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After discussing the general direction and not having time to stop and rest, Chen Kai and Zheng Chenggong boarded the ship separately and left.

Time is running out, and it can be used to describe the current state. Watching Zheng Chenggong board the ship and leave, Chen Kai also stepped on the trestle bridge, stopped to look north, and followed the story of Dayu's water control and three times without entering the house, and laughed at himself by the way, so he ordered to pull the anchor and set sail and return to Guangzhou.

Sailing on the sea, the return journey was long, and this small fleet gradually got out of the sight of the hunting island and flew away. It will be at least 10 days before we return to the front line of the political struggle. At this time, far away from the destination of Guangzhou, Guo Zhiqi and Lian Chengbi were not in Guangzhou.

The new group of Cantonese people returned by boat and entered the city, but they were not in a hurry to return to the alleys where they had lived in those years, but divided into several teams to climb the city wall under the leadership of the leading officials and the defenders of the city.

They are all military households of the four guards in Guangzhou. When Chen Kai rescued, he was inspired by the old general Feng Yao, and the four guards were ordered by Chen Kai to delay the evacuation of the people, and finally the whole army was wiped out in the city. After Chen Kai escorted them to Chaozhou, they settled down in Chaozhou and Zhongzuo, and for four consecutive years, they finally had a chance to return to their hometowns, so after getting off the ship, they were led by officials to the place where their fathers, brothers, sons and nephews were martyred to pay respects. And this is also what Chen Kai had agreed with Li Dingguo before leaving, and the Ming army defending the city would have to cooperate with him.

On the south city wall adjacent to the wharf, the right guard of Guangzhou as the last barrier of the defenders once swore to defend there, and at the moment before the fall of the city wall, the hereditary commander of the right guard commanded Ma Chengzu's roar is still in his ears. And now, Chen Kai has really fulfilled his promise back then.

"I'm back, thanks to Lord Chen, I'm back."

Most of the four guards in Guangzhou have been here since the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, and even those high-ranking officials and commanders have lived here for a hundred years. In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the guards were indeed not very well looked down upon, and even in the Southern Ming Dynasty, there were batches of guards directly to the Manchu Qing Dynasty, for the Manchu Qing Dynasty to pay for the grain, as if they were a landlord, completely forgetting their responsibilities and obligations as a local army.

However, things in the world can never be generalized, just like there will always be a few clean officials like Hai Rui in the corruption everywhere, Guangzhou Siwei in history is in Guangzhou at the cost of almost the total annihilation of the Qing army to make the last resistance, and under Chen Kai's Buhler, their sacrifice also has greater value and reward.

They did not know exactly which officers and soldiers of the guard post died where, so the defenders simply arranged for them to pay a memorial service in one place, put incense on them, and burned some paper money, just as they had done in Chaozhou and in the center of the left. The families of the military families of the right guard of Guangzhou were here, and the left guard was on the wall further north that separated the old and new towns. As for the avant-garde and the rearguard, they were placed in the west and east of the city respectively, just like them, but some of them had not yet arrived at the place.

After a long time, the paper money burned out, and most of the tears stopped, and under the leadership of the leading officials, they went down to the city again, and walked towards the south gate.

Walking on the street of the new city, most of the shops on both sides have been opened, and the wharf is constantly transported in and out, which also makes these shops in the south of the city seem extraordinarily prosperous.

In the rescue of that year, the new city of Guangzhou was the first to organize the evacuation, and the loss of personnel here was much smaller than that of the old city. After this period of re-homeland movement, groups of people continued to return from Chaozhou, from Zhongzuo, from Shangxiachuan Island, and even from the surrounding areas of Guangzhou City. They got the houses and shops they used to have, and they also ran the businesses they had done, and the new town began to quickly become full, very lively, and in a trance there was a bit of the atmosphere of the year.

The stunned appearance of time and space appeared on their faces, and all this, until they passed through the city gate and entered the new city, reality came back again.

Under the double gate, Guangzhou City used to be almost the most prosperous street, the shops were scattered and open, inside and outside the shops, there were also some people who were busy, but compared to the flowers that had been, it was obviously not even touched. This gap, in fact, is not so huge, just because of the comparison of tonight, especially just passed through the new city in the south of the city, and the difference during the period is infinitely magnified in my heart.

