When the news of the Shanghai battlefield reached the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Jinglun was also surprised, he thought that even if the Taiping Army could occupy Shanghai, it would be impossible to control the British Navy that controlled the Wusong Fort and the Huangpu River, but they actually repelled the British, more precisely, scared the British away, because their brazen warrior-class ironclad ships were sunk!

As for why Li Xiucheng was able to sink the British ironclad ship, because they had two huge cannons with super firepower, the British minister's protest was quickly handed to the Ming Foreign Affairs Division, just because these two cannons were sold by the Ming to Li Xiucheng. Pen? Interesting? Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 ｉｎfo

The cannon, of course, was a Krupp cannon, weighing 44 tons, with a maximum range of nearly 20 kilometers and a 65-centimeter steel plate within 3 kilometers.

Krupp designed this gun, apparently aimed at the growing ironclad ships of Britain and France, of course, the Germans did not think of loading it on ships, their idea was to use it as a shore defense gun.

But in the end, no one has tried to penetrate the armor of the ironclad ship, theoretically speaking, it should be possible to shoot through the bombardment at close range, but who will give you the opportunity to get closer? Therefore, there is no record of actual combat at all.

When he went to the Paris World Expo three years ago, Zhu Jinglun directly ordered dozens of naval guns from Krupp, and upgraded the guns of the entire ironclad ship, replacing them with front-loading guns to rear-loading rifled guns.

When he came back, he also bought two Krupp cannons, saying that they were to be used as shore defense guns, but the real purpose was to take them back and copy them.

At this time, Krupp was still unknown, everyone's impression of him was mainly a steel manufacturer, a knife and fork manufacturing factory, Krupp's arms were not yet famous, the head of the Krupp company, Elfred Krupp, produced munitions, mainly to prove the quality of their steel to outsiders, and generally believed that the steel that could make cannons must be the best steel, so Alfred designed and manufactured a batch of cannons.

But as a steel enterprise that had just entered the arms industry, even the Prussian army was not equipped, and the first country to use Krupp made arms was Egypt, which purchased Krupp weapons in 1856, then Belgium in 1861, Russia purchased Krupp arms in 1863, and it was not until Prussia began to purchase weapons made by Krupp in the three dynastic wars.

It can be said that before the Franco-Prussian War, Krupp's fame was not great, and he himself was mainly known as a railway parts company, and the train wheels made by Krupp were their pride, and the logo of the Krupp company was the pattern of the superposition of three wheels.

This is also the reason why Krupp, who became famous in later generations, still needed to go to the Paris World Expo to promote their cannons.

Of course, Zhu Jinglun knew that Krupp's cannons had caught up with or even surpassed the British cannons in this era, so he boldly ordered many of them.

After returning to China, he immediately handed it over to the arsenal for imitation, and the process was very difficult.

The structure of the cannon is not complicated, it is easy to imitate, and even Zhu Jinglun allowed the arsenal to disassemble and cut those cannons for research, but even if the structure is known, it is still difficult to make a cannon of the same quality, and the problem is mainly in the processing technology.

Krupp's largest cannon is a five-layer structure, made of layers of steel plates, and the arsenal tried to copy this technology, but the cannon was made, but as soon as the cannon was fired, the chamber exploded, and the chamber could not withstand the same pressure as the Krupp cannon.

Swedish technicians, British technicians, American technicians, and domestic technicians have used many kinds of common sense, and even used China's native methods to adopt self-tightening iron-core copper cannon technology, but it is still not up to par. In the end, after three years of intense imitation, the trial production was finally successful, but the manufacturing process is still slightly different from Krupp, although it still uses five layers of steel plates, but the processing method has been innovated, layer by layer staggered with each other, and the best quality Swedish refined steel is used, and the performance is finally comparable to Krupp.

It took three years, but not only three years, if it were not for Zhu Jinglun's previous ten years of technical accumulation, these three years would not have been able to imitate this cannon, it can be said that it took thirteen years to reach this level, because the process of manufacturing this cannon took more than ten years to import from the West and explore it himself.

However, it is good to imitate it, which means that Daming is already the third country in the world after Britain and Prussia to be able to produce large breech-loading rifled guns. And just this year, the British began to replace the breech-loading Armstrong naval guns with front-loading rifled guns. Therefore, in this world, the countries that really use breech-loading rifled guns on a large scale are actually Prussian and Daming.

The biggest reason why the British switched to front-loading guns was that the performance of the large-caliber Armstrong rear-loading cannons on British warships was not stable enough.

Armstrong began to design new cannons for the British army in 1854, when he designed a breech-loading rifled gun that was one of the first rear-loading guns in the world, and was tested by the British War Office and considered to be extremely good, but at this time it was only used as an infantry gun, only 3-pounder and 5-pounder models.

Since the British believed that this artillery was very superior, in order to maintain the British army's military superiority over other countries, the British government purchased a patent for the cannon and legislated to prohibit the export of this artillery.

After that, Armstrong continued to withdraw from new models, and in 1859 began to produce 110-pound naval guns for the British Navy, which perfectly suppressed the Qing batteries in the Second Opium War. However, he ran into trouble in the war with the Satsuma clan of Japan the following year.

In the vast majority of cases, the Armstrong cannon was reliable, such as when the Anglo-French army attacked the Northern Ham, the Armstrong cannon had a strong advantage.

