He who takes what he wants, he will hold on to it.

Since Meng Xin and E Shun surrendered, Li Su has squeezed a lot of strength from them, and it is obviously not an excellent imperial technique, so at this time, it is necessary to give them blood transfusions and make blood to taste some sweetness.

Throughout November and the month of 191, the entire territory of Jianning County and the surrounding area of Yongchang County's easternmost area of Jiedong were in full swing in an atmosphere of "getting rich".

Tuntian Duwei Yandao, who had already had two years of excellent farming experience in Jiameng and Yandao, was also transferred by Li Su to the border area between Jianning and Yongchang again, renovating roads, building terraces, and cultivating tea forests on hillsides, and doing things in full swing. As for the follow-up tuntian renovation work on the Yandao side, it will be handed over to the new generation of tuntian officials trained by Guoyuan to take over.

Moreover, Li Su did not summon people in vain, at the moment when Guoyuan arrived in Nanzhong, Li Su had already asked Liu Bei in advance and directly promoted him from the captain of the Diannong to the captain of the Diannong.

The lieutenant was nominally only responsible for the tuntian affairs of a county at the same time, but after being promoted to the lieutenant, according to the official position of Liu Bei's camp, he could be in charge of the tuntian construction affairs of the entire Nanzhong region or the Tuntian construction affairs of the Governor's Mansion. In the future, if he is further promoted to the general of Diannong, he will be able to be responsible for the affairs of the entire Yizhou.

The climate in the south is warm and humid, the land is fertile, and the people do not work hard to cultivate, so the people are abundant. On the contrary, because of the rapid growth of plants and the abundance of wild fruits, birds and beasts, the population of Yongchang County is 15.6 million, but the fields are insufficient, so the per capita ration is very low.

Therefore, before Li Su presided over Tuntian, Yongchang's situation was almost in a lazy state of "the people have nothing to eat, but there is also no work to do, so they lie down and rest and work less to reduce energy consumption". Therefore, as long as Li Su is willing to teach the barbarian king to expand production, in fact, there is a surplus labor force that can build a large number of buildings.

In just two months, the brothers Meng Wei and Meng Xin witnessed the tremendous changes that are changing with each passing day.

On both sides of the mountain road around the county of more than 100 miles, at least several rows of terraced fields have been opened, accumulating more than 500,000 Han mu, and they are all the kind that have been repaired with stones on the edge of the terraces, that is, they can store water and grow rice.

In the north, after two years of experience, Guoyuan calculated the cost of developing terraced fields—it takes about 15 people a year of manpower to open a dry field to open one person of arable land. The paddy field is twenty-five times larger, because the water is stored along the stone masonry.

That is to say, the Han system of tax collection is calculated according to the per capita cultivation of 100 Han mu (converted into 30 mu in modern times), and to build a new 100 Han mu of terraced fields, it is necessary to pay 15 to 25 people to work for a whole year to open up the wasteland.

500,000 acres of terraced fields, enough for 5,000 strong men to cultivate the full quota, and all of them are paddy fields for growing rice, originally at least 130,000 strong men worked for a year to open up the wasteland, but now they only do two months of winter farming, the time has been shortened by six times, and it is said that six times the number of people who have to be invested is more than 700,000 laborers to open up the wasteland.

But in fact, there are only 500,000 or 600,000 Kunming Heiyi in the entire Yongchang County, accounting for one-third of the population of Yongchang County, and there are 780,000 Ailao Baiyi and 340,000 Han people.

Moreover, the Kunming Heiyi are not all under Meng Wei, there are also some small tribes that do not listen to his dispatch, Meng Wei only has more than 300,000 troops in Yongchang, and there are more than 100,000 troops in Qinzang County and other places in Jianning, and the total number of Meng Wei troops in the two counties is only 500,000.

