Three days later, Lao Chen stood at the bow of the boat, pointing out the direction to the boatman, "I said that you are also from this Guangdong, why don't you know how to go along this Pearl River waterway?" ”

The boatman looked depressed, "My lord, the small one has always been running the Xijiang waterway, if it weren't for helping Master Chen Li deliver food, he wouldn't have passed through Mingzhou, if he said that the Xijiang waterway is small, he can sail with his eyes closed, but this is the first time he has come back to the Pearl River waterway." Pen? Interesting? Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 ｉｎfo”

"Alright, alright! Don't talk about it, there's in front, look at it! As he spoke, Lao Chen pointed to the waterway in the distance, "From there, turn to the east, and you will reach Qianhai." ”

"Don't point the wrong way, the life of the little one is your finger, if it's stranded, it's fine, if it hits a reef or something, it's going to be a problem."

Now Lao Chen was not happy, "Okay, okay, although Lao Tzu has not walked this waterway a few times, but there are no reefs in this front bay, don't be afraid at all, okay?" In addition, the other places that can't be docked are all woods, only the harbor where there are no woods, you know how to go when you have eyes, okay? ”

The boatman was silent, but his eyes were nervously fixed on the nearby water, and he carefully steered the boat upstream, heading towards the front bay.

Lao Chen's mind was not on this at all, and he had lived a life he hadn't thought about in the past three days. As a Xu official, he is basically the lowest level of the entire Wu Dynasty bureaucratic system, and he is really an unentered stream. Of course, even if it is a county magistrate, what is issued has nothing to do with money, it is completely a folded physical object, grain, cloth, and whatever is in the official warehouse. And the Wu Dynasty doesn't pay attention to any high salaries and incorruptible at all, even if it is Xin'an County, which is a seven-grade county, the monthly salary is only seven stones and five buckets, and his direct superior county master book is only five stones and five buckets, and these things have to be exchanged into silver taels by themselves, which is not worth much, and it is very troublesome, and many officials are not even too lazy to receive this money. Instead of going through the trouble of exchanging it into silver, it is better to accumulate it and redeem it once a year to save trouble. Not to mention his little servant, the monthly salary is three stones, but it is deducted by the officials above layer by layer, and the ones who can get it are often only about one stone or eight to two stones, and counting on these servants to live is simply waiting for the rhythm of starvation, and the reason why he came to be a servant is nothing more than to be able to pay less money and grain when collecting grain every year.

As an official in the Wu Dynasty, it is definitely not enough to rely on Yulu, so you can only find a way to find gray income. When the county order can also withhold a part of the silver in the name of "fire consumption" in the local tax, but when they go down to these unstreamed, there are not many choices, if you want to be like a fish in water in the workplace, you must pay bribes to your superiors, so that you can keep your job, where does the money come from? Naturally, there is only one way to exploit the common people. The thing that annoys Lao Chen the most is that Xin'an County is a poor place, although there are not many mountains, but there are not many places suitable for farming. For an agricultural country like the Wu Dynasty, grain is the lifeblood of the country, and only with grain can there be money.

Fortunately in the past few years, the Maidno people are not allowed to directly enter Mingzhou for trading, so many Maidno people choose to trade on Baji Island outside Mingzhou, but the continent is too small, and it is very cumbersome to load and transship goods, so some Maidno merchant ships will choose to load and unload in the front bay. In this way, the local people can still get some money for providing supplies to the merchant ships or loading and unloading goods, and he will still have a chance to lie on the people and absorb some people's fat and ointment. However, in recent months, there have been fewer and fewer merchant ships in Meednor, and while the income channels of ordinary people have gradually decreased, his gray income has naturally decreased. At first, he didn't notice much, but when he noticed it, it was the time when the yellow-faced woman at home complained to himself that he had no money to buy food, which was still early from this month's Yulu, and now he has no money to buy food and is embarrassed to borrow money from someone, so he can only struggle at home, relying on a few hard tops of stored grain, and this time he came out and was complacent, and he could eat public meals for a few days.

