On the third day of arriving in Zhibuwei County, Yongchang County, after receiving the hospitality of Li Taishou and others, and after slightly adapting to the climate and recovering his strength, Li Su diligently launched a visit to the local area.

Li Su got up early in the morning of the same day and left the county seat to explore westward.

A short half of the way can be ridden, and the rest can only be supported by a guide. There were uneven hills along the way, but there were not many steep mountains and deep valleys, until in the evening, when the last hill was finally turned over, a surging river suddenly appeared in front of me.

"Whew-I'm tired, this river is Zhoushui?"

This is the key to Li Su's future farming and infrastructure planning for Yongchang County - to open up the sea trade route.

Cheng Lu Kai, the young county who was in charge of serving as a guide, hurriedly replied: "Governor, this is indeed Zhou Shui. Yaodian is rumored to come from the Buzhou Mountain in the extreme west, hence the name. The governor has worked hard, drink some water. ”

Zhou Shui is the Nu River of later generations, the so-called from the Buzhou Mountain is obviously nonsense, Li Su knows the common sense of geography, whether it is the Nu River or the Lancang River, it is the same as the Yangtze River, from the Tanggula Mountain on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Yongchang locals think that the upper reaches of Zhoushui are estimated to be only more than 1,000 miles at most, but in fact, the Nu River has passed 2,000 kilometers, or 4,000 miles, to the south of Yunnan, and it is only more than 1,000 miles downstream from Myanmar to the sea.

Li Su let people wipe their sweat, spread out the tent to rest in the shade, drink water and eat to recover their strength, after all, they have been walking for most of the day, and it is definitely impossible to return to the county seat tonight, so they can only camp here. Although there are one or two scattered tiny primitive villages along the river below the hills, it seems that there are only a dozen or so families, and they will definitely not be able to accommodate the hundreds of people who are personally guarded by Li Su.

The two soldiers helped him knead the calves of the leggings, and Li Su continued to ask, "How long have we been walking today?" How far is it from a straight line of Buwei? ”

Lu Kai: "We walked seventy miles today, and it should be fifty miles in a straight line from the county seat, and the mountain road has to be detoured." If the governor is too far away and wants to ship ships and goods to the Shan country, it is also possible to go to the shipyard on the bank of Cangshui in the east of the county, which is only thirty miles away from the county seat. Moreover, the water also flows south into the Shan country, and eventually into the sea. ”

The Cangshui is the Lancang River, and after flowing to Myanmar and Thailand, it is the Mekong River. Although for doing business with Shan people, going through Cangshui is the same as Zhoushui, Li Su knows that the key point is that the Mekong River finally enters the sea on the east bank of the Indochina Peninsula, so wouldn't it be necessary to make a detour of the Strait of Malacca to the West in the end?

Therefore, it is better to walk an extra 40 miles on the side of Buwei County, and it is absolutely impossible to take an extra 2,600 miles of sea road in order to save these 40 miles of mountain road.

"Absolutely not, you don't know geography, you can only go to Zhoushui if you want to poison yourself." Li Su directly vetoed, and Lu Kai and the others stopped speaking.

In fact, if you want to say that the road is closer, you should take the Ivalodi River in Myanmar further west and enter the sea from Yangon, the capital of Myanmar in later generations. It's just that if you want to go to the Ivalodi River from Buwei County, you have to go west to a Gaoligong Mountain, which is the boundary mountain of the Sino-Burmese border in later generations, and the whole process is a snow-capped mountain with a relative altitude of more than three or four thousand meters. The Han people really can't get by, so they compromise.

Anyway, the Nu River flows into the Indian Ocean from the west coast of the Indochina Peninsula, which is not less than a few hundred miles. Ninety years ago, when the traitors of the Ailao State were destroyed, the part of the Ailao Yi who refused to surrender turned over the Gaoligong Mountain to rebuild the Shan State, and it is said that "seven or eight out of ten of the dead who went over the mountain" were "directly reduced by four-fifths" of the terrifying logistical punishment.

Even the Nu River, which Li Su is now underfoot, is not easy for the Han people to reach - outside the north gate of Buwei County, it is backed by the "Nushan" mountain range, which is the watershed separating the Nu River from the Lancang River.

