Although Li Zicheng was defeated and died, his remnants of his generals still carried out activities in Shaanxi and Sichuan under the banner of the Dashun Army. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

Among them, the Shaanxi area is just a scattered part of the remnants, no different from the Liukou, they are all burdens abandoned by Li Zicheng when he fled, and there is almost no combat effectiveness.

However, Zhang Xianzhong of Sichuan, Li Dingguo and others have a lot of strength, Wu Sangui has raised troops to fight several times, but he has not been cheap, and the hat of King Pingxi can be said to have an empty title, and he does not even have a territory that really belongs to him.

The Manchu Qing Dynasty's army was mainly to solve the remnants of the Dashun Army in Shaanxi, as well as Zhang Xianzhong in Sichuan.

After the army arrived in Xi'an, Haoge sent Shangshu Xingne and others to break the enemy in Pizhou, and sent Gushan Ezhendu to attack Qingyang.

At that time, thieves such as He Zhen, Erhu, and Sun Shoufa occupied Hanzhong, Xing'an and other places.

Wu Dading, Gao Ruli, Jiang Denglei, Shi Guoxi, Wang Kecheng, Zhou Kede and others occupied Huixian and Jiezhou.

The Qing army divided troops from Xi'an to attack the thieves, Jiang Denglei, Shi Guoxi, Wang Kecheng, Zhou Kede and others all surrendered to the Qing army, and the rest of the people were defeated and fled, and the Qing army captured these cities occupied by the thieves.

Haoge led the army, and it took only three months to completely wipe out the entire territory of Shaanxi, and at this time, Haoge, who absorbed the troops of the Dashun army, increased the total strength to 350,000, and the army can be said to be fighting more and more.

In November of the same year, the army attacked Sichuan, when Zhang Xianzhong occupied Xichong, Haoge sent Aobai, Wu Sangui as the vanguard to attack, he himself led the army to follow, the army arrived in Xichong, broke Zhang Xianzhong's army, Haoge personally shot the "King of the West" Zhang Xianzhong, and broke through Zhang Xianzhong's more than 130 camps, beheaded tens of thousands of levels.

Zhang Xianzhong was defeated, and his adopted son Li Dingguo incorporated his deployment, and finally made up his mind to return to the Southern Ming.

After all, today's Dashun Army is already at sunset, but Nanming is getting stronger and stronger, and the only one who finally wins the Central Plains can only be the Manchu Qing or Nanming.

For the Dashun army, the Manchu Qing Dynasty had "hatred of destroying the country", and Li Dingguo and others were all Han Chinese, so they naturally disdained to surrender to the Qing Dynasty.

Subsequently, Li Dingguo led the army to break through Guiyang, go to Kunming, and in only four months, even broke Chenggong, Qujing, Jinning, Shizong, Tonghai, Mengzi, Amizhou and other places, and the army was stationed in Lin'an (Jianshui) and Xiping in the east to rest and recuperate.

During this period, Li Dingguo sent an envoy to Nanjing and took the initiative to ask Zhu Youzhen for recruitment.

Zhu Youzhen knew that there were not many areas actually controlled by the Southern Ming Dynasty now, and the Yunnan-Guizhou region had no time to take care of it, so he simply granted Li Dingguo's request and appointed his "Xining Bo" and "Qianguo Gong" Mu Bin (the heir of Mu Wangfu at that time) to jointly guard Yungui and other places.

The Qing army's westward expedition lasted from the first month of 1646 to August 1647.

In a full year and a half, Haoge not only recovered the entire territory of Shaanxi and killed Zhang Xianzhong, the leader of the Dashun army, but also pacified the counties of Zunyi, Kuizhou, Maozhou, Rongchang, Longchang, Fushun, Neijiang and Baoyang.

The situation in Sichuan gradually became clear, and at the same time, because of the continuous war in Sichuan, social production was almost completely stopped, and it was impossible to solve the supply of food and wages, so Haoge had to stop there, led the Qing army back to Beijing through Shaanxi, and sent Wang Zuntan, Li Guoying (the former general army of Zuo Liangyu's subordinates) and other Ming generals to garrison Sichuan.

At the same time, it has been three years and five months since Li Hongfei came to Daming, and three full years have passed since Suzhou's comprehensive reform.

In 1645, the pig iron output of Suzhou Heavy Industry was only about 20,000 tons, but at that time it was already equivalent to half of the entire Nanming iron industry.

Of course, this is also the fundamental reason why the Ming Dynasty closed a large number of mines before, resulting in the underdevelopment of the smelting industry.

However, in 1646, with the official implementation of the comprehensive reform, the mining industry in various places prospered unprecedentedly, and a large number of mining areas were added to the Suzhou area again, and the pig iron output in Suzhou alone reached a terrifying level of 40,000 tons.

At the same time, with the completion of large-scale steelmaking plants, the total output of stainless steel has also reached more than 5,000 tons.

Moreover, Li Hongfei once again opened his golden finger and put forward the idea of alloy steel, that is, in the process of smelting steel, doping with various different metal elements, so as to obtain new metal materials.

The idea is correct, and Song Yingxing's research on alloys is definitely a contemporary authority, but according to today's smelting technology, many things, not to mention mass production, are a small amount of development, all have great difficulties, so this kind of thing is not urgent, Li Hongfei handed over these topics to the experts and professors of the Royal Academy of Sciences, and it can be regarded as providing a research direction for these new scholars.

With the advent of the steam engine, the benefits of the mining industry have grown rapidly, and the benefit is that the smelting industry in Suzhou has seen explosive growth.

By 1647, the pig iron output in Suzhou had made a major breakthrough in the annual output of 100,000 tons, and the pig iron output of Suzhou Heavy Industry alone reached about 60,000 tons.

This is still in the case of a serious shortage of ore mining, otherwise Suzhou Heavy Industry is fully capable of breaking through the annual output of 100,000 tons of pig iron.

The emergence of the steam engine not only led to the development of the mining industry, but also replaced mules, horses and manpower in specific fields, greatly liberating the labor force.

The thermal efficiency of the steam engine originally invented by Li Zeshui is very low, which is mainly due to the fact that when the steam enters the cylinder, it needs to be condensed on the cylinder wall that has just been cooled by water, so a lot of heat is lost, so this kind of steam engine can only be popularized in coal-producing areas where coal prices are low.

In the following more than a year, Li Zeshui continued to improve and research, and finally broke the original design of the steam engine, invented the steam engine with a condenser, and in May 1647, it was officially put into use in the mining area of Suzhou Heavy Industry.

The emergence of the condenser solves the disadvantage of pouring water on the outside of the container and losing a lot of heat energy.

Although the balance lever and tie rod mechanism are still used to drive the water pump, in order to remove the condensate and air from the condenser, Li Zeshui installed an air pump for the steam engine.

At the same time, he also added a sandwich layer to the outer wall of the cylinder, heating the cylinder wall with steam to reduce condensation losses.

The emergence of the new type of steam engine has made the original machinery that can only lift water become a mechanical equipment that can be widely used, and the thermal efficiency of the steam engine has been doubled, and the coal consumption has been greatly reduced.

The steam engine is not only widely used in the mining industry, but also in the smelting, textile, machine building and other industries.

Cao Hong, a tycoon in Suzhou's textile industry, changed all his textile factories to steam engines, and the output of cloth in the first three months increased by as much as 60%, and the cost was not much different from before.

That is to say, after the installation of the steam engine, this sixty percent of the output is equivalent to giving it away for nothing.