(Note: When the Eastern Han Dynasty registered the population of Yongchang County and Yuewang County, the caliber was different from that of Jianning County and Qiqi County.) Yongchang Yuewang counts all the Yi people in the number of households, and Jianning only counts Han people, so there are very few people in Jianning when you look at the archives, only 1340,000, but in fact, there are 340,000 barbarians. And Yongchang's 15.6 million is counted in the Han and Yi countries, because when the Ailao Kingdom surrendered, it was 'dedicated to the household registration book', which means that the barbarian king himself has a systematic population count. ）

Among the 500,000 people in the Meng Wei Department, it is necessary to remove the old people and children who will not serve the conscription to build terraces, so in fact, it only takes about half of the average yield manpower to build so many terraced fields, which almost doubles the efficiency, which made Li Su stunned at first, and the Meng barbarians, who do not know how to do it, are even more emotionally moved by the efficiency of Guoyuan's wealth.

For this reason, one day in the lunar month, Li Su once asked Guoyuan in person: "Zini, these rice fields in Nanzhong are all paddy fields, why is it difficult to repair and manpower, far lower than the paddy fields of Yandao, and almost the same as the dry fields of Jiameng that can only grow radishes and wheat." What's your magic trick? ”

Guoyuan also did not hide his selfishness, and revealed the secret very proudly: "Tuntian has been tuntian for a long time, so he is good at observing the environment and taking advantage of the situation." Although Nanzhong Tuntian is a paddy field, it saves a project compared to Yandao and Jiameng, so it is fast. ”

Li Su: "Oh? There is something to say thoroughly, what is saved. ”

Guoyuan: "After I arrived here, I observed the weather for a period of time and asked the local elders to find out - the local elders all said that Yongchang and Jianning are like spring and winter in all seasons, so there is no autumn and winter freezing, and the four seasons are spring rain, and there are no three sunny days.

Therefore, I decided to omit the irrigation waterways of the terraces and the waterwheels that carry water, and even the water storage stone edge can be slightly worse, and the water can be slightly seeped downward, but the rain can meet the year-round irrigation. It is precisely because of the elimination of irrigation considerations that the amount of work can be reduced by 40%. ”

As soon as Li Su heard this, he suddenly realized, and he was also emotional: the climate of the tropical rainforest is cool, where to consider the problem of "irrigation", just throw a handful of seeds on the ground and wait for it to grow on its own. It's no wonder that the tropical peoples of Southeast Asia can be lazy and still have enough to eat.

In this place of Yunnan, it seems that there is a little less rain in the lunar month and the first month, but the middle month and a half can be rested without farming, and the rain is always sufficient during the crop growth period of more than ten months.

However, 500,000 acres of terraced fields are only an additional 5,000 strong men to find farm work, or an additional 20,000 or 30,000 people (one strong man corresponds to a family of five), which is not much of an anti-natural welfare at first glance.

In a short period of time, what really made the Meng Xin brothers see the curative effect of the Han Tuntian official's guidance on farming was the planting of tea trees, peppercorns, and pepper.

Yunnan originally had wild tea, and in the process of organizing the terraced fields, Guoyuan directly planned the areas on the slopes on both sides of the river valley, higher than the planned terraced areas, into tea fields and pepper fields.

The amount of work required to level the slope of the hill is much smaller, because as long as you follow the trend of the mountain, each row of tea trees can be at one height, and there is no need to level out large blocks of flat land like planting rice. With just tens of thousands of people busy for two months, hundreds of thousands of acres of tea plantations can be burned and logged to renovate hundreds of thousands of acres.

The cultivation of pepper and pepper is actually easier after breaking through the technical difficulties - peppers are vines, and they grow on large trees in the wild, and a very small number of rattan peppers (peppercorns) will grow along the stone walls of the rocks.

Later generations who have planted pepper peppers know that as long as a shelf is built to induce pepper plants to wind, artificial planting can be realized.

Although there is no ready-made rattan pepper rack for sale, but there are a lot of bamboos in Nanzhong, and once the local aborigines learn how to build a frame, how to guide the climbing vines to be wound up at the beginning, and teach these technical details, large-scale planting is simply easier than opening a tea field - because there is no need to level the land at all, even if the ground on the mountain is uneven, cut off the length of the bamboo pole of the shelf, and trim the top, you can grow pepper anywhere.

