Chapter 343: Fifty Years Later

Time flies, fifty years have passed in a blink of an eye, and the time has come to 333 years of the Ming calendar.

In the ninth year of Longwu, proposed by Wang Pu, the new chronological law was formally adopted with the approval of the cabinet, and the new chronological law took the first year of Hongwu (1368) as the first year of the Ming calendar, and today, the Ming Dynasty has gone through a full three hundred and thirty-three years, and more than 50 years have passed since Longwu Zhongxing.

A group of Zhongxing veterans such as Sun Chuanting, Qian Qianyi, Lu Daqi, Qu Shiyun, He Tengjiao, etc. are no longer alive, and the young and handsome people of the year, such as Wang Pu and Li Dingguo, are also dying of old age at this time, and they are about to die, but Sun Chengzu, Wang Fa, Li Dingxi and other young generations have taken over power from their parents.

At this time, the Ming Empire had established a very complete constitutional monarchy system politically.

The new bourgeoisie, led by the four major families, has completely seized the power of the empire, and the so-called four major families refer to the Wang, Sun, Zhu, and Chen families.

Among them, the most powerful is the Wang family, and the current head of the Wang family is Wang Fa, the eldest son of Wang Pu.

The Wang family controls more than ninety percent of the empire's banking industry and more than eighty percent of the military industry, almost monopolizes the empire's financial and arms industries, and also owns large pastures in Australia and North America, and several large gold mines in South Africa and Chile.

The Sun family is a wealthy family second only to the Wang family in power, and the current head of the family, Sun Xu, is the eldest son of Sun Chengzu, although he is nominally Sun Chuanting's great-grandson, he is actually Wang Pu's grandson, so in terms of blood, the Sun family and the Wang family are actually one family, and they are not separated from each other at all.

Although the wealth of the Sun family cannot be compared with that of the Wang family, it completely monopolizes the shipbuilding and steel industries of the empire.

In addition to the Wang family and the Sun family, and then the Zhu family, the origin of this Zhu family is a little special, speaking of which this Zhu family is the royal family of the royal family, but it is not the blood of Emperor Taizu.

This matter has to start from the beginning, Emperor Chongzhen has four children: Emperor Longwu, King Yong, King Ding, and Princess Changping, among which Emperor Longwu has no fertility, King Ding died violently at a young age, and King Yong accepted a lot of concubines, but ten children were born in a row! Emperor Longwu had no choice but to follow the proposal of the cabinet, and succeeded the eldest son born to Princess Changping and Wang Pu to his knees, renamed Zhu Hekan and planned to become the crown prince.

Coincidentally, at this time, King Yong gave birth to twin sons, and Emperor Longwu immediately changed his mind and passed one of King Yong's sons to his knees, named Zhu Hezai and established him as the crown prince, which is today's Wanli Emperor! In the end, although Wang Pu's son Zhu Hekan did not become the emperor, he became a prince and set up another door, which is the origin of the Zhu family.

The origin of the Chen family is also similar.

In the year when Wang Pu returned from his expedition to Japan, that is, in the seventh year of Longwu (1650), his beloved wife Chen Yuanyuan died in childbirth when she gave birth to her third child.

Therefore, fundamentally speaking, the four major families of Wang, Sun, Zhu, and Chen are all descendants of Wang Pu, and the heads of the four major families are either brothers or uncles and nephews.

Economically, with the influx of Japanese laborers, Indian laborers, South Asian laborers and African black slaves, the economy of the Ming Empire ushered in an unprecedented leapfrog development, and in less than 50 years, the process of the industrial revolution was completed, from agricultural civilization to industrial civilization.

The cobweb-like railway stretches from the distant Indochina Peninsula to cold Siberia, from the coastal Songshan Mountains to the desolate Gobi Desert, with towering chimneys everywhere, the roar of machines everywhere, busy construction sites everywhere, and the crowded train stations, the cries of fruit and newspapers, and the shoe-shining children shuttling through the crowds......

The spacious streets are full of huge trams and charcoal-burning cars.

