If it was many years ago, regarding foreign invasions, especially places like Japan and North Korea, which are much closer to the mainland than Europe, Xiao Xuan might have chosen a path of "whale swallowing". Dispatching at least 100,000 troops and trying to control the whole of Dongying in a short period of time will have a similar policy toward North Korea, and perhaps there will not be much need for a reason or excuse for war.

However, after experiencing the government affairs of the Western Expedition for a few years and learning a lot of things, Xiao Xuan also began to understand why in modern China, the Western powers had such a great advantage but did not directly choose to annex and digest China, such as India. Even during the Japanese invasion of China, they politically occupied parts of the country and sought to divide China into several regimes that were not too strong.

Management also requires costs to a large extent, and if we personally send troops and officials to collect taxes directly in place of the samurai class in Japan, we will certainly need a lot of human resources, and if we have such abundant resources, we will certainly have a way to obtain more financial benefits in the country by improving the method of taxation. Of course, India, whose population is largely more concentrated along the Ganges, may be a different story?

This time, of course, Xiao Xuan did not intend to make a big move, and Chen Siyuan, the main force of the new volunteer force returning from the West, and Li Yuan, who was in charge of the Admiralty, personally led the team to launch a small expedition with 5,000 navies and 10,000 new marines, with the purpose of first leasing and occupying several islands off the coast of Korea, and taking and occupying and sweeping the entire Kyushu Island. At the same time, if they had the strength to spare, they captured Iwami Ginzan and forced the Tokugawa shogunate to bear a war reparation, which was rare in ancient times.

At the meeting, Chen Xin couldn't help asking: "I don't know what is the reason and scale of the compensation for this levy day?" Please make it clear? ”

Xiao Xuan smiled and said, "This question, I'll test you first!" ”

Of course, Chen Xin also knew a lot of things, and said: "Now that I have been in the Ming Dynasty, the 170,000 officers and soldiers who have died in civil and foreign wars over the years have at least determined the standard of bereavement according to 100 acres of the best fertile land per person or 5 hectares of ordinary fields of northern level. If according to this standard, based on the 30-year cycle of profits, the entire cost of the pension in the next 30 years is equivalent to 6,000 taels, an average of 200 taels per person per year. Then Dongying should at least pay tens of millions of taels of wealth every year for thirty years, I think: this should be a limit of what they can bear. ”

Hearing this, Xiao Xuan was quite satisfied, and he had the impression that the standards of modern powers, such as the Franco-Prussian War or World War I, were accustomed to demanding compensation according to the scale of the annual GDP output value of the entire country, but they were required to pay it off over many years.

It seems that he feels that something is missing, and it is obvious that it would be a very embarrassing thing if the wealth obtained from the indemnity cannot be freely disposed of by the central government, so Chen Xin added: "Of course, the immediate family members of many veterans are no longer there, and so are the people of that year, which should be in the name of state compensation." ”

Because Li Yuan had also gone to sea to deal with some people in Dongying before, he felt that this kind of condition was impossible for the people of Dongying to accept, so he only said bluntly, "This asking price, even if you don't need to completely overthrow the shogunate, I'm afraid it will take a lot of time to mobilize troops... ”

In this regard, Xiao Xuan is of course also prepared, even after decades of transformation by the Americans in World War II, Japan is more conservative in culture, unlike the Chinese and Americans who are more culturally open-minded and do not shy away from talking about the shortcomings and problems of their country and society in front of foreigners, while many Japanese people cannot put down their national consciousness and cultural awareness, look at problems from a more "universal" perspective, and face culture is much more prosperous in China.

However, Xiao Xuan didn't care about this: "If that's the case, then we will also be the widows of the year, and we will go to eat big households by ourselves if they don't give them a regular schedule." I believe it should be much more efficient than the Japanese of the year. . . Even in the era of Zhu Yuanzhang or Zhu Di, such words may not be embarrassed to say it openly in the court, but now Xiao Xuan, who has largely gotten rid of the shackles of the old framework of the past, is not so taboo.

"As for the expedition to Kyushu, the excuse is obvious: Ryukyu is a vassal of China, they are guilty of war crimes, and this crime can also be put on the head of the shogunate, whether they want it or not... Li Yuan also seemed to remember something, and added.

In this way, because the size of the fleet of the expedition to Dongying was not too large, nor did it exceed some of the scale of the previous training in the open sea, so such a dispatch did not require too large-scale financial and material resources to prepare and mobilize, and more than 100 newly built sea ships carried 5,000 sailors and even 12 battle groups, and the elite of the Marine Corps soon set off from Nanjing to Zhenjiang and started their original journey in a roughly northeast direction towards the open sea.

In the same way, because there was no burden of too large-scale naval battles, the 12 battalion battle groups and 48 companies of the 12 battalion battle groups marched far away with a light artillery team of about 2,000 troops composed of 300 light artillery guns, a demolition attack team of about 1,000 as the core, and 7,000 elite archers as the auxiliary. Including the guns on the ships, the fleet had about 400 firepower, and it was clear that the Shimazu family's water power was not worth mentioning even if it existed compared to the Western fleets that were engaged in the war.

Different from the previous troops, the elite archers of this expedition were also equipped with a lot of guns and cannons, and the vehicles accompanying the manpower also increased the carrying capacity of the army to a large extent, which is also one of the experiences since the expeditionary operation.

When spring first began to come, the wind and waves in the East China Sea were not calm, and in the past, because of the change in wind direction and even the uncalm waves, it seemed that it was not suitable for ocean travel, but when the longitudinal human propeller was used more and more on ships, everything began to change. Another obvious benefit of the expeditions in the spring is that the threat of typhoons is minimized.

With sufficient manpower and the freedom to sail in any direction, it took only four or five days for the fleet to reach the vicinity of Sanggyeong-do and Jeolla-do.

The internal and external wars over the years have also made the Central Plains Dynasty, which is completely different, have greater prestige, and when they learned that they were only asking for some offshore islands, the local officials in Korea did not dare to obstruct it. The flotilla's planned actions began to seem to be smooth.

(End of chapter)