However, in the Anglo-Saxon War that broke out between Britain and Japan in 1862, the Armstrong cannon attacking the Satsuma Domain's fort had frequent jamming and decreased accuracy, which finally led to heavy losses for the British army, 50 wounded and 13 killed, mainly due to the violent storm of the day, and the British learned that this kind of cannon was unreliable in bad weather.

For this reason, in 1864 the British War Department announced the discontinuation of the Armstrong cannon, and began to design a front-loading rifled gun to replace the Armstrong cannon, and in 1870 began to remove the Armstrong cannon from warships.

Now the Ming Dynasty is doing the opposite, not only using the Krupp breech-loading rifled gun as a circle, producing a large number of army small cannons, but also producing naval guns and coastal defense guns, there is a tendency to rear-load, Zhu Jinglun knows that the cannon must be developing in the direction of rear-loading, and the British will go against the trend of history, and sooner or later they will regret it.

However, Zhu Jinglun was always unsure about whether the Krupp cannon could sink the British warship, so when the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom attacked Shanghai, he asked someone to sell Li Xiucheng, saying that the Ming Dynasty had recently produced a giant cannon that could bombard ironclad ships, and asked Li Xiucheng if he was interested.

Li Xiucheng has bought too many artillery products made in the Ming Dynasty in recent years, and the products of the Ming Arsenal naturally have nothing to say, even the products of the Foshan Iron Workshop, because of the technical supervision of the Ming Arsenal responsible for quality inspection, the performance is also very satisfactory, and the fight in Shanghai is bound to meet the foreigners, Li Xiucheng agreed to buy a few to try, but the price is too expensive, one asks for 100,000 taels, and finally Li Xiucheng gritted his teeth and only needed two.

When attacking the city wall of Shanghai, two cannons had just arrived, and as a result, this kind of cannon that could fire 600 kilograms of heavy artillery shells showed its face fiercely, and the three cannons collapsed the city wall, and after the capture of Shanghai, it was even more with the British ironclad ships on the Huangpu River for more than an hour of artillery battle, and as a result, a British ironclad giant ship was sunk with good luck.

But it's impossible to buy more.

The British minister expressed British anger at the Ming Foreign Affairs Department, and Xu Rongcun, the number one cadre under Wu Chongyao, did not give him face.

"That's right, the cannon was sold by us to the Taiping Army."

"You are undermining the principle of neutrality, could it be that Daming wants to start a war with Britain?"

The British minister, Wittoma, spoke with a menacing tone.

Xu Rongcun sneered: "Your country did not declare war with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, not to mention that when we sold artillery, the Taiping Army had not yet begun to fight Shanghai, and the peace talks undermined the principle of neutrality?" ”

Wittoma snorted: "Well, from now on, we officially inform your country that our British Empire and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom have entered a state of war, and we hope that your country will strictly abide by neutrality, otherwise it will be a declaration of war against the British Empire!" ”

Wittoma's ultimatum Xu Rongcun shrugged: "You need to submit official documents. ”

"There will be." ”

Wei Tuma's attitude is uncomfortable, and Xu Rongcun doesn't care in his heart, the British are very virtuous these years.

It's just a pity that they can't continue to make war money, but I didn't expect Britain to really declare war, and I thought that they didn't plan to do it seriously, so it seems that they have to tell His Majesty the Emperor immediately.

After communicating with Chen Zhiting, the two soon visited Zhu Jinglun together, told Zhu Jinglun the news of the imminent declaration of war by Britain and asked the emperor for his attitude.

Zhu Jinglun's heart was quite complicated, the British had not declared war before, but only sent a diplomatic note to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

Obviously, they wanted to intimidate the Taiping army, just like Ningbo a few years ago, the Taiping army occupied Ningbo, but had to withdraw, but now it is different from the past, the Taiping army has long been different from the past, Li Xiucheng thought that the army was strong and strong, and there was no reply to the British note at all, and the fight was directly started.

If that's all, the British probably won't really go to war at this time, because the French are busy arguing with Prussia, and they don't have time to intervene in the war in the Far East with the British, and the British don't want to do it alone at all, especially in the face of the Taiping Army, which is often hundreds of thousands of troops.

However, if someone sank a main ironclad ship, this matter cannot be finished like this, and it is impossible to explain to the people without a battle.

Therefore, a declaration of war became inevitable.

The British were involved in the war, and this scene was out of line, what tricks Li Xiucheng could play, Zhu Jinglun was immediately unsure, but one thing is certain, Li Xiucheng will be entangled with the British, and this Northern Expedition can only be stopped.

For Zhu Jinglun, this is not necessarily a good thing, he didn't want to see the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom once again burn the war north of the Yangtze River, and now that the British have entered the war, it is just right to tighten the reins of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's wild horse.

"I thought I promised the British that we would remain neutral and that we would not sell arms and materials to the war zone during the war."

Zhu Jinglun said.

"Is it really not for sale?"

Xu Rongcun was a little sorry, this is a good opportunity, how many people have made a fortune in the past few years by selling arms, he is a businessman, he is very clear.

Zhu Jinglun shook his head: "Tell Li Xiucheng over there, just say that under pressure from the British, we can't continue to provide them with weapons." ”

Li Xiucheng is not short of weapons for the time being, it depends on the outcome of his battle with the British.