Seeing this, Li Yan couldn't help laughing: "Haha." Brother Ji also said that sweet potatoes are very cheap and can be planted anywhere. But look at you now, planting these things, it cost not a hundred taels but also seventy or eighty taels of silver. If those victims want to have such money, why don't they just go and buy food? ”

Ji Qingwen said with a smile: "Brother Li's words are biased. When there is no harvest in the field, and all the grain accumulated over the years is eaten, then there will be no silver to buy a full meal, what should I do? ”

Li Yan also knew that he had made a mistake, so he hurriedly found a step for himself: "Brother Ji misunderstood what I meant." I mean, you have to be so careful when planting this thing in the south of the Yangtze River, can you still grow it well in the northwest where the weather is cold and the land is poor? ”

Ji Qingwen is a person who knows the truth of history, and he can be said to be confident about the role of sweet potatoes in relieving famine, so he said with confidence: "Brother Li, don't worry. Now these sweet potatoes seem to be the only children in the family, and of course they need to be carefully taught and cared for. When the cultivation is effective, it is like a large family full of children and grandchildren, and the ancestors will let them spread out on their own, and they can't care about so much. ”

…………

Because he had to take care of these life-saving sweet potatoes, Ji Qingwen stayed in Dianshan Port, Songjiang Prefecture these days, and did not return to Suzhou.

How many things can you do to grow sweet potatoes? How can you let Ji Qingwen, an idle master, stare at it every day? So he personally participated in the construction of the warship that had been entrusted to the missionary John Tang and the scientist Song Yingxing.

Originally, the most taboo thing about this kind of thing was that the leader who didn't understand everything blindly commanded, so that the subordinates below who knew how to do it were at a loss.

Before Ji Qingwen crossed over, he had been a code farmer in Party B for five or six years writing code, and he couldn't be clearer about the hard work here.

Therefore, although he always asked, he never interfered indiscriminately, but only asked: Do you want silver, just give you silver; If there is a shortage of people, just find someone for you; If you are short of materials, just find a way to buy them for you.

Under the care of Ji Qingwen's "good leader", shipbuilding affairs are naturally twice the result with half the effort, but in just a month's effort, a wooden warship is already quite large-scale, parked on the special berth of the wharf, facing other sea ships that come to operate, there is really a feeling of seeing the mountains at a glance.

Such an eye-catching warship parked in the harbor is naturally very eye-catching, so that the maritime merchants who have been berthed in the past all stop and watch. Some maritime merchants deliberately got off their own ships, circled around Ji Qingwen's new ship, and finally went back dejectedly—compared to this new ship, the sea ships under their own names were like small sampans.

Even the maritime merchant Zheng Zhilong was envious when he saw this half-finished warship for the first time, with a little jealousy and envy, and praised the power of this sea ship vigorously.

Ji Qingwen was also in charge of such a big project for the first time, so he was afraid that there would be something wrong with him, so he chased Zheng Zhilong and asked him if he saw anything wrong.

Zheng Zhilong didn't find out the shortcomings of this ship for a long time, so he had to say: "This ship is very big, but I'm afraid that it will be too big to turn around, and I will suffer a loss if I start a war." ”

For such doubts, Ji Qingwen was also prepared.

He thought that after the ship was built, he would pay for copper and iron armor to cover the hull, and would rather sacrifice a little speed to make the ship indestructible. Anyway, in this era, although the power of artillery has been revealed, it has not yet reached the point where it can destroy withering and decaying, as long as the defense is strong enough, in naval battles, the opponent can also feel the power and spirit of "indestructible and immovable".

It's just such a plan, and it's just an expedient measure in Ji Qingwen's heart.

In his plan, he will take the construction of this new ship as an opportunity to further enhance the technical capabilities of the industry under his name, and give full play to his advantages in mastering the historical development process and the direction of scientific and technological development in the coming period, and gradually develop new power cores such as steam engines and internal combustion engines, so that seagoing ships can completely get rid of the restrictions of wind power, so that the fleet surnamed Ji can step through thousands of miles of waves and rise to prominence all over the world.

At the same time as building the sea ship, Ji Qingwen embarked on another big undertaking - land reform.

The so-called land reform is to completely break the original feudal land ownership system and liberate the vast number of peasants from the shackles of land, so as to turn the centralized management of land into a more powerful productive force, and at the same time obtain a large amount of their own labor force and devote themselves to handicraft and machine-making production activities.

This is the correct direction of historical development, but Ji Qingwen cannot let go of his hands and launch a vigorous land reform movement.

The reason for this is very simple, that is, Chinese history is like a train or two full loads. The train was moving fast on the established track, and even though he heard that he was almost at the end of the track, the train driver had already pulled the brakes, but the huge inertia still pushed the train forward.

The power of this inertia was so strong, so strong that it was enough to crush any force that tried to stop it before it stopped completely.

Ji Qingwen didn't want to be crushed, so although he had reached the end of the Ming Dynasty, he was still afraid of the feudal power that had developed to the extreme, limited by his relatively weak strength, and did not dare to adopt the kind of "land revolution" like a storm in later generations.