Most of the guards in the city lived in clusters, and the high-ranking officials commanded the various departments to live in the bamboo camp and other places, while the Han guards lived in other places. The guards and military households of the brigade gradually diverted and reintegrated into the city, but it was their livelihood, but they had to wait for Chen Kai to come back before discussing with Li Dingguo.

The population in Guangzhou is increasing day by day, but there is a limit to this recovery, for example, the people living in Chaozhou and Zhongzuo are almost finished, and on Henan Island, after a period of screening, the number of people on the island has passed the peak and is declining continuously. It is estimated that it will not be long before the people who can come back will come back, and the rest of the scattered ones can be handed over to the prefecture and county yamen to be responsible.

The people living outside the city began to fill the vacuum in the city again, and outside the city, the spring ploughing season had already arrived, and the county governments were encouraging and organizing the people to carry out spring ploughing and production. Last year, the war situation in Guangdong was roughly settled, and the people got rid of the oppression of the Pingnan and Jingnan feudal domains and the Qing court.

In the past few months, the farming has already begun. In Chaozhou, Huizhou, Qiongzhou and the counties in eastern Guangdong, basically as in normal days, the people plow, breed, and plant according to the normal agricultural time, and water and remove insects step by step. At most, it is the Huizhou side, because the fighting has been delayed until February, there have been some delays or disturbances in some areas of the people, which may affect some harvests.

"Spring ploughing is one inch deep, and you can top the dung once. Spring ploughing is unwilling to be busy, and the face is hungry and yellow after autumn. ”

"One more hoe in the spring, one more in the fall."

"Catch one more moth in the spring, and harvest one more grain in the autumn."

According to the experience of agricultural production for thousands of years, the Chinese people have already summed up too much knowledge about agriculture, and it has been passed down by word of mouth through proverbs, folk songs and many other forms, and has been passed down to this day.

Just like the eastern part of Guangdong, the same ballad is sung on the ground in western Guangdong. However, compared with those areas that were less affected by the war last year, western Guangdong can be said to have suffered the hardest hit by the military disaster, and many places in last year's summer planting and autumn harvest were abandoned because of the rampant soldiers, and there were many people who ate wild vegetables, tree bark, and grass roots to survive. Even, this is considered good, if you eat Guanyin soil, most of you won't see this year.

The county governments are still trying their best to organize spring ploughing, and most of the warehouses in these prefectures and counties have been used up in last year's campaign, and can only be used up by the seizures from the city of Guangzhou and the newly recovered prefectures and counties. For this reason, Lian Chengbi started this work early, and after Chen Kai left, he hurriedly left Guangzhou City, rushed to Zhaoqing Fucheng to sit down, and even went down to the counties to supervise production.

It is inevitable to be busy, and even in order to go to one more county as soon as possible, it is common to stay up late and hurry. Even Chengbi practiced it, and those civil officials in western Guangdong naturally did not dare to ignore it, and one by one they were all so busy that their feet did not touch the ground, and they were expecting some achievements during the summer harvest.

The governor of Liangguang has been made into Tuntian Road in western Guangdong, and he is very happy to do it. Even the city is like this, Guo Zhiqi's side is not idle, first walked around the Ming army in Guangzhou, and then rushed to Foshan to inspect the production of weapons that are equally important to them at the moment.

Foshan, where there are no iron ore resources, is the most important steel production base in Guangdong. The raw materials used here come from the mountains of northern and western Guangdong, and the crude iron that has been roughly processed in the place of origin is transported to Foshan through the waterways of the Xijiang and Beijiang rivers for further processing. As for the fuel required for processing, there are no coal mines here, but charcoal is burned. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, it was not the industrial production of later generations, and charcoal was barely competent.

It was not an ideal steel smelting base in later generations, but in this era, it was enough to rely on the productivity of this era.

When Guo Zhiqi arrived here, iron smelting production was still recovering. Speaking of which, last year's battle was actually not very big for the impact here, and the real battle of a slightly larger scale was only carried out, and it was a half-crossing attack by the superior Ming army against a rout, and the damage in the local area was actually not very big. However, the two feudal domains of Pingnan and Jingnan were uprooted, and the iron smelting industry in Foshan, which they had penetrated deeply, inevitably had a certain amount of chaos, coupled with Chen Kai's policy of returning to his homeland, a large number of Guangzhou people living in Foshan chose to return to their hometowns, and the human resources of related industries collapsed instantly, which also continued to deepen the chaos here.

