In March of the eighth year of Chongzhen, the climate of the Cheolsan Peninsula in North Korea began to warm, and the plants on the peninsula began to flourish. On the central hill of the peninsula, there is an iron mountain castle built by the Ming people, which looks extremely magnificent against the background of the surrounding mountains and forests. In particular, the jagged walls built with the help of the slope of the hill look even more imposing.

A year ago, it was with this city wall and the concerted efforts of the soldiers and civilians in the city that several attacks launched by the Houjin army were repelled, so that the Houjin finally gave up the plan to seize the city.

Wang Huazhen, who was standing at the head of the city, stretched out his hand and touched the horse face stone in front of him, and couldn't help but feel a little emotional. Six years ago, it was just a small castle, and it was he who took those Korean slaves and maids who fled from Liaodong to build this city little by little, and reclaimed thousands of hectares of fertile land outside the city, which greatly alleviated the food crisis in Dongjiang Town.

Wang Huazhen, who experienced the defeat of Guangning, finally washed away the little bookish anger on his body. After arriving in Dongjiang Town, he began to go deep into the grassroots in a down-to-earth manner, to talk with those low-level soldiers and fugitives from Liaodong, and to ask about everything one by one, and no longer pretended to others.

In the past six years, the military and political affairs of Tieshan County have tempered Wang Huazhen, and it can be said that he has almost turned him into another person. His influence in Dongjiang Town is no weaker than that of Mao Wenlong himself. In more than six years, Dongjiang Town has also changed from a group of Liaodong deserters and fugitives who huddled behind enemy lines to warm up to a military group that controlled the northern overseas territories of the Ming Dynasty.

At this time, Dongjiang Town did not dare to be the selection of officers, the recruitment and retirement of soldiers, and the management of logistics materials had gradually been incorporated into the management of the imperial court. Of course, in order to complete the run-in and docking between Dongjiang Town and the imperial court, Wang Huazhen also made great efforts in the meantime.

The war of Kim's invasion of Korea a year ago can be regarded as a test that Wang Huazhen's energy in North Korea in the past five years has not been in vain. When the Later Jin army invaded Korea, Wang Huazhen rejected Mao Wenlong's suggestion to withdraw to Phi Dao, and chose to hold the city together with the soldiers and civilians of Tieshan City.

This time, Wang Huazhen was not disappointed, and there was no second Sun Degong in Tieshan City. In the process of defending the city, Wang Huazhen found that compared with those generals and big families in Liaoxi, these low-level soldiers and civilians who fled from Liaodong, and even those Korean slaves and maids who fled to Tieshan County, were very brave in the face of the invasion of the Later Jin army, and none of them wanted to surrender to the Jurchens.

It was precisely because of their desperate resistance that the Houjin army, after paying heavy casualties, finally gave up their plan to capture Iron Mountain City, and instead chose to monitor the city on the spot until the end of the war.

After the withdrawal of the Later Jin army, Wang Huazhen finally received an order from the imperial court to return to the capital. From the first day she arrived in North Korea, Wang Huazhen thought that one day she would be able to return to Beijing to wash away her shame. But when he was really able to return to the capital, he was reluctant to give up on this land that had consumed him for six years.

Looking at the sea in the distance, Wang Huazhen couldn't help but sigh, compared to the simple personnel here in Dongjiang Town, the turbulent politics of the capital is really a formidable existence.

Just when Wang Huazhen was looking at the sea, the political struggle in Hanyang could be regarded as coming to an end. Shen Jiyuan and Kim Sang-heon, who returned to Hanyang with Chongzhen's stern orders, united with the pro-Ming forces in Korea with the help of Zu Dae-su and Oh San-gye's uncle and nephew, who controlled Hanyang Fortress, and criticized the party of Kim Liu, the leader of the council after the surrender, and Cho Myung-gil, the official who signed the humiliating peace treaty.

The alliance signed between North Korea and Hou Jin was too humiliating, and Li Yu himself was deeply humiliated by the experience of bowing to Huang Taiji three times and nine times at Mitadu, and after Hou Jin's peace plea from Daming was transmitted back to North Korea, it also made many Korean pro-Ming people arrogant. Many people think that if North Korea had been able to hold out last year, it might have been able to wait for the Ming army to come to its aid, and then North Korea would not have to bear the humiliation that followed.

With the military and political pressure of the Ming Dynasty outside, the public opinion pressure of the Korean scholars inside, and Li Liang's sense of humiliation for the Houjin, in the first month of the eighth year of Chongzhen, Li Liang finally issued a decree. Jin Liu, Cui Mingji and other party officials were dismissed, and they were exiled to other places. Jin Shangxian was appointed as the leader of the council, and Shen Qiyuan was the judge of Cao, and he followed the example of the Ming Dynasty to set up a cabinet and began to implement the new policy.

Kim Sang-hun's first act as the leader of the council was to announce the formation of a division of the new Korean army to defend the city of Hanyang. The training and command of this new Korean army was handed over to the Korean minister of the Ming Dynasty, Zu Dashou, and the Korean naval divisions were also unified into the Korean navy, and Lim Kyung-ye was appointed as the chief general of the Korean navy, responsible for commanding this navy.

