Broadly speaking, Luzon has a total of 7,000 islands, which can be divided into three parts: Luzon in the north, Misha in the middle, and Mindanao in the south. It is different from the Indochina Peninsula, which is densely populated and economically and culturally developed. The population here is sparse, the level of civilization is also very low, before the Ming and Spanish came one after another, its most developed island of Luzon was only in the stage of slave city-states, and the indigenous people of Misa and Mindanao were even in the stage of primitive society.

After defeating the Spaniards, it took Nanyang Company ten years to complete the conquest of the whole territory of Greater Luzon, but the migration and development of the population was still limited to Luzon and the Misa Department, and the dense primeval forest of Mindanao was not included in the six provinces and forty counties under the jurisdiction of the Governor-General of Luzon.

Since the death of the king of Luzon, the Governor's Palace of Luzon has become the supreme ruling body here, and it is too far and insignificant for the Beijing court, so it has not changed the governor for ten years since it was established, and if it is not for the support of Shen Mo, it is not even worthy of the most basic civil service system. However, the wild has the benefits of being wild, and it can be planned unrestrained and unscrupulous... Devise. Luzon is divided into three major regions, with Manila and Tortoiseshell Province as commercial trade zones, with processing exports and services as the pillars. The hilly and mountainous areas in the north are industrial and mining areas, with mining as the pillar industry, and the plains in the south and central and western regions are agricultural areas, with plantation economy as the main area, planting sugarcane, rice, tobacco, abaca, etc. Since the Misa Department is also mainly plantations, the silent investigation can be carried out only on the main island of Luzon, and you can get a full view.

Ten days after leaving Manila, Shen Mo arrived in Pearl River Province in central Luzon, a region dominated by plains and a plantation economy second only to the Yangtze River Province near Manila. Walking on the main road, you can see rice fields and sugar cane plantations on both sides, and after walking for an hour, you will see a Hakka walled house-style tulou, standing in a sea of greenery, which is a residence built by the Southeast Governor's Office for immigrants.

The choice of this defensive style of housing was based on the actual situation in Luzon.

Before the mass immigration, the whole of Luzon, with the exception of a few city-states near Manila, was a wilderness. Even after 20 years of development, there are still large areas of primeval forest, infested with insects and snakes, and many wild animals. Moreover, because of the characteristics of the plantation economy, the immigrants could not settle in the city, and their lives were very scattered, and they were easily attacked by the natives who hated the Chinese. It is impossible for the Governor's Palace and the troops of the Nanyang Company to be stationed at every settlement point at all times, so how to ensure the safety of immigrants has become the top priority related to success or failure.

In the letter to Zhulai, after seeing this question, Shen Mo immediately thought of the Hakka walled house that impressed him when he was suppressing bandits in Zhennan. The harsh living environment forced the Hakka people to attach great importance to defense, and they built their houses into a fortified city that was easy to defend and difficult to attack, and lived together in groups.

There are wells, granaries, livestock pens and other living facilities in the tulou, so that the Hakka people have obtained sufficient security. He had also seen with his own eyes how these large defensive structures could stand firm under the onslaught of the official army, so he proposed that the southeastern governor's palace could build such residences for the immigrants.

This kind of well-defended and cohesive dwelling was welcomed by immigrants, and more than 10,000 of them have been erected in Luzon over the past decade. Yes, Hakka walled houses are a key factor in the success of the plantation economy and even immigration.

Before sunset on this day, the team arrived at a walled house village eighty miles away from the city of Zhujiang Prefecture, and the shì guard who played the front station had already communicated with the residents here, and when he knew that the army had brought its own forage and dry food, and only needed to provide some hot water and food for the nobles, the village chief was very happy to open the gate of the village and welcome the arrival of Shen Mo and his party.

Only when you get closer, you will find that these inconspicuous earthen buildings are actually unusually tall and majestic, full of four storeys high.

The defensive nature of this kind of building must be considered first, and the ground floor and the second floor are not opened with external windows, and the third floor has a narrow slit and the fourth floor is equipped with a large window, and the enemy platform is added, which can be fired from a high position. The only weak point was the entrance, but Shen Mo then looked at it carefully, and saw that the thick hardwood door was covered with iron sheets, and the back of the door could be fixed with a horizontal bar, and a fireproof water tank was placed on the door, which was difficult to break through without a red-coated cannon. Enough to keep the residents safe.

