"Changhua is famous for raising sheep. ()Xiong Buyou knows the famous food of Hainan well, "as famous as Lingao suckling pig." He smacked his mouth and looked greedily at the little goats that were gnawing on the bushes. There are many sand dunes along the coast of Changhua, dense shrubs, and many natural herbs and herbs, which are rich in minerals and salt. The famous Changhua sheep grew up eating such natural feed, and the taste can be imagined.

"Why don't you open the meat." Yellow Paw was already eager to try.

"It looks like it's all farm-raised, and if it's not good, you just have to eat and buy one."

"Whoever will slaughter a sheep?"

"It's a little bit to slaughter a sheep." Yellowpaw was confident, "I've cleaned up hares before. ”

Everyone discussed whether the slaughtering experience between hares and goats could be shared, and came to the gate of Changhua County. The official name of Changhua County is Changhua Thousand Households City, from this name everyone also knows that the county government is just borrowing a place to work, and the Ming army is the real master of the city.

The castle is not large, about the same size as Lingao, and it looks like the walls are three meters high. The whole body is covered with bricks, and the urban defense construction of Daming is still in place in terms of hardware. The software side was not very good: the gates were open, and there was no guard at the gate except for two people who were probably sitting in the form of officials or sentinels.

Xiong Buyou looked up, the name of this door said: "Zhenhai", and said to everyone with a smile: "This door is really suitable for the occasion." It's welcome to us too. ”

A few copper plates for the gatekeepers, a group of people smoothly entered the city, and the city was even more scarce than Lingao. There are only more than 600 households in Changhua County, half of which are military households. There are not even 200 households in the county seat, and the so-called county seat is just a big village for this group of peasants who farm the land with the title of soldier. Naturally, there is no climate business, only a blacksmith shop that repairs agricultural tools, two grocery stores, although everyone has known what Hainan's urban business looks like from Lingao, but seeing such a depressed county, it is still not interesting.

"It's so unfair." Ye Yuming muttered to herself.

“？” Others wondered.

"Don't have to make a traverser, how can you casually earn hundreds of thousands of silver from a county town? We—we—" he pointed to the streets of Changhua County, which were covered in dust and garbage, "and there aren't even a hundred copper plates in this place!" ”

Fang Jinghan, who has a poker face, said: "This place makes me feel like watching a western. He actually had a tape recorder in his luggage, saying that he was going to do fieldwork.

Xiong Buyou tries to communicate with the locals, but finds that his language talent is completely ineffective. It is neither the Cantonese Hainanese dialect, nor the Hokkien dialect spoken by the Fujian shooters, nor the Lingao dialect that he is best at. Rather, a rather strange dialect.

"This is military talk!" Fang Jinghan understood after listening for a while, "The local language in Changhua is very mixed, and one of the major dialects is military dialect. ”

So the task of communication was given to him, but Fang Jinghan could only roughly understand what the other party meant, and he couldn't speak, and he could only communicate with each other.

With the guidance of the locals, Zuihou finally found a fairly large shop on the county street. It's a warehouse, and it's still in Guangzhou.

What do the merchants of Guangzhou do here? Xiong Buyou went to the counter to inquire, this shopkeeper is a genuine Cantonese, surnamed Qian. I was struggling to stay alone in this wild town, and I couldn't even find a few people to talk to. Suddenly, a group of strange vendors who could speak Cantonese came, and they were in high spirits, so they pulled everyone to chat, and called a young man to bring herbal tea. Everyone walked hot, and they just stopped by to inquire about the news.

It turned out that this warehouse was dedicated to the purchase of local soaphorns, medicinal herbs and goats. Many big families in Guangzhou City like the sheep here, and the boss sees that the business is good, so he specially sends people to sit here to buy them.

Xiong Buyou pretended to be a small trader who came to Changhua for the first time and was going to sell goods in Li District, so he asked how it was going here.

The money shopkeeper said that it was quite peaceful here, and pirates rarely came to Changhua, and the most they could do was to dig some water on the shore and grab a few sheep or something. The paddy fields around the county seat are all owned by thousands of households, and although the thousands of households are dilapidated, they can still pull up a team of two or three hundred people, so the pirates do not come to the vicinity of the county seat.

As for the Li District, the money shopkeeper said that the terrain is too rugged, there are many mountains and rocks here, and there are many evil diseases, and ordinary people are reluctant to go to the Li District. The Li people went into the city together for half a month and a month to sell some local products or something. It's still quite peaceful, and I haven't heard of any robberies and killings of Han traders.

The money shopkeeper asked curiously where they came from. Hearing that they were from Lingao, the shopkeeper didn't show much surprise - this made the travelers fully appreciate the slow transmission speed of messages in the past, and they were so busy in Lingao that Changhua, less than 200 kilometers away, didn't know anything. Later, they learned that the boss of the money shopkeeper had only sent a ship from Guangzhou to Changhua once in half a year.

