Merchants are profit-seeking, and their wealth is also accumulated through hard work.

The proposal to harden the official road fee was quickly unanimously approved by everyone.

But how long this policy can last, a group of wealthy businessmen still have doubts, after all, the hardened official road is still the official road, the ownership is still in the hands of the government, how to collect the toll, how much tolls to collect can only be collected by the government, businessmen do not have the right to set up roadblocks privately, so they cannot guarantee that they can continue to collect, in the interest of collecting tolls, their interests can not be guaranteed.

For this kind of scruples, Shen Jin could only promise them that once the hardening of the official road was completed, the businessmen who paid a lot of money could send people to participate in the collection of tolls.

Then he told them that the main purpose of hardening the official road was to facilitate the traffic of vehicles and horses, the transportation of goods, the speed of transportation of goods, the reduction of transportation costs, and the greater benefits of collecting tolls.

Two months later, with the support of the technical staff of the institute, businessmen in Yidufu, Jinanfu, Weizhou, Laizhou, Mizhou and other places successively invested in the construction of cement production workshops, and gradually began cement production.

At the same time, at the request of the pacification envoys, the local government began to widen the main official roads connecting the state capitals, uniformly widening to three zhang wide, and the money required for land acquisition, or land replacement, was borne by the imperial court, and the rest of the local governments were borne by themselves.

The money for widening the official road was said to be borne by the local government, but in the end it was apportioned to the local people and the squires and merchants, but fortunately, it was exempted from taxation for six years, and the people were no longer as difficult as during the reign of the Jin State, so it did not cause much trouble.

Of course, during the period of widening official roads and hardening roads, a large number of officials in Shandong prefectures lost their official positions because of corruption and accepting bribes, and in the context of the imperial court's strong anti-corruption efforts.

However, these did not affect the construction of official roads in Shandong, and with the arrival of groups of young officials who were eager to make contributions and make political achievements, the expansion of official roads and the hardening of roads even began to advance rapidly.

Since this matter was personally led by the pacification envoy, the newly appointed officials from all over the country did not want to behave in front of Lord Shen, so young and promising officials quickly appeared in Shen Jin's field of vision, and were quickly promoted and reused.

The state capitals are building and hardening in sections, and the speed is naturally unprecedented.

In addition, most of the official roads in Shandong are originally very gentle, and rarely cross the hills and mountains, so whether it is widening or hardening, it is not difficult, and the only thing that delays the hardening progress is cement production.

Although cement production workshops were built in various state capitals at the beginning in order to speed up the hardening of official roads, cement production is still far from keeping up with the speed and demand for hardening.

For this reason, the workshops had to quickly recruit and train people, expand the scale of the workshops, and increase production.

The increased demand for manpower in the workshops has given people who had previously fled from the north more places to earn a living.

After nearly a year of busyness, the whole Shandong was expanded into a main official road three zhang wide, of which one zhang and five feet wide were finally hardened with cement.

The smooth and smooth official road is particularly comfortable at a glance, like a touch of light ink in a pastoral painting.

On the smooth, hardened official road, the horses pulling the cart saved a lot of effort, and they ran faster and more smoothly than on dirt and stone roads, and there were almost no bumps.

After the hardening of each section of the official road is completed, the pacification envoy will carry out the final acceptance inspection and trial operation, and the major problems will be repaired.

After half of the official roads were hardened, the pacification envoy arranged a test, allowing two carriages to set off from Mizhou at the same time, one to take the hardened half of the official road, and the other to take the unhardened half of the official road, to test how many advantages the hardened official road has over the old official road.

The test began in Mizhou, passed through Laizhou to Weizhou, then from Weizhou to Yidufu, then through Zizhou, and finally reached Jinan, almost crossing most of Shandong.

In the end, this test gave everyone a big surprise.

The two carriages completed the journey, and the carriage on the hardened official road took eleven days and changed two axles, while the carriage on the dirt and stone official road traveled non-stop for forty-eight days, changing twelve axles and seven wheels!

The great advantage of hardened official roads in horse-drawn carriage transportation was immediately demonstrated and soon spread throughout Shandong.

As a result of this astonishing test result, the remaining half of the official road was quickly activated and entered into accelerated hardening.

The road is repaired, the transportation of goods is accelerated, and the connection between the whole Shandong is closer, and the goods from the south are transported to Mizhou by sea, and then the goods of Yidu Fu are transferred, which greatly saves the difficulty of transportation, reduces the time, and the goods transported from Jinan to Yidu Fu and Laizhou to the sea have hardened the official road and are more convenient.

In addition to hardening the official road, the institute also introduced a four-wheeled carriage with an iron base in due course, so that the horses only had to pull the carriage in front without carrying weight, and the capacity of the entire carriage was more than tripled.

There are good roads and improved high-capacity carriages, and the big and small businessmen in Shandong have wider horizons and more thoughts.

In the past, the purchase of goods from the south, can only take the sea route, either Mizhou, or Laizhou, no matter where to go, as soon as the ship docks, the road transportation is a ** annoyance, now the road transportation problem is solved, they will look at the south thousands of miles away from the south of the Yangtze River.

Just when Shen Jin presided over the leveling and hardening of Shandong's main official roads, Yang Congyi also made big moves in Hejian Mansion.