There are more than 30 households, more than 400 Chinese people, and 45 indigenous women who are known as shì women. Except for the harvest season, it is rare to find anyone here, and it is as lively as a festival. At the orders of the village chief, the inhabitants began to light fires and prepare hot water for the more than a thousand people, while the children ran outside, curiously looking at the outsiders and the muskets on their shoulders.

The village chief asked the men to settle the large army, and he asked Shen Mo to go up to the fourth floor of Xuanyi.

After washing and changing clothes, I sat down in the living room for a while, drank a cup of homemade hot cocoa in the house, and felt much warmer on my body.

At this time, the dark-skinned shì woman served fragrant roast chicken, roast goose, roast meat, and even a roast rǔ pig. In this way, the village chief was still inconsiderate. Although Shen Mo didn't like meat, he still expressed his sincere gratitude to the host, and happily enjoyed this sumptuous dinner with the village chief and several old people.

Although they are not sensitive to meat, Shen Mo likes their home-brewed sugar cane wine. Especially after several years of aging, there is a unique, incomparable taste, and it turns out to be the taste of rum after drinking it for a long time.

The wine table is the best place to eliminate the strangeness, coupled with the strong affinity of silence, after three rounds of drinking, I have become friends with the people at the table who talk about everything. Of course, for the first generation of immigrants, it is necessary to meet new friends with pride and talk about their entrepreneurial process.

Unlike the spontaneous immigrants of Chen's generation, the village's residents were recruited by Nanyang in Guangdong. The old people still remember the slogans of Nanyang Company's skyscrapers, as if everyone could become a big landlord with thousands of acres of fertile land as long as they came to Luzon, and they could become a rich man without farming and toiling. Half of them were attracted by this kind of very deceptive propaganda, and half of them were also because of banditry, because the government couldn't survive the tyranny of the government, and they had to leave their hometowns if they stayed in China, so they didn't go to Nanyang to try their luck.

In fact, in the first decade of Nanyang's naturalization, more than eighty percent of the immigrants were Fujian and Cantonese people, because the two provinces were mountainous and the area that could be cultivated was pitifully small, and the huge population pressure forced many to find other ways to survive. Among the enormous immigrants, only these immigrants who are already unhappy will lose the least and gain the most.

When Shen Mo was in the cabinet, he once talked about this matter with the governor of Guangdong, who had come to Beijing to report on his work, and the governor complained about "this kind of emigration frenzy like a contagious disease", saying that he could not understand the phenomenon of Fujian and Cantonese people flocking to Luzon to open up wasteland.

Silence for him: The so-called desolation is relative. For the people in the mountainous areas of Fujian and Guangdong, the land of Luzon is not desolate. "But as far as the lowly knows, most of those who immigrated to the past only had enough to eat and drink, and did not get rich as advertised." Is it difficult to start everything?" The silent words made the governor embarrassed and said: "The reason why a life of food and clothing can make them leave their homeland is because they can't even get food and clothing in their hometown." After the governor reported on his duties, he was transferred internally, and a colleague who could think of it took his place.

To be honest, the difficulties faced by this generation of collective immigrants are worse than those of Chen Lao's generation

Many, first of all, in terms of survival rate, in order to avoid the death of precious immigrants, Nanyang Company strictly limited the number of passengers on the migrant ship and equipped it with doctors, almost eliminating deaths during the voyage. When migrants arrive in Luzon, they will also have a month of acclimatization time before being assigned to the provinces. This results in a mortality rate of only 132 to 1 in a year, which is an absolute miracle compared to the past and to European immigrants.

Nanyang also helps newcomers through the difficult period between setting foot on the land and reaping their first agricultural harvest, providing them with the necessary supplies and technical guidance, and teaching them how to protect themselves on plantations away from the city...... Of course, all this is paid, but it can be paid in installments over the next 10 years.

However, the help of others can only be regarded as an external force, and it still takes years of hard work to turn a wasteland into a dense plantation. After solving the problem of eating, they began to try to grow tobacco because this crop is the simplest and most effective. Seven years later, however, the land where the tobacco was grown was severely degraded, forcing them to switch to another highly profitable cash crop, sugar cane.

But the labor of the sugar cane plantations was too heavy for ordinary people to bear, and although they imitated others and used some indigenous labor, they themselves did not break away from labor. Years of hard work, year after year of abundant harvests, the sorrow of being away from home has disappeared, and people have tanned their faces from years of hard work, but joy is always on everyone's face, and they have never been so hopeful for the future.

For the history of such immigration, Shen Mo naturally never gets tired of hearing about it, but what interests him the most is that they are very different from the domestic organizational form!