When Emperor Chongzhen's fingers clicked heavily on several necessary shipping lanes in the waters south of the Min Sea, that is, off the coast of Guangdong, Shen Tingyang quickly realized his naivety.

The Shen family is engaged in private shipping, and private ship owners or maritime merchants can pay tolls, tolls, and protection fees to Zheng Zhilong, Liu Xiang, and even the Spaniards, Portuguese, or Dutch, in exchange for their passage guarantee and maritime protection.

However, how could the official fleet of the Ming court pay them protection money?

It's not just a matter of the dignity of the Ming court, because even if you want to buy maritime protection from Liu Xiang or the Spaniards and Dutch behind him, will they agree?

If the protection fee is higher than the value of the goods you are shipping, what are you going to do with it?!

If the value of the goods you transport is higher than the protection fee you pay, for example, there are a large number of weapons and a large amount of food, and people will rob them directly, what protection fee will you be charged?!

When Emperor Chongzhen called Shen Tingyang to the study of Qianqing Palace, although he didn't say so directly, Shen Tingyang quickly figured it out.

Emperor Chongzhen didn't want to trade in Nanyang, nor did he want to directly take silver or weapons to exchange a large amount of rice with the kings of small countries in Nanyang.

But now the Ming Dynasty's maritime power is really not enough, even if Zheng Zhilong is attached to the imperial court, it still cannot guarantee that the official trade fleet of the Ming Dynasty can pass safely south of the Guangdong Sea.

This matter is really urgent.

After Shen Tingyang realized the emperor's hardships and painstaking efforts, he also knew the real problem at the moment.

Although it was impossible to organize a fleet to buy rice in the South Seas for a while, Emperor Chongzhen was still very much in favor of carrying out sea transportation, at least to improve the volume and efficiency of transporting grain from the south to the north as much as possible.

It is precisely because of this that Emperor Chongzhen still partially agreed to Shen Tingyang's request.

In mid-May, he issued a holy decree to Nan Juyi, the governor of Zhili, and Liang Tingdong, the governor of Tianjin, appointing Shen Tingyang, a scholar in the Wuying Palace, as the Tianjin military preparation road and the Tianjin naval division supervisor, and allocated him 1 million silver dollars in advance, so that he could set up the government-run Dagukou shipyard at the mouth of the Dagukou, that is, the estuary of the Wei River (later known as the Haihe River), and he personally served as the general office, recruited craftsmen, and supervised the construction of large transport ships and warships.

In Tianjin, there was a governor in the Wanli period, but in the Wanli period, the position of the governor of Tianjin only existed for two years before it was revoked.

It was not until after the Emperor of the Apocalypse ascended the throne that this position was restored in order to respond to and support the Liaodong war.

However, the actual jurisdiction of the governor of Tianjin was very limited.

At the beginning, it was mainly to manage coastal defense and maritime affairs, and the three guards of Tianjin on land were under the direct jurisdiction of the Governor's Office of the Later Military Capital, not under the jurisdiction of the Governor of Tianjin.

As for other civil affairs, they were either under the jurisdiction of the Shuntian Governor or the Baoding Governor.

Militarily, it is under the management and command of the Baoding General Army, and the battalion only has the position of Tianjin Deputy General, which is subordinate to the Baoding General Army.

Later, Liaodong was repeatedly defeated, the Liao affair was bad, and the land of Gyeonggi was also at risk, and Tianjin's maritime defense became more and more important, so the Tianjin Naval Division was built.

At this time, in addition to the governor, a deputy general army was set up to take charge of Tianjin's water and land defense, and the land battalion led by the deputy general of Tianjin was also transferred to the unified command of the deputy general of Tianjin.

Nowadays, the Tianjin Sanwei, which has long been abandoned, has also been revoked in the process of restructuring and returning to the non-border guards in the first year of Chongzhen, and on the one hand, the cultivators have their own fields, and on the other hand, they have also turned military households into civilian households, and they have been included in the household registration of the counties under the jurisdiction of the Tianjin governor.

This was the case in Tianjin when Shen Tingyang was ordered to arrive in Tianjin at the end of May to take up his post.

Today's Shen Tingyang, with the support of Nan Juyi and Liang Tingdong, has circled the site of the shipyard in Dagukou, and is currently being led by Huang Long, deputy chief of the Tianjin Navy Division, to dig a shipyard in the shipyard at Dagukou.

Shen Tingyang himself had already gone south, and with the will of Emperor Chongzhen, he went to the coastal areas of Fujian, especially Fuzhou, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou, to hire shipwrights along the coast of Fujian.