If you go a hundred miles north from the county seat of Buwei, the Nushan Mountain Range is already a towering snow-capped mountain state, and it is impossible to climb it at all. It's just that when the earth's crust moved to the vicinity of Buwei County, the "wrinkles" of the earth's crust suddenly stretched, from a snowy mountain with a relative height of more than 3,000 meters to a hill of only three or four hundred meters.

It is precisely because of this that when Li Su and his entourage arrived at the bank of Zhoushui, in addition to feeling hot at first because of the fatigue of exercise, and after camping and resting, they soon felt that the climate was acceptable.

Li Su lit the lights in the tent and prepared for dinner, so he talked and laughed with Lu Kai, Nang Xi, Li Hui and others: "When I was in Yuyu County, the place where I camped was close to Ye Yuze, I didn't think that the climate was so high, but I didn't expect that this place is four hundred miles south of Yuyu, but it is cooler, and there is no nuisance of poisonous insects, fleas and lice, what is the reason?" ”

Lu Kai explained: "Naturally, because this place is not far from Buzhou Mountain, and dozens of miles to the north is the Snow Mountain, how can it be hot and poisonous? It is the common miasma in Nanzhong, and it does not exist in the vicinity of Buwei County.

I have been waiting for a long time to hear that the governor is tired and disgusted with miasma, so I specially asked the hunters here to prepare some clean ice drinks and prepare wolf-paste, and ask the governor to use it. ”

Saying that, in order to please Li Su, these locals actually served a can of cold drinks like smoothies, and used the cherished wolf sauce (jujube sauce) and shallot leaf rue flower dew, which are not surprising, Li Su also ate it in the county a few days ago.

He was curious that it was almost the end of the third month of the lunar calendar, where did the ice and snow come from in the tropics?

Lu Kai saw Li Su's curiosity, and proudly explained: "It is all pure ice and snow that the hunters picked on Buzhou Mountain while the sky is getting dark, Buzhou Mountain is regarded as a holy mountain by the natives, we know that Dudu does not drink raw water, but these ice and snow will never have filth, these snow containers have also been boiled before, and they are also covered with boiled linen, which will definitely not be polluted." ”

Li Su secretly thought: It seems that I love baths, love cold drinks, fear of heat, and don't drink raw water...... These reputations have spread all over the world, and even people in the most remote and southwestern counties in the south know it.

Forget it, after all, the body has resistance, and people in every era have the microflora environment of each era, and they don't get sick if they don't eat cleanly. Suvu shepherds sheep and drinks the ice water of Lake Baikal.

……

After enjoying the smoothie drink at the end of March in the tropics, Li Su officially supervised the locals to start planning a shipyard and tuntian in the vicinity, and preparing to set up a new county seat here.

After all, there are still seventy miles of land from the county of Zhibu Wei County, and another county can definitely be set up on the seventy miles of roads in the north of the mainland, if you are really ready to build and pioneer.

And there is actually a lot of narrow and fertile land on both sides of the Nu River. You don't even need to make terraces, just plant directly along the river, set fire to the wasteland first, and the alluvial plain of the river valley for more than ten miles nearby is absolutely no problem to feed thousands of households.

In addition, there is no winter in Nanzhong, so even if the burning starts at the end of March and the planting is not planted until May, there is no fear of delaying the agricultural time.

Don't look at the population of Yongchang County with a population of more than 1.5 million, after all, it is equivalent to most of Yunnan Province and part of Myanmar in later generations, and there is still a lot of fertile land that can be planted idle.

The imperial court did not develop it in previous years, completely because it felt that this was already the end of the world, and no matter how well it was developed, it was restricted by logistics and transportation, and the materials handed over could not be fed back to the Central Plains, so it was too lazy to care.

Li Su came prepared, and he brought dozens of experienced shipbuilders, hundreds of ordinary carpenters, and dozens of shipyard masons with him. It took a few days for the craftsmen to choose the land of the new county town, and then began to cut wood, dig earth, build kilns, and burn bricks, starting from scratch step by step.

With a simple house to live in, the desert has been burned, and a batch of timber and masonry have been stored, only then did the pattern French style be taken out and the shipyard was officially built. As for the drawings of the ship, they were also left, and there were 200 and 400 ships.

When Lu Kai, Li Hui and others first saw the drawings of the river-sea dual-purpose boat that Li Su took out, they were worried about whether the boat would be too big and they would not be able to get through the places where they encountered dangerous shoals and reefs and insufficient drafts downstream, but Li Su said that there was no need to worry at all - the "earth wrinkles" in the Hengduan Mountains have passed, and the south will only become flatter and flatter, at most there will be more miasma in the dense forest, but there is absolutely no need to worry about navigation and draft.

