The light of dawn seeped into the windowsill. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

A golden morning sun shone on the bed, and Li Chao woke up.

Although he was the first and auxiliary minister of the imperial court and the post of staying in Hanjing, Li Chao was not diligent in government. The affairs of the DPRK and the Central Committee were basically handed over to the three auxiliary ministers Yang Gongren, Du Yan, and Liu Hongji. There is nothing special, Li Chao only went to court last time in five days.

The Lee Mansion has also been very lively recently.

Because the Li family has obtained a 600-mile Dawan fiefdom, they have to recruit a lot of territory knights. Li Chao regarded the number of knights in this territory as a benefit for the Li family, and the stewards had a chance to get it.

From the beginning of the Chinese New Year to the present, the internal and external stewards of the Li family have been staring at this matter. It is not easy to select the right person from these thousands of excerpts and materials.

"I didn't expect so many people to be interested!" Cui Yingying's belly was already slightly bulging again, she was wearing a mink fur, and she was looking at it with a registration form in her hand.

Li Chao smiled and kissed her on the face, and reached out to touch her belly, which had just bulged a little.

"After all, the knights of the territory are also nobles, and for the stewards, this is also extremely rare. Once you become a knight of the territory, you become a nobleman, and you will be glorious. He flipped through a few copies, "I'm surprised that our family's steward is so powerful. ”

To become a Territory Knight, a prerequisite is to have a population of 500 to go to Dawan. There are a lot of people in 500 people, especially now that Zhenguan has been in the ninth year, this is the time of martial virtue. During the Wude period, the poor people were everywhere in the world, but now, after all these years of immigration to the frontier, there are also nobles' territory recruitment, where are there so many people to recruit.

Now the Central Plains is no longer as vast and sparsely populated as it used to be, and because of the rise of industry and commerce, a large number of workshops have also absorbed a large number of people. Even the people who still don't have much land are still worried about life. Working in a workshop is better than farming.

After all, Dawan is too far away, and as soon as he hears that it is thousands of miles away, he can already scare off the vast majority of people who want to go to the frontier enclosure. To go to Dawan, it is better to go to other places. Lingnan, Liaonan, and even Liuqiu, aren't they better than Dawan in the Western Regions?

Therefore, this hard condition for recruiting 500 people can definitely stop the vast majority of people who want to get the title of knight of this territory.

Now that there are so many people signing up for the Li family's housekeepers, of course there are people.

"These guys are quite smart, and they have used all kinds of means." Li Chao laughed while watching. Some people buy slaves directly, buy 500 slaves and go to Dawan in the Western Regions, although 500 slaves are not cheap, but many of the Li family's stewards are rich, and ordinary local merchants can't compare to them.

Especially those executives of the Li family, these people all have stocks, and the dividends and rewards for a year are quite good. The Li family has always believed that the higher the benefits created for the Li family, the higher the rewards will be.

For the executives of many industries such as Li Ji Qianzhuang, pawnshops, printing, sugar, and tea, buying 500 slaves from Qinzhou Port is really not a big deal.

Others mobilized their own family members and relatives to gather 500 people to go.

There are even people who directly adopt a group of orphans from those orphanages and other places, as long as they can ensure the support of the teenagers who grew up in the orphanages, etc., the orphanages are also allowed to be claimed by ordinary people and even businessmen. The steward took the teenager away in the name of employment, provided salary, arranged accommodation and food, and signed a contract, and there was no reason why he would not let him go.

In order to obtain the rank of territorial knight, the stewards of the Li family are simply eight immortals across the sea, each showing their magical powers.

Li Chao is just happy to see it happen.

As long as you can get people through, that's fine.

The Li family itself is also recruiting people, but it is indeed difficult to recruit people from Dawan, even if the conditions are very good, promising that as long as they can reclaim as much land as they can reclaim, they can own as much land as they want, promising to exempt all taxes for the first five years, and even promising to cover all travel expenses, etc. Not many people want to go.

Now the people of Datang are living a much better life than before.

There are very few people who are willing to leave their hometowns, stay in their hometowns, have no land, and can also work in the workshop, anyway, now that the tax system is reformed, land tax is levied according to land property, and household tax is levied according to wealth, and the tax pressure is not great.

Without the shackles of servitude, it is very convenient for everyone to go out to work and earn money. Working near home, celebrating the New Year during the Qingming Festival, and going home to worship ancestors, clean ancestral graves, and even if they die in the future, they can also be buried in ancestral graves, which is the best for many people.

If you are too far from home, you will not be able to come back.

If you can't enter the ancestral grave after death, won't you become a lonely ghost?

Now the use of slaves has basically begun to be used in the mines and workshops of the lords and landlords everywhere. The port of Qinzhou has now become the largest slave trading center in Datang, with countless ships of slaves arriving every year.

In addition, the nobles of the Central Plains will also open source.

The Meizhiman rebellion in Hunan three years ago was just the beginning. In three years, the Meizhou people in Hunan had almost been arrested, and all of them had become slaves in the Jingzhou slave market.

