It was meal time, and there were four dishes and one soup on her table, all of which were vegetarian.

"Serve me food."

Zhou Lang was not polite.

Sit down and eat.

"Kimchi in North Korea?"

There was also a pickle among the four dishes, and he munched on the pickled cabbage, but his appetite came.

Jin Minshu shook his head: "Master Sichuan made it." It is cabbage harvested in the lakeside vegetable garden in winter. ”

Zhou Lang nodded: "How is it compared to the kimchi of the Korean country?" ”

Jin Minshu said: "The customs of the country, the small state of North Korea is naturally incomparable. ”

Zhou Lang couldn't help but smile bitterly: "A plate of pickles, how much is so exquisite." ”

Jin Minshu hurriedly said: "The emperor has taught a very good lesson. ”

Zhou Lang asked casually: "You haven't been home to save your relatives for two years, have you?" The train to Seoul is open, and you don't want to go back and see. ”

Jin Minshu shook his head: "North Korea is in the poor countryside, there is nothing to go back to." There are some sisters who often miss them. If Your Majesty is gracious, will the slaves and maids bring them to the palace? ”

Zhou Lang sighed: "I'm old. Don't stuff me with any more women. It's okay to come and play, many princes in Nanjing are young, and it's a good match to look at each other! ”

Zhou Lang married a daughter to the king of North Korea, and North Korea has sent women to Zhou Lang over the years, a total of no less than thirty or fifty, and Zhou Lang can't even call everyone's name. Half of them were women from the Korean clan, and later some women from wealthy Korean families were also sent in. This Kim Min Shu is from Anton Kim's family. In addition, there are famous Korean families such as the Pungyang Cho clan and the Liheung Min clan.

These famous families in North Korea often trace their origins to a certain famous family in ancient China, and they multiplied by entering Korea in a certain year of troubled times to avoid disasters. It is not known whether it is true or false, but Zhou Lang feels that this can be regarded as a kind of connection with China, which is conducive to maintaining relations with Fanbang.

Therefore, when the Anton Kim family, who held the real power in North Korea, was the first to offer a woman to the Chinese palace in the name of his family, Zhou Lang accepted it, and the Anton Kim family set aside the minor emperor, and there were not a few ministers in the court who were dissatisfied with it, and the Korean regime lasted longer than the Central Plains Dynasty, and the ministers in the DPRK and China were more from the hands of some famous families, so the various factions checked and balanced each other, but also formed their own balance.

Anton Kim is bigger, and no one wants to see it. Quan ministers often do not end well, and the Kim family, perhaps out of this sense of crisis, was the first to offer a woman to the Chinese emperor by marrying a Chinese princess in Korea. After that, other wealthy families followed suit, and Zhou Lang also smiled and accepted them one by one.

The women sent by these people don't dare to say anything else, they are definitely one in a million beautiful, and they don't even dare to guarantee that each woman is really a woman from their family, but what can be guaranteed is that each one is beautiful enough. They are all playthings sent to please the emperor, and sending an ugly monster to find death.

For Zhou Lang, it is just a matter of accepting some women, and there is no loss. Politically, on the contrary, it is cultivating power for the daughter who marries into North Korea. These families, who have offered women to China through their queens, often have a sense of having a direct relationship with the Chinese royal family, which is used to show off that it is only a side effect, and will be greatly supported psychologically. I felt that I had the support of the Chinese royal family, and I dared not to take the Korean king who had no prestige in my eyes. And they will unite more closely around the queen of China and form a solid political force.

The Hou Party has de facto taken control of the Korean government, and the king is more like a puppet. With the post-party forces in the country and China's political and military forces in the outside world, the economy and culture have infiltrated the DPRK in recent years.

In the past two decades, North Korea's economic problems have been serious, the market is flooded with Chinese goods, the traditional handicraft industry has been directly destroyed, a large amount of precious metals have been lost, and the domestic financial order has been chaotic. Dozens of peasant uprisings broke out, the most serious of which was when Seoul was besieged by peasant armies, and the king and queen of Joseon took refuge in China by ship in panic with a group of powerful ministers.

After Zhou Lang sent troops to suppress the Korean rebellion, he sent some experts in the economic field to redesign the Korean economic model.

With the Chinese army in charge, the power of the post-party is monstrous, China's economy has penetrated, and internal and external forces have interacted to reshape North Korea's economy.

Chinese financial experts helped North Korea establish a national bank to issue banknotes using bank notes from Chinese public banks as reserves. A prudent monetary system was established. At the same time, the introduction of Chinese commodities in the past has shifted to the introduction of Chinese capital.

Timber demand was strong in northern China, and the fact that merchants who had illegally logged during the Qianlong period even dared to steal the woods in the Mulan paddock showed how profitable the timber industry was.

North Korea is mountainous, some of which are old forests, and after the arrival of Chinese timber merchants, a large number of North Koreans were hired to drill the mountains and cut wood. After the trees were cut down, the government organized the people to plant Korean ginseng on the spot. At the same time, the mining restrictions in North Korea are less than those in China, so there are relatively more mines, and there are hundreds of mines in the Qing Dynasty.

Now there are more of them, small mines that the North Koreans can develop themselves, and large mines that require the introduction of new machinery and equipment, either government-run or contracted to Chinese mine owners, and later to mining companies. North Korea's silver and copper mines were the first to enter their heyday, because these two minerals began to be mined on a large scale as early as the Qing Dynasty. With the introduction of new technologies, new equipment and capital, development has been even more rapid.

