Qingdao was originally called "Jiaoao", and since the imperial court set up a port here and connected it to Jinan by rail, this small fishing port has expanded into a large city of 4 or 50,000 people in almost four or five years.

Qingdao, located on the eastern coast of the Shandong Peninsula, faces the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago across the sea, and is the closest northern port to Shanghai and other southern ports. Therefore, when the port was first established, it became a very lively trading port. By the eleventh year of Chongzhen, the trade volume here has exceeded the original dual-use port of Liaodong Peninsula and the Korean Peninsula - Penglai Port, second only to Tianjin Port.

The Shandong Peninsula is a large piece of land jutting into the sea, and the coastline along the coast is extremely tortuous, so there are many excellent harbors that can be used as private ports for ships to go to sea. Before the opening of the sea ban, the gentry and smugglers of the Shandong Peninsula owned a number of small ports for smuggling to Liaodong and the Korean Peninsula.

Although the Denglai Navy controlled the sea route to the Liaodong Peninsula, making Shandong's sea smuggling ships less unscrupulous than those on the southeast coast, it was also a major smuggling province on the northern coast, and the bulk of its smuggling goods were salt and cotton cloth.

However, by the end of the eleventh year of Chongzhen, these smuggling ports in Shandong were basically over. Of course, this was not discovered by the conscience of the gentry and the smugglers, nor was it the sudden exertion of the Shandong officials and troops, but the fact that smuggling activities were defeated by the market economy.

On the one hand, after ten years of reform and expansion, Changlu Salt Farm has become the largest salt field in the Ming Dynasty. Through the adoption of various new processes and wind turbines, the output of Changlu Salt Farm in Chongzhen has exceeded double that of the Lianghuai Salt Farm in the 11th year of Chongzhen, accounting for almost half of the country's salt production.

These low-cost salts not only provided a large amount of salted salt for fishery production and animal husbandry production in the north, but also defeated the long-standing illegal salt on the Shandong Peninsula. Although the local salt boiled by the private salt dealers in Shandong is cheap, the quality is obviously not comparable to the salt produced by the Changlu salt factory using an industrial process.

The reason why Shandong's private salt can endure for a long time is completely dependent on the high price difference of official salt and is not accepted by the people, so it has a market. Now that the price of official salt has dropped to the point where the people can accept it, and the quality far exceeds that of local salt, private salt has naturally lost its market.

With the opening of the ban on the sea and the encouragement of fishery production, many smuggling salt dealers found that they made much more profits than selling smuggled salt, and Shandong's originally developed smuggling salt economy shrank rapidly.

As for the owners of those private ports, they soon discovered that in today's Ming Dynasty, it is not possible to have a port that is not discovered by the government to do smuggling business. The port of Tianjin, which relies on Tianjin's manufacturing industry, and the port of Qingdao, which relies on a railway to the interior, are the official ports planned by the imperial court are absorbing the resources of the north in an unbelievable way, and the cost of transportation is allocated to a minimum.

The price of goods exported from these two ports* is actually lower than the cost of goods going out of these private ports, so who wants to ship from private ports with inconvenient transportation and no guarantees.

In the past, the owners of these private ports owned the entire Shandong Peninsula as a source of export, but now behind them is a Shandong Peninsula that has been separated by railways.

The shortage of transported materials, in turn, has pushed up the operating costs of private ports, which continue to dissuade cargo owners. As a result, except for a few private ports with convenient transportation facilities, those private ports with inconvenient transportation gradually closed down.

Although in this process, many owners of private ports were extremely dissatisfied with the imperial court's planning of railways and port construction, believing that they were preying on the small people, and they constantly incited the local people to oppose the construction of the railway. However, the gentry, who had benefited from the railway, stood firmly on the side of the imperial court, protecting the workers and engineers who were building the railway.

And in the spring of the twelfth year of Chongzhen, these Shandong gentry and people who maintained the construction of the railway reaped their greatest reward. Although Qingdao is a port with excellent geographical conditions and borders the Yellow Sea, this area is still an arid region with poor water resources.

Before the construction of the port and railway, Qingdao's agricultural production was relatively backward, after all, there are often droughts in spring and summer or summer and autumn, and they can only rely on fishing as a major sideline for the local people. However, with the completion of the railway from Qingdao to Jinan, Qingdao Port quickly ushered in a period of rapid development.

Cotton, steel, and coal from the interior, fish from overseas, grain and various daily necessities from the south, all filled the wharf of Qingdao Port. Every day, you can see the flow of people and vehicles on the docks, loading and unloading a large number of goods.

Earlier, an official from the Yamen of Shandong's governor came to Qingdao to inspect and after seeing the lively scene of Qingdao Port, he commented: "The ships in Qingdao Port and the train cars in Qingdao Station are the lives of Qingdao people. ”

However, at the beginning of the twelfth year of Chongzhen, it was not good for Qingdao people, from the first month to March, there has been no rain in the local area, and this year's spring sowing naturally has little hope. Such spring droughts are not uncommon for Qingdao people, but this has not been the case in other parts of Shandong in previous years, and they can still count on buying some grain from the mainland to survive the famine.