Because shipbuilding is not a simple matter.

In particular, the large Fu ships that the Ming Dynasty was able to build themselves and the Dutch plywood ships and the Spanish Galen ships that are more advanced than they can be built by themselves.

During the Yongle period, the shipbuilding level of the Ming Dynasty was the second in the world at that time, and it is estimated that no one dared to call it the first, and the later maritime powers Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, etc., were not fart at that time.

However, after the Yongle period, the glory of Zheng He's voyage to the West was like a flash in the pan, like a passing cloud, and soon dissipated.

Two hundred years later, in the Chongzhen period, not to mention the kind of standard Zheng He treasure ship that is 44 zhang long (about 140 meters), 18 zhang wide (about 50 meters), as high as five stories from the bilge to the deck, and more than 5,000 materials (equivalent to the current displacement of 2,500 tons), it is a lucky ship with more than 2,000 materials, and it is not something that all the shipyards along the coast of Jiangnan or Fujian and Guangzhou can build.

When it comes to the shipbuilding industry in the coastal areas of the middle and late Ming Dynasty, it is a long story.

According to the shape, French style and craftsmanship, it is roughly divided into four ship series, namely the fortune boat, the wide ship, the sand boat and the bird boat.

Among them, the manufacturing process of Fu Boat, which is mainly popular in the coastal areas of Fujian, is called Fu Ship because of this.

Correspondingly, the Guangzhou ship is mainly the shipbuilding technology in the coastal area of Guangdong, compared with the Fu ship, it belongs to the long and narrow type, the hull is also very long, but the above deck seems a little narrower, and at the same time, the Fu ship is not so tall and tall as a building, so the speed of riding the wind and waves at sea is much faster than the Fu ship.

The bird boat, mainly popular in the coastal areas of Zhejiang, is smaller than the Fu ship and the Guangzhou ship, and is named because the bow is pointed like a bird's beak.

As for the sand boat, it is a kind of flat-bottomed boat, mainly offshore, shallow sea and inland shipping transport ships, the draft is relatively shallow, so it is not resistant to wind and waves, and the boats on the canal are actually mostly in the shape of flat-bottomed sand boats.

During the Yongle period, Zheng He's fleet when he went to the West, except for super-large treasure ships, was mainly lucky ships.

And the so-called treasure ship is actually a super-large lucky ship.

Since the Song Dynasty, especially in the Southern Song Dynasty, this kind of lucky ship has been used as the main transport ship for ocean-going trade along the coast of Fujian.

Although it was mainly a transport ship, it could also be loaded with artillery and carried out naval operations, and most of the main warships of the northern and southern naval fleets in the middle and late Ming Dynasty were fortune ships.

In the Battle of Luliang during the Anti-Japanese War in the Wanli period, the fortune ship of the Daming Navy Division was much more powerful than the so-called tortoiseshell ship touted to the sky by the Koreans in later generations.

Even the so-called dark house ship, which the Japanese are proud of, is just a pediatric in front of the Daifuku ship.

Because in the same historical period, the largest Ataka ship that the Japanese could build was only 500 materials.

However, although the shipbuilding industry in the middle and late Ming Dynasty was still at the forefront of East Asia, the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Dutch were lagging behind in comparison with the large ocean-going merchant ships used for both commercial and war purposes.

Even Fukufune and Canton, which were originally ocean-going carriers, could only trade in the offshore area.

Because of the maritime ban policy after Yongle, the demand for foreign trade declined, and the manufacturing process of large ocean-going merchant ships soon fell behind.

If you can't build a big ship, you can't carry a lot of supplies, so you can't sail far from the coast for a long time, so you can't cross the ocean to a place like the Spaniards, Portuguese, or Dutch.

Walking to the ocean, of course, is what Emperor Chongzhen has to do now, but if you want to go to the ocean, you must first have a boat.

And it's not just a ship, your sea ship must also rush out of the so-called first island chain in the future!

Now that the sailors of the Ming Dynasty are in the East Asian seas, it is not a problem to bully and bully Korea, Jianyu and even Japan.

But when the sailors of the Ming Dynasty could not guarantee victory in the face of hundreds of sturdy and faster Canton warships under Liu Xiang's command, how could you go out of the offshore sea and compete with the Spanish and Dutch warships?

If you want to go to sea, you can't be in a hurry, you must first build a good warship, although it doesn't have to surpass the Dutch plywood ships or the more advanced Spanish Galleons, but at least 2,000 large fortune ships, you have to be able to build them. [.]