More than two years have passed, and what was originally just a small grassland town with earthen walls and wooden fences has now become a new big city by the Yuma River outside the Saiwai.

Standing on the loess cliff outside Fengzhen City, you can see that Fengzhen City, which originally had only one street, has now expanded into a big city with more than 80 streets.

In addition to a large number of shops on the streets, there are more workshops for nitrate leather, and even Yuan Chonghuan, who stands on the loess cliff and looks at the scenery, can smell a faint smell of skin.

In just over two years, it has grown from a small city with a few hundred households to a large city with a population of tens of thousands, which is naturally not the result of natural development. The relocation of the right-wing Mongolian tribes, the relocation of the victims of the Shaanxi disaster, the relocation of the Shanxi merchants, and the various support policies of the imperial court developed this small city where the caravans from Cyprus rested into a distribution center for foreign merchants to depart and return.

The Naturalized City, once regarded by the Mongols as the pearl of the outside world, was also overshadowed by this emerging Fengzhen City. Looking around from Fengzhen City, Han villages, fixed yurts, fixed pastures and neatly arranged fields have replaced the original grassy wilderness.

This kind of thriving scene is difficult to see even in Kannai. However, Yuan Chonghuan felt that the rapid development of this place still lies in three things.

The first is the windmills, which can not only carry the river water from the lower places to the higher places, but also continuously pump groundwater to the surface, and then divert it to farmland and fixed pastures through cement aqueducts, greatly replenishing the areas where the river water is difficult to irrigate. When the crops are ripe, these free power can grind corn and wheat into flour, and the benefits are really difficult to explain.

The second is the 448-kilometer railway from Fengzhen to Datong, which was completed more than half a year ago. The completion of this railway directly reduced the cost of transportation between the two places by half, and shortened the speed of transporting troops between the two places to one day.

After Emperor Yongle, the reason why the Ming Dynasty adopted a shrinkage strategy on the grassland was that not long after the founding of the Ming Dynasty, there were still large tracts of land in the interior that were abandoned, and naturally there was no excess population to develop the Mongolian grasslands with poor natural conditions.

Secondly, the terrain of the steppe is flat, which is suitable for cavalry attacks, but not conducive to infantry defense. Even if a city was built on the steppe, and the isolated defenders were cut off from logistical supplies, they would eventually be wiped out by the nomads.

However, now, the natural conditions of the Mongolian grassland, which has maintained its original ecology, are much better than those in overdeveloped Shaanxi. The large number of people who have lost their land due to land annexation and natural disasters is enough to start the migration and reclamation activities of the Mongolian steppe.

The advent of the railroad solved the confrontation of the Ming army against the cavalry superiority of the nomads. Regardless of the era, the army of the agrarian people, who solved the problems of logistics and the speed of marching, could always easily beat the nomads. Of course, in the area through which the railway passed, whether it was the settled Mongol tribes or the Han Chinese immigrant villages, their access to the information of the central court and the convenience brought by the railway were incomparable to those of the people in other places, and these people would be the most supportive of the central authority than the people in other regions.

For example, the residents around the Fengda Railway can now enjoy cheaper daily necessities such as coal, ironware, porcelain and tea, and their harvest can be sold to the mainland through the railway more quickly. It's like an unobstructed blood vessel, firmly bonding the surrounding flesh and blood together.

The third is the barbed wire fence invented by a certain Shanxi immigrant, a few wooden stakes and a few barbed wires can enclose a piece of land and use it as a fixed pasture for livestock. This not only reduces the conflict between herders and Han Chinese immigrants, but also protects the herders' flocks.

Unlike Mongolian herders, who only know how to forage for water and grass to graze, the Han people's sedentary mentality makes them more likely to be able to raise their livestock on a regular basis. In addition to the traditional alfalfa planting, the rye grass introduced by the imperial court from the Western Regions, the peasant association is also organizing the selection of the most widely distributed local varieties of sheep grass and ice grass, trying to turn these wild grasses into pasture grass that can be planted.

These fixed Mongol herdsmen and the Han settlements that were interspersed with them soon became the providers of food and other necessities for the residents and garrisons of Fengzhen, and the management of the steppe was transferred from the nobles of the various Mongol tribes to the various yamen stationed in Fengzhen.

Of course, the biggest benefits are still those merchants, who not only greatly reduce the cost of business, but also reduce the production cost of many goods, and obtain more benefits for themselves.

The Jin merchants, who had to come up with money to invest in the construction of the railway in Shanxi, were forcibly suppressed by the emperor and soon received excess returns from the completion of the railway. These Jin merchants immediately realized that investing in railways was not only to obtain the benefits of railway transportation, but more importantly, to enable them to use railways to earn more effectively the wealth of the areas through which they passed.

Even the right-wing Mongol tribes, with the support of Chongzhen, established large joint animal husbandry companies, which did not stump these shrewd Jin merchants, but instead used the animal husbandry companies controlled by these Mongolian nobles to exploit ordinary herders and steppe tribes who did not join the livestock companies.