Jingzhou has now become the second largest slave market in the Tang Dynasty after Qinzhou, and most of the slaves in Qinzhou come from the sea, mainly Kunlun slaves. However, most of the slaves in Jingzhou were barbarians from Shannan, Meizhou from Hunan, Bashu from Bashu, and barbarians from Jiangxi, Guangxi, and Yunnan.

In recent years, countless powerful and noble families have set up slave hunting teams, fully armed in Wuling Mountain, and in Daba Mountain in Shu to catch slaves.

Those barbarians in the mountains can be regarded as having fallen into blood mold.

Many people want to come and live a life in the mountains, but because of the hot slave trade and the amazing profits, they have participated in attacking those cottages and capturing those barbarians.

And the court is also acquiescing.

These things that happened were also good for the imperial court.

When the barbarians' village was breached, the imperial court naturally took over a place. The states and counties that had control over the flat land at the foot of the mountain had a larger jurisdiction.

Even the local Han people were able to buy a lot of land from the government at a low price.

According to inexact statistics, over the past three years.

The countless slave hunting teams captured millions of barbarian slaves from Shannan, Hunan, Qianzhong, Bashu, Yunnan and other southwestern places, and then traded them to various places through the Jingzhou slave market.

Hunan, a place where the imperial court had little control, now has no barbarian power, and the few surviving barbarian tribes have retreated into the deep mountains and mountains, and there is no barbarian tribe that can raise the flag to confront the imperial court.

These countless barbarian slaves also alleviated many labor shortages, and at the same time lowered the price of slaves in the market.

Even the Li family bought a lot of slaves in the Jingzhou market.

"The law of the jungle is the law of the jungle. The barbarians in the southwest are self-contained, unwilling to be sinicized, and unwilling to be included in the mainstream. Subjugation, even enslavement, is also a very inevitable thing. It's cruel, but no one can stop it. This is what Li Chao said to Cui Yingying, and this is the essence of the facts.

In the eyes of the Tang people, from the monarch and prime minister to the peddlers and pawns, no one regards those barbarian slang fangs as Tang people.

In the eyes of the Tang people, they are alien races, and they are no different from the Turkic people, Khitan people, Gaoju people, and Tuyuhun people in the north.

Not only were they not disgusted with the slave catchers of those noble and powerful families, but they also praised them, thinking that they had opened up territory for the Tang Dynasty.

Hunan has been swept away by those people, and the next step is the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau.

It is estimated that with the traffic terrain over there and the strength of the indigenous people, it is enough for them to toss for another ten years. Then ten years later, you can go to Yunnan, Yunnan is finished, you can also rush into the Burmese rainforest, and then there will be Zhenla.

If they keep up the momentum.

In other words, as long as the industry and commerce of the Tang Dynasty have been so prosperous and the labor shortage has always existed, then those slave catchers will continue to open up the past.

These people are pioneers!

Li Chao does not oppose or support them, as long as he does not touch his own interests.

Some time ago, some people wanted to go to Ryuqiu to catch slaves, perhaps because they felt that Ryuqiu was relatively close, and the cost of catching slaves in Ryuqiu was low. But Liuqiu has long been Li Chao's forbidden belly, dare to come to Liuqiu to catch slaves, isn't that taking food from Li Chao's mouth?

The natives of Liuqiu, Li Chao regarded them as his own family.

The alliance he pulled up is still so many tribes, but in the past few years, with the support of the Li family, it has been invincible all over the surrounding area, and I don't know how many tribes have been destroyed.

Li Chao can get at least 100,000 Shanyi slaves every year, which greatly alleviates the labor shortage for the Li family, which is the harvest of the Li family alone. Not to mention, the Li family has more and more land in Liuqiu, and in recent years, several ports and castles have been built, and more and more arable land has been developed.

The tribe of that alliance has now been reduced to Li Chao's thugs and mercenaries. They conquered and attacked those other Shanyi tribes for Li Chao, and then exchanged the population and territory they had defeated for things to the Li family. Exchange almighty paper money, exchange weapons, and even buy a house in the city, and live a very comfortable life.

They did not plow or hunt, nor did they even build their houses, nor did they weave cloth, so they specialized in warfare.

The Li family also sent troops every time, but basically they watched the battle from behind, and it was Shanyi's own people who died. Now the entire central and southern regions to the west of Liuqiu Island have become the world of the Li family. Of course, it is also the world of the imperial court, and last year, the imperial court also deliberately upgraded Penghu County to Liuzhou.

"I haven't been to Ryuqiu in three years, and I miss that place." Li Chao said.

After several years of development, although the Li family only occupies the central and southern plains to the west of the island, there are already 300,000 people on the island, which is not counting the 100,000 Alliance Shanyi tribes that have been semi-Sinicized.

Nowadays, the fertile fields are everywhere, and rice has become the largest local product, in fact, it is cane sugar.

Last year alone, the Li family shipped as much as 1.5 million stone of rice from Liuqiu to the Central Plains. Even Hankyung can eat Ryugu rice.

Ryuqiu has become a granary.