Seeing the salt, sugar, sewing needles, soju and other hardware and miscellaneous goods taken out by the traverser, the money shopkeeper's eyes straightened. Enjoyable items such as sugar and shochu have been out of stock locally for a long time. At the moment, he asked to buy dozens of catties of sugar and soju. He exchanged the hook knife and iron farming tools that the Li people liked.

The traverser took the opportunity to ask him to introduce a guide, and the money shopkeeper agreed.

"It's easy, I'll find you someone."

After the exploration team achieved its goal, they returned to the Zhenhai to report the situation. Another batch of goods for trade was unloaded from the ship.

Early the next morning, the fleet set sail and continued their journey,

The exploration team led by Cui Yunhong had breakfast in the morning, brought equipment and goods, and went to the riverside to meet the guide. The guide that the money shopkeeper found was a guy in his store. Although the Li people are not eating life, the mountains and forests in the Li area are dense, the climate is changeable, and there are all kinds of miasma, which the Han people often regard as fearful. When ordinary people go to Li District, they have to ask "Shuli" to be a guide.

Although this guy is a Han Chinese, his mother is a local Mei Fo Li. His surname is Wang. Since ancient times, Changhua has been a county with more intermarriages between Han and Li. There are a lot of Han-Li mulattoes like this. The guide is not only fluent in the Mobil Le language. And his uncle's family lives in the middle reaches of the Changhua River. The road is very familiar. A perfect fit. Because he was a buddy from a primary school apprentice, although he was only eighteen or nineteen years old, he was very familiar with the world. He smiled when he opened his mouth. Seeing that this group of people was a group of more than a dozen, although they were wearing Han clothes, the men were all bald, and there was actually a Yuli woman mixed in. Everyone carried a large basket on their backs, and most of them also had a long stick wrapped in cloth.

Naturally, the exploration team couldn't say that they were looking for iron ore, so they said that their group was going to Li District to buy medicinal materials, and Cui Yunhong had to pay the guide first, and the guide said that it was not necessary, and it would not be too late to give it when he came back. As long as they give him a pound of white sugar first, let him take it home and give his family a taste of new ones -- white sugar is a very rare thing here.

Ready, a group of people set off in the morning and swam along the Changhua River.

After setting off, everyone realized how wise the decision to ask the guide was. In this barren land, there is almost nothing to call a landmark, and the Changhua River is a river with a particularly large drop in the dry and wet season, which makes it difficult to find its true course during the dry season, when the channel washed out is not only wide but also very scattered. Pools of water and runoff can be found everywhere.

Along the way, Cui Yunhong used a compass and a map to constantly verify whether the direction of the team's march was accurate. Their first goal point is to find the Shiroku River. This tributary of the Changhua River is shown on the map to be about 40 kilometers upstream of the mouth of the Changhua River.

Obviously, the journey will not be easy. This is especially difficult when you are carrying a lot of equipment and a lot of goods. The only hope is that the further upstream you go, the more water will increase, and it will be easier to be able to sail - even if you don't have a boat, it will be easy to build a bamboo raft.

After walking for more than ten miles, I saw that the water potential in the river was slightly larger, and the sand dunes were becoming less and less. Knowing that it is close to the interior. The terrain is getting rougher. The banks are mostly hilly, undulating, the forest vegetation is not dense, and many places are bare with large areas of rocky sandstone. Cui Yunhong saw that many of the hills here are limestone containing a lot of clay, which can be directly fired into high-quality cement without ingredients, so it is also commonly known as "cement rock". I can't help but secretly rejoice in my heart that this place can be built into a cement industrial base in the country.

Cui Yunhong didn't know that in another time and space, Hainan high-grade cement was often fired from Changhua's limestone.

Between the hills and the banks of the river, there are scattered flat lands, many of which have been reclaimed into dry and dry fields. Those uncultivated areas are large barren meadows. During this period, there were some villages scattered around. The guide said that these are all Han Chinese or Han Li mixed villages. Cui Yunhong saw that there was nothing special about these villages, so he only asked the people of the survey team to mark the scale and location on the map.

The survey team traced their route on the map along the way, encountering settlements and places where fresh water was available, and re-surveying them in places where the terrain had changed considerably. These data are the basis for future development paths.

The guide saw that they were not in a hurry along the way, and they had to stop to write and draw after walking for a while, and some people were carrying poles and boxes everywhere, not knowing what they were tinkering with. couldn't help but feel strange, so he said to Cui Yunhong: "Shopkeeper, it takes several days to walk like this to get to Lizhai." ”

Cui Yunhong had to make it up and say that they were looking for herbs. Naturally, the young man did not believe in these words. But if you don't have to work in that dreary warehouse, it's a rare rest to go around, and I don't care if I walk for a few more days. Don't ask any more questions now.