His approach is called land "reform," and this "reform" is only a "pilot."

How?

It is to use the money he earned before, taking advantage of the bad times and cheap land prices, to buy a large amount of land around Dianshan Port.

If it is placed in the 21st century in the future, the vicinity of Dianshan Port is about the Songjiang and Qingpu areas of Shanghai, although it is not the center of Shanghai, where every inch of land is valuable, but it is also a suburb of Shanghai, and the land price is also very cheap. With such a land price in the future, the little money Ji Qingwen earned, I am afraid that he will only buy a few villas.

But now, Dianshan Port is still a new land that has just been reclaimed from the sea, and the nutrients in the land are not fertile, and many of them are because they will be filled out of the sea, and the soil is a little saline-alkaline, so the real estate is not rich.

In ancient times, when they only knew how to plough the fields, cultivate the land, and collect grain, of course, such land was not worth much, and Ji Qingwen spent no more than 200,000 taels of silver to acquire hundreds of hectares of flat land around Dianshan Port - whether it was cultivated land, tidal flats, or wasteland.

When he bought the land, he became a monk, and the peasants who owned the land naturally sold the land happily.

However, there are still many old farmers with brains and outdated concepts, who guard the land handed down by their ancestors and refuse to sell it to Ji Qingwen.

For these people, of course, Ji Qingwen will not use various means to force them to sell their land like those unscrupulous profiteers in later generations - although Ji Qingwen's current strength is much stronger than those profiteers, at least he has a large number of Ming military troops with superior combat effectiveness.

As a result, in order to make this "land reform" continue as "gently" as possible, Ji Qingwen did not use too drastic means to be impeached by those idle officials in the local and imperial courts, and finally ended up in nothing. Therefore, Ji Qingwen adopted a curved strategy, first promising these old people's juniors that they could work in their own Ji family's industry, and then asking them to persuade their elders to hand over the land in turn.

These old people kept the land for the sake of their children and grandchildren, and now they are willing to give up the land, and the old people naturally have nothing to say, although they are not very reluctant, and finally they hand over the land in hesitation.

In addition to the peasants, there was also a lot of land in the hands of large landowners.

By the end of the Ming Dynasty, land annexation had become very intense, and landlords and rich peasants, who accounted for a small minority of the population, controlled more than one-third of the country's land. However, in the south of the Yangtze River, because of the high yield of land, farmers can cultivate 10 or 20 acres of land as a family unit, and then raise silkworms and weave cloth by themselves, which can also feed a family. Therefore, the situation of land annexation in the south of the Yangtze River is far less serious than that in the north, and those who can accumulate a large amount of land are either rich or expensive, either big businessmen on the rich side or bureaucrats who have been officials for one term.

For these people, Ji Qingwen also has other ways to deal with them. This is to let them use land as shares, choose Ji Qingwen's textile mills, wharves, ports, money houses and other industries to obtain shares, and participate in dividends.

These industries are famous in the south of the Yangtze River, and others dream of getting involved in one or two every day, but they don't expect that now they can buy shares with some abandoned and tasteless land, so that these landlords are naturally eager to buy shares.

In this way, Ji Qingwen took a lot of twists and turns, but he finally acquired a large piece of land around him, and finally had a world to show his strength.

And for these acquired lands, Ji Qingwen naturally has his own disposal.

For the fertile and fertile part of the land, Ji Qingwen asked people to move good mulberry and tea seeds from Huzhou, Huizhou and other places, and invited farmers who are good at planting mulberry and tea to plant them carefully, so as to become the raw material production area of his handicraft workshop.

The slightly barren land was reclaimed by Ji Qingwen and opened up as a special "test field" for planting newly collected overseas crops - although at the moment, Ji Qingwen only has a new crop, sweet potato, in his hands.

And for those saline-alkali lands that are completely unable to grow food, they are the most valuable in Ji Qingwen's eyes.

Just because these lands are around the Dianshan Port Wharf, they are the areas with the strongest control over themselves. In this regard, Ji Qingwen built a lot of construction here, and moved the textile workshop, printing workshop, welfare workshop, and even the military camp of the Ming Wu Army that was originally located in Suzhou City to this place.

In this way, inside and outside the cofferdam of Dianshan Port, it has really become an impregnable fortress and base under Ji Qingwen's name.

And Ji Qingwen's footsteps are far from stopping.

In addition to the completion of these infrastructure construction, thousands of more houses and buildings were built, and before the construction, Ji Qingwen deliberately planned and perfected this place - before building the building, the brick floor, water canal, greening, etc. were first built, and the city was still in a state of primitive growth at the end of the Ming Dynasty, which made people feel a refreshing feeling at a glance.

However, such an advanced infrastructure construction naturally has to be piled up with mountains and seas of silver, and the silver taels in Ji Qingwen's hands before were only about one million taels, leaving some of the silver to be used for tribute, emergency, and salary, there are only five or six hundred thousand taels of silver left, which is not enough to support such a huge expenditure.