After the water thieves were exterminated, Yang Tingjian captured more than 20,000 prisoners, and the prisoners were still dealt with according to the old rules, all the leaders above the level of 1,000 households were killed, and all the small leaders of the general banner to 100 households were sent to open mines.

The treatment of the Tiger Ben Army is excellent, and there are 12,000 water thieves who take the initiative to participate in the Tiger Ben Army Navy, and the navy in Yang Tingjian's hands has soared by nearly 50,000 people, and Yang Tingjian only has the establishment of four guards in his hands, and Yang Tingjian, who has no choice, has no choice but to expand the scale of the four guards.

Originally, there were only 5,600 people in a guard station, but Yang Tingjian directly made up 12,000 people, and if you add the people from the Navy Logistics Department, it is already in the early 50,000s.

All the navy temporarily stayed in Gaoyou Lake for training, Yang Tingjian returned to Hangzhou with three hundred guards, and the two Huai salt merchants were about to be driven crazy, and sat in the Yamen of the two Huai salt transport envoys every day and waited for Yang Tingjian to go back.

These salt merchants were all miserable by Xia Mengqi's trick of small quantities and wholesale, for example, a small salt dealer picked a basket of salt to sell in the countryside, in the past they could only buy from the big salt merchants, the price was frighteningly high, they were tired and tired and couldn't make a few dollars, and now the two Huai salt transport has opened the Yamen to wholesale salt, as long as you buy one stone at a time, it will be wholesaled to you at a low price, so that the big salt merchants in Lianghuai have no way to live.

It's not that they haven't thought about fighting a price war with Yang Tingjian, but even if they are low, they can't be lower than the cost of salt and taxes! The salt tax in the Ming Dynasty is 10 Wen per catty, and the minimum cost of boiling salt is 10 Wen per catty, so the price of salt for salt merchants will definitely not be lower than 20 Wen per catty.

They can evade taxes as before! It was fine before, but now it is looking for death, and the two Huai salt transportation envoys have to have supervisors stationed in the big salt merchants, and the supervisors are rotated every six months, which is not counted. The Jinyi Wei Fanzi of the Fusi Yamen in Nanzhen was even more staring in the dark, and the salt merchants of Lianghuai really didn't dare to do anything now.

Even Qian Xiangkun, the cabinet shop, was dismissed from his official position by Emperor Chongzhen because of Qian Xiangsheng's matter, and now he is on his way home, and the salt merchants of Lianghuai are completely convinced.

After Yang Tingjian returned to Yangzhou. Yang Tingjian gave a very simple condition, as long as all salt merchants pay taxes dirtily in the future, they can obtain the qualification of first-class agents, and their purchase price is much lower than that of small quantities of wholesale, which ensures the profits of large salt merchants.

The area of Yangzhou's salt drying field is still expanding, and two or three thousand people continue to expand day and night, just half a month after Yang Tingjian sent troops to suppress thieves. The area of the salt drying field has reached more than 2,000 acres, and under the condition of good weather, the yield of salt per mu is twenty or thirty catties.

Now Yangzhou is not bad at all, there is no need for any salt, as long as you have silver, you can buy salt, but the agents at all levels are slightly different in price.

Under the governance of Yang Tingjian, Yangzhou became more and more prosperous. All kinds of factories and workshops have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and more and more outsiders have come to work in Yangzhou, a special zone. The population of Yangzhou exceeded 2 million.

Yang Tingjian had to plan out a piece of land of about one million acres outside Yangzhou, near the Grand Canal, as a special economic zone in Yangzhou, which is the first special economic zone in Daming and the first special zone in the world. He is destined to become a shining pearl.

The saline-alkali land developed by the Red Lady is also planted with various cash crops, such as cotton, mulberry, marine rice and so on. New crops such as hybrid rice and sweet potatoes are also being rolled out in Yangzhou, and even if there are no chemical fertilizers at this time, the yield of various grains has doubled, which is a great improvement.

Yangzhou needs the grain and textile industry raw materials, can be said to be in sufficient supply, this good crop and tens of millions of acres of saline-alkali land is indispensable, this is their prefect Yang Daren's credit, the people of Yangzhou, has Yang Tingjian as a Bodhisattva to offer. (There are about 500 million acres of seaside saline-alkali land in Lianghuai.) ）

(This is the end of the Interior Affair, the beginning of the conquest of the Age of Sail Battleships.) ）

When Yang Tingjian was free, he and Xia Mengqi got married. I don't know what the reason is, Yang Tingjian, Jin Zhuyu and the Red Lady have made love less often, but they didn't give birth to a son and a half daughter, maybe it's because of time and space travel! I don't know if this will be the case for Yang Tingjian and Xia Mengqi.

Time flies, in a blink of an eye, it is the sixth year of Chongzhen, God seems to be dissatisfied with the Ming Dynasty, natural disasters and man-made disasters continue, the thieves are getting more and more troublesome, and the honest Jiannu outside the gate for a period of time began to be active.

Countless displaced people have flocked to Yangzhou to make a living, but fortunately, Yangzhou has opened countless factories and workshops, as well as cultivating wasteland and mining, and these manpower can just solve the situation of insufficient labor in Yangzhou.

The only regret that Yang Tingjian regretted was that most of the ships that came to Chongming Island to trade were from the Western powers, and the bulk of the money must have been made by the Western powers.

However, for more than a year, the navy of the Tiger Ben Army has not been idle, training every day, and 36 hybrid warships with sails and steam engines built by Longjiang Bao Shipyard have been built.

The first-class battleship of the Victory class, with a standard displacement of 3,500 tons and a full displacement of 5,000 tons, is a fortress city, equipped with a total of 108 Shenwei guns, a crew of 850 people, and can store 35 tons of gunpowder and 120 tons of shells on board, which can travel continuously for six months at a time. Because the Shenwei artillery is only 1,000 catties, which is more than 1,000 catties lighter than the iron cast cannon, the load saved by more than 100 Shenwei cannons is almost more than 50 tons, which is used to load coal as fuel for steam engines.

In the case of the full sail of the battleship Victory, the speed of the first class battleship is 8-9 knots, (15-17 km), if a hybrid is used, it is about 18-20 knots, which is unimaginable in the early days of the sail era, plus the rate of fire of the Shenwei artillery fifteen seconds per round, which is enough to crush a qiē power.

The number of the first-class battleships of the Tiger Ben Navy started from two digits, and now it is 11-47, and the name of the ship is named after the Daming Fu-level city, and other second-class to sixth-level warships, Longjiang Bao Shipyard has also built a lot, but after testing, it was found that because the second-class to sixth-level warships were not equipped with steam engines, they could not keep up with the pace of the first-class battleships.

The method was thought up by people, and in the end, a first-class battleship dragged three or four ships behind, so that the speed of the entire fleet was basically the same, and of course the overall speed also dropped to about twelve or thirteen knots, which was still not comparable to the pure sail warships of the great powers.

In March of the sixth year of Chongzhen, the Huben Navy swore to the death on Chongming Island, with a total of 36 first-class battleships and 128 second- and third-class battleships, all of which were new-style warships built by Longjiangbao Shipyard in more than a year.

…… (To be continued......)