The terrain of Hejian Province was flat, but because the people were afraid of the impact of the war, most of them fled south, and the fields soon became barren, Yang Congyi remembered the horse farm that Huiyi had established in Liuqiu in the early years, and it was time to move them to the north.

Over the years, Yang Congyi, Shen Jin, Lu You and others, as well as the large army of the Jingwu Army have gone north one after another, the power of Huiyi in Liuqiu has weakened a lot, the entire military camp has been less than 2,000 people, and the horses in the horse farm Lu You sold a batch, only more than 10,000 left, the soldiers in the horse farm have raised horses for more than ten years, and the experience of raising horses is relatively rich, there are no horses to raise, it is really a waste.

So Yang Congyi quickly sent someone to Haizhou to find Lu You, and asked him to send people south to Liuqiu, and find a way to transport the people and horses of the horse farm to Binzhou.

In September of that year, 100 large ships loaded with men and horses came to Binzhou from the south, landed in Binzhou, and after five days of rest, more than 1,000 horse-raising soldiers drove more than 10,000 horses and horses north to Hejian Province.

In October, 12 of the 17 counties under the jurisdiction of Hejian Province were designated as Hejian Military Horse Farms, and most of the people still living in the 12 counties moved south to live in the counties near Binzhou in the south, and the land was allocated by the local government.

Nearly 10,000 horses sprinkled on the land covering an area of 12 counties, like a handful of sand sprinkled into a lake.

Looking at the huge horse farm and the scarce horses within a radius of 500 miles, Yang Congyi quickly issued an order to the Hejian Military Horse Farm, asking them to increase the number of horses at any cost, leaving aside the quality for the time being.

At the same time, Yang Congyi obtained nearly 100 excellent stallions and mares from the north through special channels and placed them in the military horse farm to improve the horse breeds produced in the south.

To unify the North, it is simply not possible to do without good horses.

The hundreds of thousands of horses obtained in the pursuit of the Jin army in the Huai River valley have died in the past ten years, and almost all of the rest are old, and most of them will not be useful in the war to unify the north in the future, so it is imperative to establish a huge military horse farm.

The Great Song Dynasty has not had a suitable horse farm for decades, there is no excellent war horse, and it is simply impossible to establish a cavalry force of sufficient size by purchasing horses.

If Datong Mansion, which is close to the grassland, cannot be recovered and cannot be defended, even if Taiyuan Mansion and Hedong are recaptured, they will be lost sooner or later.

And if once the main force of the Jin State does not fight the Song army in Datong Mansion, but flees into the grassland, then it is meaningless for the Song army to occupy Datong Mansion, and their constant harassment is enough to drag down the Datong defenders.

Therefore, if you want to achieve a complete victory over the Jin country, you must have the ability to annihilate the main force of the Jin country, and to have this ability, you must first have the ability to catch up with them, so a good war horse is indispensable.

In Yang Congyi's view, even if the Song army regained Guanzhong and Hedong within three or five years, and recaptured Datong Mansion and Yanjing, it would not be able to completely defeat Wanyan Liang and Wanyan Yong, because they could not stay in Datong Mansion, Yanjing, and Liaoyang Mansion, and they could still run into the depths of the grassland, run back to Huining Mansion between Baishan and Heishui, and when they regained their strength, they would raise troops to invade south.

Therefore, even after the Great Song Dynasty recovered Yanyun, the war with the Northern Jin State would still not end, and it was still a long-term battle process between the two countries or the Three Kingdoms, and as long as the Great Song Dynasty did not have a strong cavalry force, it would always be in a passive defensive situation, and it would never be able to go deep into the grassland and the white mountains and black waters to find the main force of the Jin Army to fight, and the main cavalry force of the Jin State would not be destroyed, and the war between the Great Song and them would never end.

Yang Congyi used the whole armament to stimulate Zhending Mansion and Yanjing to follow up, create border tension, scare away the people of Hejian Province, who were already small, obtain a large area of barren plain land, and spent great efforts to move the Liuqiu Horse Farm and the people and horses to Hejian Mansion to establish the Hejian Military Horse Farm, all he wanted was to lay the foundation for the Great Song Dynasty to establish a usable cavalry force ten years later.

And his action to build a huge military horse farm in the enclosure of Hejian Province was also seen by Wan Yan Liang of Datong Mansion and Wan Yan Yong of Liaoyang Mansion, and they scoffed at this, because they knew that raising horses was definitely not something that could be achieved in three or five years.

In their opinion, Yang Congyi's vain attempt to raise horses in Hejian Mansion, and then organize cavalry to attack Zhending Mansion and Yanjing, is simply a fool's dream.

originally thought that Yang Congyi entered Jinan Mansion and Hejian Mansion to train troops and reorganize the army, planning to start a war soon and then seize Zhending Mansion and Yanjing, but now it seems that there is no horse, and it is difficult for him to cook without rice.

According to Wan Yan Liang and Wan Yan Yong, Yang Congyi has always been a prepared war.

So when they learned that Yang Congyi had established a military horse farm in Hejian Mansion to raise horses, they knew that it would be difficult for the Song and Jin Dynasty to start a major war within five years.