, and sell some silk and porcelain to solve the problem.

Handicrafts were extremely developed, and agriculture was technically much more advanced than North Korea. Even if Europe had an agricultural revolution at that time, the per-acre yield was not as high as that of Dashun.

North Korea was also different from Japan.

No matter how powerful Japan was, it really had mountains of gold and silver.

What did North Korea have?

Dashun's small peasant economy could be called very strong and very stubborn.

North Korea's small peasant economy could not be called very strong and stubborn, and it was very fragile.

The impact of Busan's opening of the port and Dashun's cutting off of Japan-North Korea trade on North Korea was huge.

It greatly aggravated the social contradictions within North Korea, and the two-class nobles also increased their exploitation of the lower classes to maintain their growing material needs.

The huge social contradictions led to the escape of a large number of people in the northern region.

At this time, Siberian tigers and leopards were everywhere, which was really a harsh government in the true sense of being fiercer than a tiger.

However, Dashun's development of the Northeast was a capital-oriented economic model in which the court was unable to carry out large-scale official immigration.

Just like the Baishan and Tonghua areas in later generations, the Dashun immigrants had not even occupied the vast plains, so why did they run to such a remote place?

Those who really couldn't make it, had no money to go to such a remote place.

The rich invested in the Northeast to make money, and went to such a place, how to transport the soybeans and sorghum they planted?

Liu Yu had already done his best.

South of the Songliao watershed, the power of capital was introduced to occupy areas with convenient transportation and river transportation.

North of the Songliao watershed, relying on semi-official immigrants, they occupied Vladivostok, the estuary of the Heilongjiang River, and other places, and adopted a model of drawing a line to occupy the estuary area first.

But in the end, immigrants to the north had to go around a big circle, bypassing the Korean Peninsula, and the efficiency was not a little bit worse than going directly to the Bohai Sea and up the Liaohe River.

It was different over in Korea, they just ran over.

It was inevitable that Dashun could not station too many military forces in the Korean border area. Only a fool would spend a lot of military funds to station troops there.

Secondly, the smuggling trade in the border area is very frequent.

And all the early Dashun pioneers who ran there were actually willing to accept people who escaped from Korea.

Being a tenant farmer or a hired worker, isn't that all?

If it were just like this, it would actually be helpless. Dashun could only think about getting a group of immigrants to the border with official money.

Spend more money.

After all, there was something wrong in the late Ming Dynasty. Liaodong was the most vulnerable nerve of Dashun.

But someone danced on this nerve, making the emperor furious.

That is, when checking the problems of villages in the border area, someone reported that officials from Korea came to the Korean villages here to collect tribute.

It should be certain that the King of Korea didn't know, and it can be basically confirmed that it was the spontaneous behavior of local officials.

But this matter really caused an uproar for Dashun.

Isn't this nonsense?

They are all from the Confucian cultural circle, with benevolence and righteousness as their foundation. Some officials, out of benevolence and righteousness, turned a blind eye to some people who fled from North Korea.

But coming here to collect taxes...

Liaodong was originally a bad tooth of Dashun. A hundred years ago, this tooth made people here suffer from pain. It has not hurt in recent years. I thought it was cured, but the deep memory of the toothache at that time is still imprinted in my mind.

Running here to collect taxes is equivalent to taking a needle and stabbing Dashun's bad tooth hard.

Of course, this incident itself must have caused an uproar.

But how to deal with this incident actually hides the true attitude of Dashun's decision-making circle.

Dashun is thinking about county-based Korea and northern Vietnam. If it is really county-based, immigration and reclamation can't say anything.

If you want to be a truly universal empire, you have to walk on two legs.

The Industrial Revolution is just one of the legs.

The other leg is to reform Confucianism, or whatever, to make it into a culture that conforms to the industrial age, leading the cultural circle to maintain the cultural motherland, or even the cultural motherland of the entire industrial civilization.

This is why Liu Yu could have pushed the salt administration reform, but he had to hold the Rugao meeting.

The Rugao meeting did not affect the occurrence of the Dashun Industrial Revolution after the Jiangsu reform; but it would affect the cultural transformation of traditional and modern society in the future.

If the spontaneous transformation is successful, the two legs are completed, and the problem of the countyization of the concept of the world is not a big problem.

But as of now, the decision-makers of Dashun do not want to countyize Korea for the time being, because they think the time is not right.

So, this matter is just a standard thunder with little rain.

The emperor was furious, the government was furious, but how to solve it after the anger?

This can only be said to be a pillow for sleepy people, so increase the number of ports opened.

This is not very related to the official emphasis on trade in Dashun, and the trade volume between the two sides is really not large. The fundamental reason is that the decision-makers of Dashun still have the idea of ​​countyization, and the achievements of the previous policy of controlling Mongolia with merchants and opening up the road to Southeast Asia, which makes Dashun want to repeat a similar story.

Through opening ports, gradually increasing control, thinking that the future counties will be like the achievements of the Han and Tang dynasties, this is the way of thinking of the feudal dynasties to expand their territory. If the feudal dynasties simply expand their territory, they will neither change the production relations nor bring in the market subordinate status. It is not imperialism, but just the expansion of the classical empire.

But it happened just at the time when Jiangsu was undergoing its initial industrial revolution, which gave the significance of this increase in the number of ports opened a standard imperialist color.

The saying "Three Treasures of Goryeo" gradually became a common saying as North Korea increased the number of ports opened and continued to relax trade restrictions.

The three treasures of Goryeo are ginseng, mink fur, and deer antlers.

The route from Weihai to North Korea became the most important route for the "three treasures", and with the new students of Dengzhou Prefecture running around the world, this saying was spread everywhere.

But in fact, the real bulk trade was three other things: rice, paper... and women.

And with a rice output far lower than the per capita grain possession of Dashun, it was exported crazily, ensuring the stability of food in Jiangsu during the transition period from Suzhou, Changshu and the world to the starting point of the industrial revolution.