But I didn't expect that in the past three days, he has lived a very comfortable life near this Xiangdao, these people eat not two meals a day like the Wu Dynasty, but three meals a day, and the food is not pure grains, these people buy the catch from several fishing villages such as Liyumen in the surrounding area, and make a big pot of porridge with all materials.

It is said that this Xin'an County is not a place that is often vulnerable to disasters, but every year when there is no success, there are always a lot of displaced people to come, and there are also a lot of Huazi who linger near the Guandi Temple every day, waiting for the big family to give porridge. Those porridges Lao Chen has seen, boiled relatively thin, all of them are coarse grains, and even some have a lot of chaff chaff and chaff floating on them, the beautiful name is that they are afraid that they will choke when they drink too fast, but in fact, those who boil porridge deduct the grain from it and sell it for their own money.

But the porridge that Lao Chen drank in the past three days is not the same, although it is mainly coarse grains, but there is also a large amount of white rice, sometimes you can see those guys throwing brick-like things into the gruel and cooking together, the more they cook, the thicker it becomes, and the guys of this group of people are quite willing to put salt and condiments, and the combination of vegetables is also very suitable, the porridge he drinks tastes different almost every time these days, but every taste can be called delicious, which makes him quite surprised.

In addition, the soldiers of the pirates often release guns in the wild, and they can bring back wild boars or deer from time to time, and they can fight back almost every day when the hunters don't necessarily get back a single prey for half a month, which makes Lao Chen unbelievable. At first, he thought that the pirates had bought it from local hunters, but when he quietly followed the gang to watch the gang pack up the prey, he clearly saw that the gang cut open the prey and took out lead bullets one by one, and he knew that it must have been fought by the pirates. There is no such projectile in the local area, and in addition, there is no damage caused by the usual arrows or traps on the prey, so it is naturally impossible for the pirate soldiers to snatch or buy it from the local hunters and then shoot it.

The wild boar is a relatively strong and resistant animal, and the deer is a very alert and fast-moving animal, and the local hunters either dare not fight or cannot hit it on weekdays, which brings a problem, the guns used by these pirates are not just silver pewter spear heads as he felt at first, but are simply powerful and accurate weapons.

In the past three days, he often came to the red or blue soldiers of the pirates to get close, wanting to see these firearms, but these haired pirates spoke a strange official dialect with an Annam accent, and some even spoke in Japanese language, which made him almost unable to start if he wanted to talk Cantonese.

This group of pirates did as the spies said, drove a huge iron ship as big as a mountain, and stopped in the bay every day to load grain, he thought it was a trick made by the pirates at first, but seeing a boatload of grain swallowed into the stomach by the big iron ship, it can only mean that this must be a real ship.

The pirates also performed their own duties in Xiangdao and Kowloon, some worked as sentries in Kowloon, and there were sentry agents on several roads leading from Kowloon to the bay, and no one could sneak into Kowloon quietly without being discovered; Some pirates weigh and transfer the grain on the beach, and their movements are so skillful that the onlookers and the unloading men are not aware of this efficiency; In addition, in addition to these people, there are also people who cut trees in the woods, and there are also people who carry a lot of building materials from small boats, it seems that these people are building docks, and the people of these buildings are also very handy at work, and they are extremely efficient, and in the past few days, he has built a trestle bridge about ten zhang wide and four zhang wide by the sea, and looking at their momentum, it seems that they will continue to extend to the sea. In addition to the wharf, these people also built houses by the sea, these houses are completely different from Dawu's houses, they are not large, but they are quite long, no more than three zhang wide, but the length can reach more than 30 zhang, the top is still flat-roofed, and there are upward stairs, which seem to be to build two floors.

This is the decision of the executive committee, at the beginning they only got a lease procedure through the hands of Wang Zunde's staff Zhang Qiulin - this cost a lot of things, first through Zhang Qiulin gave Wang Zunde a set of glass tea sets, if you send a set of glass tea sets to others in the old time and space, you will definitely be scolded, but here, glass is a novelty, and glass tea sets are quite prominent things. In particular, this set of tea sets was prepared for Wang Zunde at the beginning, and it was specially engraved with the scene of all the people sending each other and holding high the umbrella of all the people, and each cup was also engraved with poems and famous sentences made by the Qing officials of the past dynasties. The effect of this tea set must be very good, because the next day Zhang Qiulin brought the warrant personally instructed by Wang Zunde.