On behalf of the Kingdom of Korea, Shen Qiyuan signed a package of economic assistance agreements with representatives of the Central Bank of Daming and the Sihai Trading Company, borrowing 3 million taels of silver, about 4.5 million yuan, from Daming on the basis of North Korea's mining rights, customs taxes and salt taxes, to build Daming's infrastructure and various industrial and mining enterprises.

One of the most important pieces of infrastructure is the construction of the Gyeongbu Railway. The purpose of the construction of this railway was to connect Hanyang with Busan, and to ensure that the volunteers of Gyeongsang-do could quickly move to Hanyang, so as to ensure that Sim Jiwon, who was born in Gyeongsang-do, could use the power of his hometown to influence Hanyang City.

At this time, in the Ming Dynasty, a tael of gold was worth about 21 Ming silver dollars, and paper money needed 25 yuan. The loan lent by the Ming Dynasty to North Korea is paper money, and the money will not actually flow into North Korea, but directly become various materials in the Ming Dynasty and then transported to North Korea.

It should be said that Shen Qiyuan does not mind this method of payment, and with his understanding of the North Korean bureaucracy, if it is imported currency, it is estimated that more than half of this loan will go into the pockets of officials at all levels. The only thing he was dissatisfied with was that the loan given by Daming Bank actually paid interest, although it was only six points, which really violated his impression of Daming.

Just as the Koreans were actively preparing for reform and trying to find a way to enrich the country and strengthen the army, the reforms led by the eastern and western shogunates of Japan finally began to make some improvements.

Strictly speaking, unlike the Edo shogunate, which only pursued military reforms, the Osaka shogunate, led by Ye Yuxuan, tried to carry out comprehensive changes from the economy to society. Ye Yuxuan did this because many of the customs in Japan and China are similar, and the reform experiments carried out in Japan can be implemented in China with only a slight change.

In Chongzhen's eyes, Japan is a testing ground for social change, and certain policies that cannot be implemented in China for the time being can be tested in Japan first, and then lessons learned and then used at home, which is obviously more able to alleviate domestic contradictions.

However, Chongzhen only wanted to conduct social experiments in the Osaka area, while Ye Yuxuan and those Japanese feudal lords tried to promote it to the entire western Japan region after seeing the rapid development of the Osaka area. As the governor of Osaka and a senior official of the Tokai Patrol Office, Ye Yuxuan and other Chinese officials already regarded Japan as the territory of the Ming Dynasty, and they could not wait to digest the western Japan region and thus create a solid foundation for the expansion of the Tokai Patrol Office.

After all, at this time, the East China Sea Patrol Office had turned its attention to the Americas, where the fur trade and the silver and gold produced in Mexico had already made Xu Xinsu and the merchants of the Four Seas Trading Company salivate.

However, the voyage from China to the Americas was too long, and the migration of the Ming population to the Americas, the company did not have the absolute right to dispose of these Ming people, and these people did not want to obey the company's orders to hunt after arriving on the west coast of the Americas, but preferred to find a safe piece of land to open up the wasteland, in order to offset their own ticket money.

Reclamation of the wastelands of the Americas was an excellent choice for the Ming Dynasty, which meant that the Ming were able to take root on the west coast of North America and provide enough food and supplies for those who came after them. But for merchants, it was the worst option, because only fur could bring high profits to the trade routes to and from the Pacific.

Merchants wanted more fur; The East China Sea Patrol wanted to explore the interior of the Americas more deeply, even beyond the Rocky Mountains, so as to expand its control over the Americas. As for the lords of the Japanese feudal domains, they wanted to send away as many ronins and bankrupt peasants as possible in their own domains to prevent popular riots.

The tripartite hit it off, and the ships to the Americas began to take with them Japanese ronins and paupers, who were not only obedient, but also hard-working as the farmers of the Ming Dynasty. Even better, no one cares about the life and death of these Japanese, so the ship can be stuffed with as many Japanese as possible, thus increasing the transport capacity.

Ships of the same size, often carrying more than twice as many Japanese as Chinese, made death during the voyage commonplace. The Japanese who were transported to the west coast of the Americas needed to serve the Ming Dynasty for five years before they were allowed to own their own land.

Others were shipped to Peru and Chile, where they were sold to the Spaniards for mining and agricultural work to supplement the lack of labor caused by the Indian revolt.

And many more Japanese are hired by Chinese fishing companies to fish and whale hunt around Japan, and make canned fish and dried fish off the coast of Japan and transport them to China.

It was thanks to the work of these low-level Japanese that the Japanese economy, which had been damaged by the war, finally began to slowly recover. In particular, the discovery of Besko Copper Mountain in northeastern Iyo allowed the Osaka shogunate to acquire new financial resources and began to invest in the construction of the Osaka Shipyard.

The Satsuma, Choshu, and Kumamoto domains, after sending vassals to the Ming Dynasty to study, began to try to build ironworks, coke factories, and gun factories. The war of conquest of Japan by the Tokyokai finally made these feudal lords and samurai feel the crisis, and they tried to become rich and strong by learning * and driving the southern barbarians out of their country.