This is already considered the "middle and lower reaches of the Nu River", who has ever seen a river in the upper reaches of the river is fine, but when it reaches the middle and lower reaches, the altitude and draft are still problems?

It's like the Yangtze River is more than 6,000 kilometers, the first 4,000 kilometers are in the mountains, there are Qinghai, Tibet and Bashu mountains, but the last 2,000 kilometers are to Huguang, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang.

Lu Kai and Li Hui saw that Li Su said so conclusively, and they didn't stop it for a while, but just said that they would send scouts or expeditions to build the first batch of small boats in the future, and then go down the river to explore the way and find out the geography of the south.

After seeing everyone's reactions, Li Su has a greater grasp of his own decision-making: to put it bluntly, this is the inspiration of piercing a layer of window paper, just because everyone misjudged "this is the upper or lower reaches of the Nu River", which led to other people's overestimation of the difficulty of navigation, only Li Su knew that this was already downstream, he was bold.

This does not just prove that the failure of the predecessors to complete is not a technical problem, but a judgment problem. Just like the technology of seagoing ships more than 100 years before Columbus, in fact, it has been able to reach the Americas, but no careerist has the courage to send death to the depths of the Atlantic.

It's a pity that Li Su himself doesn't have time to stay here for too long, and this kind of long-term construction can't let him supervise it all the time. So after staying in Buwei County for more than half a month, and making a list of species such as "long-staple cotton" that he would focus on looking for from the poison country in the future, and handing it to Lu Kai and the Li family, Li Su decided to leave.

Of course, before leaving, he did not forget to ask the new Taishou Li Ji and others as representatives to jointly praise the new policy system of official election, finance and taxation implemented by General Zhengxi in Yongchang, and listed some of the benefits and achievements of this new policy experiment. After Li Su took it, it will naturally be useful in the future-

As for the personnel system of "the list of candidates for local selection and the selection of the final officials by the state pastor" in the first stage of the "reform of the land and return to the stream" in Nanzhong, as long as it is slightly improved, the transition from the Han Dynasty's inspection system to the Sui and Tang dynasties' "tribute system" can be achieved.

And "allowing the Nanban to replace paying taxes with military service and shipyard repair" can also be used as a transition from the current tax system of the Han Dynasty to "mutual substitution of rents and mediocrity".

Li Su has worked hard in Nanzhong for more than half a year, and the excellent system that has achieved real results is always less resistant than directly taking out a reform that will divide the personnel and financial interests of the big families out of thin air.

After all, this is a gun with a stick pointing at Sang and scolding Huai, the stone of the mountain can attack jade, and there is an extra modification of the boiled frog to disintegrate the will to resist. Li Su is an old yin beep, and he has always done things one by one.

Before leaving, Li Su's last sentence was for Guan Yu: "Yun Chang, the southern expedition has been delayed, and you have to live here for the entire summer and autumn." However, I finally thought about it, when the time comes, your crusade against Yuewang this autumn should be advanced to the end of July.

I will persuade the lord to let Yide pretend to cross the river on the northern front at the beginning of July, and attract Gao Yi's main force to the north line of Moshui half a month in advance. When Gao Yi's main force is exhausted, you steal his lair from behind, and you will definitely win the battle. The reason for the advance was also to dismantle his vigilance-

Everyone will guard against the attack of the enemy army when the autumn is cool, if Yide attacks Yuewang, and crosses the Dadu River in July, it is indeed necessary to harvest in August to reach the hinterland of Yuewang. But you are different, cross Lushui from the southern route in July, and you can reach Qiongdu in July. Gao Yi just wanted to break his head, and he would not have thought that someone would take advantage of the lack of military food and run for 300 miles a month before the autumn grain came down. ”

(Note: Guan Yu's route is equivalent to a sneak attack on Liangshan Yizhou from Panzhihua north along Lushui.) ）

Guan Yu clenched his fists and agreed: "Don't worry, I won't mistake the time." Gao Yi must not have imagined that we could make an appointment in advance for the time difference between three or four months and thousands of miles apart. In the past six months, Gao Shun and I have been able to train in Nanzhong. ”