Qin Ergou listened to the correspondent's words and said excitedly: "I will go out of the city to take a look in person, and the troops at the head of the city should not slack off, continue to be on guard......"

After he finished speaking, he came to the city, and by this time the city gate had been opened, but the several machine-gun positions at the head of the city and the city gate did not relax in the slightest, and were still loaded and ready to fire at any time.

As soon as Qin Ergou came out of the city gate, he saw a cavalry member of the horse team running out of the queue in the distance and came to him. The cavalryman on the horse was a non-commissioned officer, and when he saw Qin Ergou's rank, he hurriedly jumped down from his horse and saluted Qin Ergou.

"Comrade Major, the third battalion of the second brigade of the newly built third cavalry division of the Northwest Field Army was ordered to rush to Linqingzhou."

Qin Ergou returned a military salute, then looked at the sweaty non-commissioned officer, and said with a smile: "Brothers, you have worked hard all the way, let's go to the city, I will let the troops arrange food and lodging." ”

"Yes......"

The cavalry non-commissioned officer shouted loudly, and then mounted his horse and returned to the horse team in the distance. After a while, hundreds of Far Eastern cavalry and more than a thousand war horses roared into Linqingzhou City.

The commander of the cavalry battalion was called Hu Cheng, he came to the city gate, turned over and dismounted, shook hands with Qin Ergou and said, "Brother, you look good, it's also from the Northwest Army." ”

"Brother, I am from the 1st Field Division of the Northwest Army, you have worked hard all the way, I have ordered to go down, prepare hot water and meals for everyone, let the soldiers scald their feet well, wash themselves, and then eat a hot meal."

Hu Cheng listened to Qin Ergou's words, and laughed: "Haha...... I have to be a brother of the Northwest Army, and I am intimate. I thank you on behalf of my brothers. ”

The arrival of several hundred cavalry greatly alleviated the tense situation of Linqingzhou's troops. It also gave the Far Eastern Army in Linqingzhou a powerful mobile force.

At noon, an overseas battalion of the Southern Corps also rushed to Linqingzhou. The officers and soldiers had no horses, so they could only march all the way after receiving the order, and finally came to the city of Linqing City after running for two or three days. At this point, the main force of the Far Eastern Army in Linqing City had reached nearly one regiment, numbering nearly two thousand people.

The main forces of the three battalions, together with some armed police units and musket militia units, temporarily formed the Linqing garrison. Hu Cheng, the commander of the cavalry battalion, was the most senior cadre among the three battalion commanders, so he served as the commander of the Linqing garrison.

Hu Cheng was born in the Liaodong Field Division and was the first batch of military cadres to follow Li Ming to Hetao. Because he was good at horseback riding, he was later transferred to the first two new cavalry divisions as a company commander, and participated in almost all the battles of the cavalry units of the Northwest Army.

Because the problem of the weak troops in Linqingzhou City had been completely solved, Hu Cheng, Qin Ergou and others decided what to do after research. The first is to simply have initial contact with the people inside and outside the city, after all, the city of Linqingzhou is now deserted and deserted, like a dead city.

At the beginning, in order to deter local forces, they had to adopt an iron-blooded policy. But now the situation has changed, after all, the Far East should enter the Central Plains as soon as possible, and it is also a top priority to establish a glorious image of the Far Eastern Army in the minds of the local people.

This was also the request of the Political Department of the Far Eastern Military Commission before the campaign was launched. Now Linqingzhou City is in order inside and outside the city because of the iron-blooded methods of the Far Eastern Army.

Moreover, at present, the troops are sufficient and the armament is strong. It is also time for the Linqing garrison area to find a way to ease the local tension. The first thing to do is to try to make contact with the local people, to eliminate as much as possible the iron-blooded image that the Far Eastern Army created in their minds some time ago.

In the Ming Dynasty, there were three parts of the population of Linqing City, one part was the common people, one part was the "wandering overseas Chinese merchants", and the other part was

Linqing Guard Household.

Among them, Linqingzhou is 32 miles, nearly 30,000 people are in and out of the city, and overseas Chinese businessmen from all over the city also live in Linqingzhou, and the number of people and the population of the household are several times that of the residents. The Ming Dynasty set up a general military officer in Linqing Prefecture, and there were about 5,000 military households in the Linqing Prefecture Guardhouse, plus tens of thousands of military families and relatives.

In addition, Linqing is located along the North-South Grand Canal, connecting the north and south, connecting Xu and Huai in the south, and Tianjin and Beijing in the north, and the commerce and handicraft industries are relatively developed, so the number of low-level people who come here to make a living is huge.

Therefore, the new city and the old city have a large number of commercial floating population as much as ten times the fixed population of Linqing, and the commercial port with huge transportation, commerce, and customs affairs is huge, and of course there are also a large number of officials and gentry.

Chongzhen Nian's "The Question Book of the Eunuchs of the Director" said: "In total, there are more than 30 miles around the city, and in a city, regardless of the goods and wealth of the north and south, that is, gentlemen and merchants, there are nearly one million people." Although the legendary population of one million is somewhat exaggerated, there are always at least three and a half million.

In addition to a large number of warehouses in Linqingzhou City, the most are rows of shops. Of course, the most are the granaries and grain stores, and in addition to the official buildings such as the government office and the school palace, the granaries occupy almost a quarter of the ground.

The canal and the Wei River, which are responsible for the transportation of grain and the exchange of merchant ships, meander through the new city, and the rivers meet in the city, along the banks of the river, densely packed with wharves and bazaars. There are six or seven grain markets in the city, with an annual trading volume of 500 to 10 million stones.

The total number of shops in Linqing City is at least five or six hundred, and if you add all kinds of handicraft workshops, market vendors, etc., there should be thousands of large and small merchants in the city in the heyday. Among them, there are shops of commercial transit institutions such as tooth shops, pawnshops, didian and silver villages, as well as various service industry shops such as restaurants, hotels, gambling houses, inns, and brothels.

Linqingzhou City is also the largest cloth and silk trade center in Jiangbei, with nearly 100 cloth shops and silk shops. Most of the southern tea ships that came from the canal were also docked and traded, and many of the big tea merchants in the north collected tea here and sold it to various parts of the north.

Linqingzhou's handicraft industry is also extremely developed, textile, ironmaking, printing, ceramics and shipbuilding and other handicraft workshops are very numerous, with the help of the prosperous canal economy, Linqingzhou's goods are sold throughout the Ming Dynasty.

There is a Fuyunlai restaurant on the wharf outside the city, which is said to be a restaurant, but it is actually a place where many porters, coachmen and boatmen on the wharf eat on weekdays. Because the food of Fuyun is affordable, the amount is large, cheap and full, so the business has been booming, and the flow of people is continuous from morning to night, although the profit is not large, but it can also make some hard money.

The owner of Fuyunlai Restaurant is a local named He Bensheng. He has no background, so he has to be deducted a lot of silver by the local underworld forces and the officials of the government and yamen every month

Fortunately, although such a store looks popular, all kinds of forces also know that this kind of business is a small profit and quick turnover, and it is hard money, so it is not interesting to annex the store, it is better to collect some silver every month, and it is also worry-free.

These days, business was booming, because the Far Eastern Army occupied the city of Linqingzhou and took control of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. It also made Fuyunlai Restaurant lose business in an instant. (To be continued.) )