Later, with the steaming of China's industry, North Korea's coal and iron ore began to be mined on a large scale, and at this time, Chinese mining companies began to emerge, and their financial strength and technical capabilities directly raised North Korea's technology to a higher level.

North Korea's own commercial capital has exploded with the lifting of government restrictions, and North Koreans have taken advantage of the development of the timber industry to mass-produce Korean paper, which is already famous in China, and fishermen export seafood to China.

After surviving a decade of repeated peasant uprisings and repression by the North Korean government and the Chinese military, North Korea's economic model has basically completed the transformation, from the closed natural economic form of the past to a commercial era led by large commercial capital and supplemented by small and medium-sized commercial capital, and for a small country with a population of several million, a few large industries are enough to improve the economy.

Trade between Korea and China became more and more balanced, government finances began to stabilize, people's incomes increased substantially, society became stable, and Korean literati began to proclaim that they had entered a prosperous age, boasting that they were no different from China, and despised the backward Japanese.

But North Korea's economy has become heavily dependent on China, and their economic system has actually been fully colonized. Agricultural production is highly cash cropped, and almost all of the country's land is used to grow jute, which is China's largest supplier of cannabis raw materials.

North Korea relies on imports for almost all of its grain, mainly from northeast China. More than half of the population of North Korea began to eat pasta, and a small part of the rice was from the northeast, which had not long been introduced to the northeast, and most of the rice was re-exported by Chinese merchants from the South Seas.

Similar to North Korea, there is also Annam, and the Nguyen family also sent Vietnamese women to Zhou Lang, unlike North Korea, the power ministers of the Nguyen Dynasty did not become a climate, turmoil was frequent, and the state of belonging to China for a long time in history made them not give birth to their own wealthy families, and the Ruan family and the Zheng family were rare wealthy families. The Zheng family has withdrawn from the stage of history, the north controlled by the Zheng family is already part of China, the Ruan family is in the south, and no family can compete with the Ruan family.

Therefore, if it is not a woman from the clan, it is also a folk beauty selected by the Ruan family himself, and absolutely no powerful minister dares to send a woman directly to the Chinese emperor. Another point that is different from North Korea is that the royal family of Annam is relatively strong, and Nguyen Phuc Huan, who inherited the throne, advocates Confucianism and works hard, which can be regarded as taking over his father Nguyen Phuc Anh's class. He also married a Chinese princess and was also crowned queen, but he managed to avoid the situation of the inner palace interfering in politics.

Not only did he not let the Chinese forces control the politics of Annam, but through his marriage with the Chinese emperor, he introduced a large number of Chinese technologies, built water conservancy, opened up the Mekong Delta, emigrated to the south, launched wars against Cambodia and Laos, and successfully destroyed Cambodia, defeated the intervening Siamese army, and successfully expanded the territory more than doubled. Annam under the rule of Nguyen Phuc Thanh was the most powerful period of the Nguyen Dynasty.

But he can skillfully avoid becoming a political puppet, but he can't avoid the infiltration of Chinese commercial forces, Chinese businessmen in Annam, even more prosperous than North Korea, because compared to North Korea, Annam's land has more development potential, driven by Chinese commercial capital, the Mekong region and Cambodia's farmland has been reclaimed in large quantities, and a large number of Chinese immigrants have poured in here to help build canals, develop land, and also become landlords and merchants.

The colonization of Annam's economy was also severe, and they overtook Siam to become China's largest rice supplier, cultivating large amounts of land for cash crops such as sugar cane, cotton, and indigo, but with a fertile and vast area of arable land, they were still self-sufficient in food. And from the very beginning, they were a country that exported more than imported. In the early years of the Nguyen Dynasty, due to Japan's restrictions on copper ore exports, Annam had no use for copper, and after sending envoys to lobby the Japanese shogunate failed, they even had to accept the advice of Chinese merchants, who at one time imported Chinese white copper (zinc) to mint white coins during the Qing Dynasty. Through trade with China, they were able to use silver and copper coins as currency during the Nguyen Phuc Anh period. In the era of Nguyen Phuc Huan, he could even follow in China's footsteps and establish a gold standard.

However, this small country still could not escape the fate of being culturally assimilated by China step by step, Chinese characters were widely used in the country, and Chinese scholars could easily obtain a higher status here, and the Chinese language began to become more and more popular, and even more than half of the population in the imperial city of Hue spoke a Chinese with a Cantonese flavor.

After finishing a meal, Zhou Lang had already figured out many problems, and he couldn't find any competitors with lanterns around, in this case, it was difficult to change the country's strength. In the final analysis, there is still a lack of competition, and even in the world, it relies on the huge size, which overwhelms the industrial pioneer Britain.

Under such circumstances, how can Chinese officials not be proud.

But Zhou Lang didn't expect them to be so proud, the war had already broken out, and they were so lax when they were besieged by many countries.

Don't they think about defeat?

Zhou Lang sighed and asked Jin Minshu: "Do you think China will lose this war?" ”

Jin Minshu was stunned for a moment, covered his mouth and smiled: "Your Majesty said that you are laughing!" ”

Zhou Lang could only shake his head and sigh, and a sense of loneliness that the whole country was drunk and I was walking alone hit my heart.