Arriving by horse-drawn carriage, the grand scene of "lonely village forging" seems to be gone. The sound of striking iron in the original memory has become sparse and sparse, and the heat wave that I felt back then seems to be incomprehensible, and I always feel that there is a cold and lonely here, which makes people very unaccustomed to it, or it makes people very uncomfortable.

Guo Zhiqi was suspicious, even more so after getting out of the carriage. The officials who came to greet him saw that the superintendent was so colorful, and he was also sweating profusely, and hurriedly stepped forward to explain, lest the responsibility fall on him when he finished speaking.

"Tell the Inspector Boss, in recent days, the crude iron stocks of the major iron-smelting workshops have been used up, and the refined iron that has been smelted in a limited number of times is also making weapons, but it is no longer able to follow."

Although the officials headed by Guo Zhiqi did not say it clearly, and it was very clear that there was really such a problem, so where is the root cause.

"Hasn't the crude iron from Luodingzhou arrived yet?"

"Liangguang Salt Law Chronicle" recorded: "The iron that covers the world is good in Guangdong, and the essence of Guangzhou iron is none other than Luoding, its iron is smooth and soft, and can be dialed as a line." However, its casting is also good, and it is not good at Foshan, so Guangzhou, Nanxiong, Huizhou, Luoding, Lianzhou, Huaiji iron, are lost in Foshan cloud. ”

Tie Moliang in Guangdong, this is indeed a bit exaggerated, at least in the Ming Dynasty, the status of Fujian Iron in the rivers and lakes is not worse than that of Guangzhou Railway, and even more prestigious. However, as he describes, the source of the most crude iron in Foshan is still in Luodingzhou, followed by the northern part of Guangzhou and Nanxiong, which are northern Guangdong, and Huizhou is only a supplement.

Now, Nanxiong Mansion and Shaozhou Mansion are under the control of the Qing army, and the Qing army will naturally not let such strategic resources flow out casually, especially when the Ming army has just recovered Guangzhou and is in full swing; The northern part of Canton Province is the front line of the front, and iron ore mining and crude iron smelting have been seriously affected, and it is needless to mention; The production capacity of Huizhou Prefecture, especially in the Lotus Mountains, is given priority to Chaozhou; And the only left, and the most important Luoding Prefecture, that place is indeed in the hands of the Ming army in western Guangdong, Wei Yingdeng and Ye Biao's two Ming troops guarded the local area, and I have not heard of being attacked by the Qing army recently.

"Xiaguan has already sent people to ask Wei Shuai and Ye Shuai for more manpower mining, but Wei Shuai's reply letter said that the captive division recaptured Luoding Prefecture the year before last, and there was a killing ring. Last year, His Royal Highness the King of Xining sent troops again, and the Tartars began to clear the wilderness again and organize the evacuation of the local people. Now the population loss of Luoding Prefecture is very large, and iron ore mining is insufficient. ”

I have to say that this is a practical problem, the Ming and Qing armies fought for each other on the land of western Guangdong, and the intrusion of the local people was the most obvious. Just like the Qing army attacked Chaozhou Mansion several times in the past few years, whether it was before or after Chen Kai's work, the population loss of the people was the most inevitable, such as Geng Jimao's two expeditions to Lufeng, and the people of Hailufeng were mostly pulled to fill in the trenches......

In this era, Luoding Prefecture was not wealthy, and most of it was dominated by agriculture and iron mining. At present, there is a widespread grain shortage in western Guangdong, and even if there are idlers in their hands, they must be given priority to agricultural production. After all, iron is not worthy of food, and people must always eat enough, at least to ensure that they do not starve to death before they can do anything else.

"In this matter, the old man will repair a letter to Wei Shuai and Ye Shuai, and ask them to try to spare some manpower to mine iron ore. In addition, you must also hurry up to urge the thick iron in Yangjiang, Qingyuan, Lianzhou and other places. ”

"The lower officials understand, the lower officials understand." The official immediately responded, and first put his attitude right. But then he continued to talk about the problem: "Over there in Yangjiang, it is said that Li Shuai is all"

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