Guoyuan brought at least hundreds of Tuntian technicians to teach these illiterate Kunming Heiyi farming skills by hand, and they all learned them in less than two months.

After inspecting their own territory, the brothers Meng Wei and Meng Xin asked the Han account office to calculate an account and found that as long as it took one year, the reverse export of pepper to the northern region could be realized, and it could develop to sell tea within two or three years. At that time, as long as the mass production of peppercorns is produced, it can be exchanged for salt that is not produced locally, and there is no need to exchange it with grain or animal skins.

Animals and lacquer can be exchanged for Shu brocade in the north, so that the upper class of barbarians can improve their lives. After all, the Southwest Yi did not have the ambition of nomads, they did not resist the vigilance of wearing Shu Jin, and they were not afraid of being economically controlled by others. Moreover, it is so hot in Nanzhong, and the smooth silk is very comfortable to wear, even from the perspective of practicality.

……

While Guoyuan produced hundreds of thousands of Han acres of terraced fields and more tea forests and rattan pepper plantations within two months, there was also a greater windfall, which Li Su did not expect, that is, Guoyuan actually leveled the mountain road from Qinzang County to Qidong County by the way.

In order to make it easier for future business travelers, some sections that could only be carried by cattle and horses because of rough and bumpy roads can finally be upgraded to oxen and horse-drawn carts, so that the land transportation capacity has also increased by several percent or even more than doubled on the original basis.

Li Su knew before he came that he wanted to open up a new generation of "Shu Shen Poison Road" trade routes, and only the two sections from Chengdu to Kunming and Buwei to the Indian Ocean could be transported by water, while between Kunming and Buwei, most of them could only be transported by land.

The loss of freight on the 900-mile land route will certainly be greater than the sum of the 1,800-mile Yangtze River waterway from Chengdu to Kunming and the 2,200-mile Nu River waterway from Buwei to the Indian Ocean.

Generally speaking, even if there is a car carrying goods by land, it is normal for the freight to be five times more expensive than that of a boat, and 900 miles of land to pull a car can be discounted into 4,500 miles of waterway, and the above two waterways add up to only 4,000 miles.

What's more, Li Su has also seen Jianning and Yongchang in the past two months, and knows that between Kunming and Buwei, although there are no lofty mountains and mountains, you can always find hilly roads that are easy to walk, but the unevenness of the roads must be very serious. The locals are carrying loads or cattle and horses.

Li Su was very surprised at how Guo Yuan could complete such a large amount of work so quickly when he first saw that Guo Yuan was leveling the fields on both sides of the river valley along with the roads—although it seemed that he was only building a few narrow terraces and repairing the lowest road in the middle, but after all, there was so much extra leveling work out of thin air.

But Guo Yuan soon told Li Su: "Leveling the lowest land is not as laborious as the terraced layer at the high level, because it can rely on heavy livestock." I think that in addition to domesticating cattle and horses, the southerners also domesticated giant beasts such as elephants.

I used oxen and horses to scrape the ground and level the ground according to the clippers used in the northern tuntian, magnified several times, and let the elephants drag them away. As long as the elephant is fed a few trees every day, a 20,000-pound giant elephant can level a two-mile dirt road. After the giant elephant passes, manually use a hoe and shovel to tamp it a little and then pass the car. ”

Li Su didn't believe it at first, but then went to the construction site to see the elephant grader displayed by Guoyuan, and was immediately dumbfounded: "Zini, you are really a talent!" Since we can even think of leveling the ground with elephants, let's make a magnified plough with several rows of ploughshares, so that Kunming Yi can learn to use elephants to plow the land, wouldn't it be beautiful? ”

Guo Yuan touched his beard and thought about it: "Du Du is a clever plan, but it is dark under my lights, and now it is not the spring plowing season, I didn't expect that elephants can still plough the land, I just think that I can level the terraces and smooth the road." If they could really use elephants to plough the fields, these barbarians would definitely be more in awe of the ingenuity of our Han people. ”