Thanks to the railways and ports, the number of Qingdao people engaged in agricultural production has been reduced to less than half of the permanent population, and everyone else works around Qingdao, a new trading port city, so it can be said that Qingdao people have no shortage of money to buy grain.

However, this year's disaster was not limited to Qingdao, and there were also various degrees of drought in Shandong, and it is said that Henan was the most severely affected. Therefore, after entering March, grain prices in all parts of the north have risen rapidly, and the grain prices in Qingdao in March were 30 percent higher than the average grain prices in Shandong.

Since the imperial court implemented the policy of unified purchase and marketing of grain in the north, although to a certain extent, the rate of grain growth and the hoarding of grain by grain merchants during the famine period have been inhibited. However, to a certain extent, it has also caused the local government to draw a prison and prohibit the export of grain from the county at every turn, and has dealt a blow to the enthusiasm of private grain traders to sell grain.

Qingdao's food is itself insufficient, and with the development of Qingdao city and the influx of a large number of people, the local area has become a food import area. As a fledgling city, Qingdao's grain reserve facilities lagged behind the city's development, so in February and March, Qingdao officials were stunned to find that the local grain reserves were insufficient, and they could not find a source of purchase in a short period of time.

Other parts of Shandong, and even the entire northern region, are in a state of food shortage, and it is simply impossible to transfer grain from abroad. Although the Lunan and Huaibei regions have been building water conservancy on a large scale, they have faintly become the second grain producing areas in the north except for Henan. However, because of the particularly serious drought in Henan this year, the local grain stocks have been transferred to Henan, and there is no surplus grain to sell to Qingdao at the moment.

If we want to wait for the summer harvest of new grain in the south, it will be at least after June or July. With Qingdao's grain reserves, it will be able to last until the end of May at most. What worries these officials even more is that because of the disaster in various parts of Shandong, many victims are flocking to Qingdao. In the entire eastern part of Shandong, it is the only city that seems to be able to sell its labor to support itself without starving to death at home.

In a rapidly developing trading city like Qingdao, the demand for manpower was naturally endless, so the officials of Qingdao did not restrict the movement of people to Qingdao from the beginning, and even provided some convenience to some extent.

On the basis of sufficient material resources, these populations have brought a source of wealth to Qingdao. But in the current year of catastrophe, the influx of victims could turn into the destruction of the city*. Officials in Qingdao wanted to ban the influx of people into Qingdao at this time, but it was also a little too late.

They could only send personnel to set up checkpoints on the road to intercept the displaced people, and at the same time ask for help from the Yamen of the governor of Shandong and the imperial court. While these Qingdao officials were worried, on March 27, a convoy of grain from the port of Lingayen saved the city.

While the Japanese were still fighting, the Four Seas Trading Company had already begun to resume production, and after losing the interference of the natives, especially after seizing the land and granaries of the Pampanga people, the entire Central Plain was completely under the control of the company. When Guo Qing was negotiating with the Spaniards, the additional 500,000 stone rice that Chongzhen had levied in the eleventh year finally began to be loaded and shipped north.

At this time, the company's latest grain ship has reached 10,000 stones, and the tonnage has exceeded 1,000 tons. In fact, the latest grain ship under construction is said to be more than 15,000 tons. After the successful construction of 1,000-ton warships, the technology of warship manufacturing was rapidly introduced into commercial ships, and the sturdy and large-scale merchant ships are constantly pushing the civilian ship construction technology of Daming to a new peak.

Unlike the Atlantic Ocean, which Europeans have to deal with with complex sea conditions, the waters off China, which is defended by the first island chain, need to be much simpler for ships to deal with.

Temple Street, Vladivostok, Sakhalin, Korea, Japan, Ryukyu, Taiwan, Nanyang Islands, the Strait of Malacca and other parts of Southeast Asia, these ports or regions are under the radiation of the Ming Dynasty's armed forces. When the Eighteen Zhi Pirate Group was recruited by the imperial court, the merchant ships of the Ming Dynasty were almost free from pirate harassment in this area. In this relatively safe maritime environment, commercial ships that abandon force and pursue large-scale and seaworthiness to reduce the cost of cargo transportation have become the mainstream of Daming merchant ship construction.

Therefore, this fleet of five ships carried 35,000 stone of rice and other Luzon specialties, and when the Qingdao officials heard the news, they immediately rushed to the wharf to try to buy all the grain. Despite the astonishing background of the Four Seas Trading Company, the head of the fleet sold 15,000 koku of rice to them in the face of local officials who were about to jump over the wall.

Rice in Luzon is about 04 yuan a stone, and rice is about 015-02 yuan a stone. In Qingdao, the market price of rice has reached 3 yuan per stone. According to the regulations of the imperial court, the head of the fleet sold 5,000 stone of rice to Guancang at a price of 09 yuan per stone, and sold 10,000 stone of bargaining grain at a price of 12 yuan a stone.

With the closing of this grain business, the price of grain in Qingdao fell by 10% on the same day, and a week later, the price of grain returned to the price of 22 yuan a stone and stabilized.

The arrival of this batch of Luzon grain, and the spread of the news that the company had obtained control of the Luzon grain producing areas, caused the price of grain in the northern coastal areas to begin to fall, which was regarded as relieving a small part of the trouble of the Beijing imperial court.