The Taiji and Nayan of the right-wing tribes suddenly became rich, and they assisted these Shanxi merchants and unceremoniously looted their subordinates and distant brothers. After acquiring a lot of wealth, these Taiji and Nayan either built their mansions in Fengzhen and Datong, or simply bought mansions in the capital and settled down.

The taxes levied by the imperial court from the merchants were constantly used for infrastructure in the steppes where the right-wing tribes were located, providing settlements, canals, education, and faith for the herders. Under the financial differentiation, the Mongolian right-wing tribes began to diverge day by day, and the upper class lost their life of sharing weal and woe with the lower classes, and the lower classes began to alienate these Taiji lords who only knew how to ask, and became close to those court officials and teachers who provided them with public welfare, and began to identify with the concept that Mongolia and Han land were all Chinese.

Yuan Chonghuan personally witnessed how the relatives and nobles of the Mongolian right-wing tribes had been antagonistic to their own subordinates step by step in the past two years. If it was the imperial court that needed to win over these Mongolian relatives and nobles in order to control these Mongolian tribes, now the situation is reversed, without the support of the imperial court, many people will be abandoned by their own people.

Of course, there is not only one reason why the Mongolian right-wing tribes have become what they are today. Over the years, trade with the common people in the Guannai has actually made the upper echelons of the right-wing Mongolian tribes basically sinicized. It is difficult for them to return to the hard life of nomadic herding for thousands of miles, eating mutton and goat's milk in white water.

The westward migration of the Chahar tribe and the attack of Lin Dan Khan on the right-wing tribes also made many right-wing tribal leaders lose hope for Mongolia, and they were unwilling to submit to Lin Dan Khan, a great Khan who bullied the weak and feared the hard, but it was difficult to break the curse of surrendering to the bloodline of the golden family, which made many people want to escape from reality.

The court's policy of co-opting the Mongol tribes gave these tribal leaders an excuse to flee the internal war of the Mongol tribes, preferring to take refuge under the wing of the Ming Dynasty rather than submit to Lin Dan Khan, who had attacked them for no reason.

The imperial court relaxed the border trade restrictions and caused the Jin merchants to go out in a big way, which destroyed the last pillar of faith in the hearts of these relatives and nobles. Whether it was the Spanish colonists, the Dutch sea coachmen, or even the British merchants, they basically did business overseas with the support of the state.

However, it was only Chinese merchants who, in addition to doing business, were constantly fighting against the imperial court's repression again and again. As a result, the Chinese merchant community has never become an independent social group.

When Chongzhen relaxed the restrictions on foreign trade, gave merchants the power to set up merchants' congresses, and formed banks to support the collection of banknotes for industry and commerce, merchants from all over the country suddenly grew together.

Although the Jin merchants suffered a great blow in the previous Zhangjiakou collaborator case, the Jin merchants with deep roots quickly recovered their vitality with the support of Shanxi Bank. As one of the most closely entangled merchant groups in the Ming Dynasty, the Jin merchants soon found a way to obtain the greatest benefits.

With the help of the official protection of his old acquaintance Yuan Chonghuan, he then used small profits to buy those livestock companies controlled by Taiji and Nayan, bought leather and other goods from herdsmen and distant tribes at low prices, and sold daily necessities such as salt, tea, porcelain, glassware, ironware, soap, candles and mirrors at high prices.

With all kinds of means, by the fourth year of Chongzhen, there were few merchants other than Jin merchants in the Fengzhen area. However, this did not satisfy the appetite of the Jin Shang Group, and they soon set their sights on the trade route from Fengzhen to Jining Haizi, and then crossed the desert to the Mobei grassland. Of course, what they wanted to build was a railway, not a loess official road.

In the eyes of the Jin merchants, as long as they master Jining Haizi, then most of the Mongolian steppes in southern Mo will basically become their own pockets, and those Mongolian tribes who used to run around will sooner or later stay and become sheep grazing by them.

And if the road from Jining Haizi to Mobei Mongolia can be opened, it will be equivalent to bypassing the Hexi Corridor controlled by Shaanxi merchants and finding another passage to the Western Regions and Central Asia.

Well, the merchants of Shaanxi and Jin, who were once as close as a family, have become two major border trade groups because of the competition for control of the trade routes between Inner Mongolia and the Western Regions.

The Jin merchants suppressed the Shaanxi merchants on the Inner Mongolia Trade Route, and the Shaanxi merchants expelled the Jin merchants' share capital from the Guanzhong-Hexi Railway. The business groups in the northern provinces now have a consensus that the extension of the railway to the place means the extension and expansion of the interests of the railway company.

At this time, the southern businessmen did not have enough understanding of this, although the railway from Shanghai County to Nanjing was opened, but in addition to facilitating the exchange of businessmen between the two places, it did not bring special benefits to the railway shareholders. After all, both ends of the railway are the most economically developed areas in the south of the Yangtze River, and there is no economic plundering of one side against the other.

Yuan Chonghuan, who has common interests with the Jin merchant group, is naturally on the side of the Jin merchants. But the railway plan to extend Fengzhen to Jining Haizi was still interrupted, and the one who stopped this railway plan was naturally that Lin Dan Khan.