Of course, in order to get an honest governor of Liangguang, it is absolutely impossible to rely on a set of tea sets alone, and silver is also needed in it, and it is far more than opening up the joints of corrupt officials. First of all, we must get Wang Zunde's chief staff - this is not difficult, Zhang Qiulin himself is, the Senate half sold and half sent a luxury version of Rolls-Royce to him, this car was originally going to be sent with the Dongfeng, but due to a gap in bearing production, it had to be postponed, Dongfeng set off a few days after this with the second batch of two sail frigates to Hong Kong, the car will return with Chen Li's grain ship, with the luxury version of the Rolls-Royce, there is also a set of lumber mill equipment, This included a range of equipment such as a wood cutter, a drying boiler, a wood tar collector, and even a newly produced steam engine to power the entire plant.

Since it is impossible to meet Zhang Qiulin's needs by simply giving him a car, the Zhaoqing part of the partnership plan had to add Zhang Qiulin's name - the new Zhaoqing timber workshop will be divided into three units: Zhang Qiulin, Chen Li and Yuan Laoyuan. As Zhang Qiulin, he obtained a luxury car just by matchmaking, and also obtained a 30% stake in a lumber mill, which is quite a cost-effective business for him; And Chen Li has no objection to only getting 30%, because he is just a small businessman in Zhaoqing, you must know that he was still in the back of the queue when he went to Shili Pavilion to meet the people, and now he can have the opportunity to do business with the people who make a lot of money doing anything, which is equivalent to winning the champion, where will there be opinions, not to mention the partners with him, on one side is the people of the people, and on the other side is the people who say the same thing in Zhaoqing and even the whole of Guangdong. As long as the timber mill here begins to be established, site selection, and recruitment, there will be more places to rely on Zhang Qiulin, not to mention that after it is put into production in the future, the entire city fox society rat in Guangdong must rely on Zhang Qiulin's identity to deter, and he Chen Li will naturally not have the slightest complaint.

After getting the top officials of Liangguang, the next step is to solve the problem of the local snake, if you want to firmly control the situation in Hong Kong, first of all, you need to have enough troops to deter the nearby bandits and pirates, this is not a problem, but then the existence of Hong Kong will inevitably affect the trade of the Medeno people in the Wu Dynasty. Because after the establishment of the Oriental Port in Hong Kong, it will inevitably establish a route between the two places, whether it is logistics or passenger transportation, once the port of Hong Kong is put into operation, the impact on the Maidno people will not be a little bit, and it is bound to completely break the pattern that the Oriental Port is monopolized by the Maidno people in the import of raw materials and the export of industrial products.

Again, blocking people's money is like killing their parents, don't look at the current Medeno people who do not hesitate to sell the intelligence and interests of their fellow Medeno clan in order to be able to trade with Dongfang Port, once the Chinese Ministry of Commerce and Trade openly abandons them, they can also immediately transform into China's sworn enemies. In order to prevent this from happening, the Executive Committee made a decision after discussion to make all-out efforts to build a defense in Hong Kong, first of all, to ensure the living conditions and food supply of the personnel stationed in Hong Kong. The grain supply is not a problem, from Zhaoqing through the Xijiang River to the Pearl River grain ships can go directly to Hong Kong, this food security channel is located in the Wu Dynasty's inland river, as long as the Wu Dynasty government does not have problems, it is basically impossible to be cut off by the Maidno people. In order to ensure that even if the Wu Dynasty government had problems, the Beishang detachment had now left Zhaoqing for Mingzhou, preparing to establish a grain depot near Huangjiazhai through Huangshi's connections, and provide food to the personnel stationed in Hong Kong at a critical moment. As for housing, a second fleet is now transporting construction materials from the Oriental Port to Hong Kong, preparing to build a deep-water port of its own in the old space of Victoria Bay to accommodate the docking of the Dongfeng and the Liberty Ship that will soon be developed.

...