Chapter 563: Soldiers are in Beijing

Jingshi, strictly speaking, this is not a fixed place name, but the traditional name of Daheng for the place where the national capital is located.

After the Sixth Dynasty of Daheng pacified the world, it did not choose the capital of the previous dynasties to be located in Fengyang, Jingzhou, but chose Xiping County, which is more than 100 kilometers away from Fengyang, which is also a city along the Jinghe River and about 80 kilometers away from the sea.

The main reason is that Fengyang was completely destroyed in the war, and if you want to rebuild, it costs a lot of money, so you chose the county seat of Xiping County next door, and Xiping County is the capital division.

Contemporary Jingshi, with a large urban area and an official permanent population of more than one million people, is the most populous and largest urban area in the Daheng Empire, and it is also the most developed city in industry and commerce.

Jingzhou Machinery Bureau, located in the eastern suburbs of the capital, along the Jinghe River, was founded 130 years ago, at the beginning of the year it cost millions of Heng Yuan, and then gradually expanded in scale, and gradually became the largest and most important comprehensive industrial production base of the Heng Empire, and reached its peak during the Heng Olympic War.

In the Hengao War, the machine bureau single-handedly supplied more than half of the entire empire's artillery supplies of various types, more than sixty percent of the supply of muskets, and thirty percent of all kinds of ammunition!

What is even more noteworthy is that the machine bureau also produced almost all the precision manufacturing machinery and equipment of the empire at that time, and owned the first large-scale mechanical textile factory, etc.

At that time, the Jingzhou Machinery Bureau, the factory area stretched along the south bank of the Jinghe River for nearly ten kilometers, with dozens of sub-bureaus, covering all industrial sectors such as mining, steel, shipbuilding, weapons, machinery, and chemical industry, and producing weapons and equipment, which was just one of their many businesses!

How to say it, at the beginning, the Daheng Empire actually built the Jingzhou Machinery Bureau as a comprehensive industrial institution, which can be seen from the name, not called the arsenal, but the Machinery Bureau!

At that time, there were some industrial departments in the world, and there were even technical schools and hospitals in the country.

The well-known Gyeongju University of Technology, the No. 2 National Hospital of Gyeongju, was the affiliated technical college and affiliated hospital of the Machinery Bureau.

At that time, the Jingzhou Machinery Bureau was huge and special, because the Jingzhou Machinery Bureau was the pilot and source of the Daheng Seventh Dynasty's attempt to promote industrialization.

They developed and manufactured the first industrial steam engine and the first shipboard steam engine, which strongly promoted the industrialization of the Daheng Empire.

However, with the gradual collapse of the Daheng Empire, the Jingzhou Machinery Bureau also inevitably declined, and although the factory area that used to stretch for the actual kilometers of the riverbank is still there, it no longer belongs to the Bureau.

After the Hengao War, the bureau was directly dismembered, and its various departments were independent of each other, and within the Jingzhou Machinery Bureau, only the weapons business was retained and became a comprehensive arsenal.

In fact, most of the other arsenals with the name of the Machinery Bureau in Dahengli have such a development process, and the Machinery Bureau basically belonged to comprehensive industrial R&D and production institutions in the early days, and they were all gradually stripped of other businesses and assets after the Hengao War and evolved into a professional arsenal.

The same is true of the Nanzhou Machinery Bureau, which is under the control of the Daheng Unification Army.

Jingzhou Machinery Bureau was brilliant in the past, and it is still brilliant today!

The current Jingzhou Machinery Bureau is still the largest and most technologically advanced comprehensive arsenal in the Daheng Empire, with more than 30,000 employees.

Last year, it began to successively switch to the production of rear-loading rifled weapons, and has now remodeled the production line and built a new production line, with a monthly output of 20,000 Luo'an-3 rifles, and a monthly output of more than 150 rear-loading rifled guns of various types, capable of mass production of brown gunpowder propellants, the production of 13 mm all-metal bullets, and rear-loading rifled artillery shells of various calibers.

In recent months, it has also begun to urgently imitate the production of rapid-fire mortars, and just last month, more than 100 rapid-fire mortars have been supplied.

The weapons production capacity of this machine bureau is equivalent to the sum of the Fuyuan Ordnance Factory and the Nanzhou Machinery Bureau!

If it weren't for the bureau's huge production capacity, the Daheng Unification Army would not have listed the machine bureau as the main operational target of the first phase when formulating the Northern Expedition battle plan.

The First Goal of the Second Cavalry Army and the Third Cavalry Army was not even to conquer the Beijing Division, nor was it to encircle the point to send reinforcements, but the first goal was to seize or besiege or destroy the Jingzhou Machinery Bureau.

The Jingzhou Machinery Bureau is the first combat target of the cavalry of the Daheng Unification Army, which has a total of more than 50,000!

As for encircling the point to send reinforcements, seizing the Beijing Division, etc., that can only be regarded as the second combat goal.

On 21 June, the Ninth Cavalry Division of the Second Cavalry Corps, after a long long journey, fought with the 10th Cavalry Division and the 11th Cavalry Division of the 2nd Cavalry Corps to reinforce the enemy with more than 8,000 men.

However, the battle was not completely over, and the Ninth Cavalry Division withdrew from the battlefield first, and then continued north!

The Ninth Cavalry Division, which went north from the south, did not go straight to the Jingshi city along the railway line, but when it was more than 30 kilometers away from the capital city, it broke away from the detachment and kilometers and went directly to the southeast.

Because their goal is the Jingzhou Machinery Bureau, not the capital!

In order to rush to the Jingzhou Machinery Bureau as soon as possible, and also to avoid leaving time for the enemy to deal with it, the Ninth Cavalry Division did not even care about the physical fitness of the war horses, and forcibly rode a horse, and finally successfully arrived five kilometers south of the Jingzhou Machinery Bureau on June 21!

But Bai Yuntian Shaoqing, the commander of the Ninth Cavalry Division, did not let the cavalry under his command continue to advance!

Because even though the Second Cavalry Army rushed all the way north, it was still too late!

The Beijing division had long been informed of the news of the fiasco on the southern front, and had already begun to shrink its forces and build positions around the Beijing division.

When the 9th Cavalry Division arrived near the Jingzhou Machinery Bureau, what it saw was already the enemy's outer defense line deployed in advance.

Bai Yuntian Shaoqing, who was riding on a horse, looked at the increasingly looming enemy position in front of him, thinking about the next decision, and several officers of the Ninth Cavalry Division on the side were also holding binoculars to observe, and at the same time began to draw a simple diagram with a pen and paper.

Bai Yuntian's chief of staff, Feng Xuekun, rode his horse to his side, and said loudly: "The scout cavalry on our periphery also searched one side, they set up a total of three defense lines on the front and left and right sides around the machine bureau, the left and right defense lines, because of the proximity to the industrial areas on the left and right sides, we have not been able to figure it out for the time being, and the field defense line in front of it is about five kilometers wide, and the specific strength is difficult to estimate, but there are at least more than 5,000 people!" ”

"And we also found several suspicious artillery positions of them, judging from their artillery positions, they should all be equipped with rear-loading guns, and there are quite a few of them!"

"We are at a disadvantage in terms of strength and firepower!"

n.