The entire Taixi War in the ninth year of Chongzhen has taken several turns, and almost the whole year has been spent in the fierce rebellion battle, and when the New Year is approaching, it begins to face variables again because of the intervention of the forces of the New World. However, almost at the same time in the East, after several years of reshuffling, war, and various purges, the turbulent sea gradually began to calm down. Cases of property rights disputes and inheritance disputes have emerged one after another in the legal courts of various provincial governments, and although the beheadings of rebellion and rebellion still exist sporadically, they have been greatly reduced. Under the suppression of huge rewards for whistleblowing, many crimes of collusion of interests and crimes of infringing on civil rights seem to have gradually come to an end compared with the climax of the previous year.

After several years of turmoil, many new shops and merchants, especially in the southeast, sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and when the law was largely liberalized, more and more individual traders also sprung up. The new order after breaking the cocoon and rebirth has broken many of the invisible pressures and shackles of economic and commercial activities. Although some small operations in the market that was not officially demarcated before could not completely avoid the extortion of the city fox and the rat, the suppression and limitations of the clans, guilds, and even the government on the emerging private merchants in the past have been greatly reduced.

In addition, the new tax reform according to the size of employees under the deterrence of huge whistleblowing rewards has also led to a significant improvement in commercial tax revenue, including the entire southeast region, and the commercial tax revenue within the central governorate of Nanzhili and Zhejiang provinces alone is as large as tens of millions of taels, which is also a product of promoting the recovery of industry and commerce and reducing the burden to a large extent. In all parts of the country, the scale of finances brought about by the changes in the scope of industry and commerce and the tax order alone is as large as about 20 million taels.

In the ninth year of Chongzhen, the income of government-run land, gold-based currency issuance, new currency minting, and even various long-term treasury bonds, government-run industry and commerce, and dividend distribution agents also began to reach about 20 or 30 million taels, plus the previous basic agriculture, salt and iron, tariffs, etc., the finances of the entire empire finally swept away most of the previous shortcomings in this year, and reached a financial scale equivalent to nearly 60 million stone grain prices.

At the same time, after a comprehensive inventory of the country's household registration after the turmoil, it can be estimated that millions of people have died in military disasters and various purges in the past few years, and if we add the losses of natural disasters and the loss of infants and children that are difficult to estimate, I am afraid that there will still be more than 20 million people lost in this large-scale change.

Of course, compared with the population decline brought about by the Ming and Qing dynasties in history, it is still significantly reduced, after all, the most serious civil strife adds up to only a few short years, not more than two generations of turmoil in history. After such population loss and turmoil, the total number of hukou still reached 26 million households, equivalent to about 130 million people.

Considering that the years over the years have not been good, even compared to the relatively cold Song and Song dynasties, the burden of converting the price of one stone of rice to an average of two people is also a bottleneck in the burden borne by the restored traditional ancient Oriental society to a large extent. If there are more, it may lead to problems of one kind or another.

New training methods, the acquisition of better firearms, and the seizure of armor have also made the local armed forces more substantial, and even if a county often has only two compendium squadrons and about 200 troops, it can often effectively control and deter the localities, so that the local government will no longer have to compromise with certain forces to a large extent, as it did before.

In this case, although the new administrative system, the expenditure on education, and the guarantee of rewards for the heroes of the city are all very expensive expenses, and because of the reduction in the burden of military personnel, there is no need for the state treasury to be overdrawn on a large scale as in the past. The limited overdraft, which relied on the vast wealth plundered from the expedition, also allowed the new combat readiness and naval build-up to be put on the right track.

When the Spring Festival of Chongzhen's tenth year was approaching, when Xiao Xuan verified and confirmed the investigation and reporting of various channels through more than ten days of busy verification, his heart gradually relaxed.

But at this time, a battle report from the westernmost direction of Taixi, twenty or thirty thousand miles away, was also delivered. Although Xiao Xuan had already expected some possible changes, when some predictions and speculations became reality, Xiao Xuan's heart began to feel uneasy.

On the eve of the Spring Festival, he also summoned Li Yuan, the new person in charge of naval engineering.

"In a short period of two or three years, the first batch of 40 ships with a displacement of about 1,000 tons, that is, a displacement of 400 tons and a fully armed displacement of 500 tons, have been launched and tested in the coastal areas. Each warship could be equipped with twenty-four two-pound rifled guns and fifty gunners, and the whole ship had a crew and a size of about one hundred and fifty combatants. Because the use of traditional hard sails saves a lot of manpower, in addition to the twenty-four light rifled guns per ship, it is also equipped with twenty-four steel-sleeved front-loading guns. Each ship is equipped with more than 300,000 catties of steel ship chain armor...

Of course, Xiao Xuan understands how big the gap between the traditional Fu ship and the Western sailing ship of this era is, the first gap is that because of the lack of keel, the ocean-going ship under the ordinary cost cannot be built particularly large, and the level of four or five hundred tons of displacement seems to be some kind of bottleneck and upper limit. Such tonnage also largely limited the arrangement of manpower and firepower. At the same time, the lack of a strong hull, the lack of an oak hull, and the lack of enough precious wood also forced the entire naval department to come up with other ways to strengthen the protection of the ship. The final solution is to hang the steel plate made of a hydraulic forging hammer with a thickness of more than two minutes on the side of the ship with iron chains and hooks to increase the resistance of the entire hull under enemy shelling, and only in this way can the problem of low mobility caused by weight gain be compensated.

At the same time, the whole ship is also designed and deployed for the first time to arrange the manpower propeller for emergency power addition, after a few years of time finally found a way to operate the longitudinal axis manpower propeller in the large ship with a relatively simple means, that can only be the use of a relatively simple manpower pedal in the case of load to carry out pedaling operations to bring the rotation of the entire hard shaft. Although the speed provided is limited, it makes up for the shortcomings of the lack of navigation talents in its own military force system to the greatest extent.

(End of chapter)