The Ming Empire has established a silver standard trade system around the world, almost all trade is settled with the Ming Yuan issued by the Central Bank of the Ming Empire, one Ming Yuan is equivalent to one or two lines of silver, England, France, Spain, the Netherlands and other Western powers are gradually becoming vassals of the Ming Empire from the economy.

In the 333rd year of the Ming calendar (1700), the total GDP of the Ming Empire was almost the total GDP of the world at that time, and the total GDP of the European powers at that time was even less than one-twentieth of the total GDP of the Ming Empire, and almost all industrial and commercial products were produced by the Ming Empire.

The indigenous peoples of Australia, Latin America, North America, and Africa can only provide cheap labor or can only produce cheap resource "sex" products.

The situation in Europe is relatively better, because the Ming Empire realized the industrial revolution ahead of schedule, and the industrial revolution in Europe also advanced, but in the process, it still fell behind the Ming Empire, and in terms of production efficiency and labor costs, European factories simply could not compete with the Ming factories.

In recent years, Europe is experiencing a big flute, a large number of factories have closed, which has aggravated the process of European powers becoming economic vassals of the Ming Empire, according to the research of the Ming Empire's cabinet think tank, at most in another five years, the Ming Empire will be able to completely control the lifeblood of Europe economically.

Militarily, the Ming Empire's external expansion had almost reached its limit.

The world is full of colonies of the Ming Empire, in cold Siberia, cowboys from the northern provinces are trying to cross the Ural Mountains to invade the Nordic Plain, in North America, the armed colonists of the Ming Empire are fighting with the British for the Mississippi River Valley, in South America, the Ming Empire has snatched the entire Amazon basin from the Spaniards.

There is also Australia, which has become a colony of the Ming Empire as early as more than 30 years, and the indigenous people who originally lived on this continent have long been extinct, and there are now more than 7 million Han people living on the Australian continent.

There is also the South Asian subcontinent, which has also become a colony of the Ming Empire.

Like the Japanese, a large number of adult Indian men were sold to the Ming Empire as laborers, and a large number of Indian women were also trafficked to the empire and became the wives and concubines of the Han people, making an indelible contribution to the explosive growth of the population of the Han nation.

In later generations, a historian once said such a sentence when referring to this period of history, the industrial civilization of the Ming Empire was completely built with the blood and sweat of the bones, blood and sweat of Japanese slaves, Indian slaves and African black slaves.

In addition, the Ming Empire also built strong military fortresses in Temasek and the Cape of Good Hope, built the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal overseas, and sent the most elite Central Army to garrison it, thus completely controlling the lifeblood of world trade, and the merchant ships of European countries had to pay more expensive tolls.

The Central Army of the Ming Empire has expanded to 500,000, of which 300,000 are stationed in the camps of Nanjing and Beijing, and the other 200,000 are stationed in the northern provinces, eastern provinces, Central Asian provinces, Southeast Asian provinces, as well as Australia, Latin America, North America, the Middle East, East Africa, Southern Africa and other colonies.

In terms of navy, the Ming Empire already has two oceanic fleets, the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic, of which the Pacific Fleet Command is located in Hawaii and has seven sub-fleets with more than 200 large and small ironclad ships, and the Atlantic Fleet Command is located in New Nanjing (New York), with four subordinate fleets and more than 50 large and small ironclad ships.

From the world, Africa is still in the era of ignorance and backward primitive tribes, the glory of the Indians in South Asia has become history, only England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal in Europe can barely compete with the Ming Empire militarily, which is still because the Ming Empire and Europe are separated by a long ocean.

If it weren't too far apart, with the strong strength of the Ming Central Army, it would have swept away the whole of Europe long ago.

However, even if it is separated by several oceans, even if it is separated by thousands of miles of mountains, the European problem will have to be faced and solved by the Ming Empire sooner or later, because economic control is not enough to make Europe submit, and there are still many things to be done to make European countries like Japan and India annihilate in the long river of history.

Finally, it is important to mention the development of the Ming Empire in the field of humanities in the past 50 years, which is also what Wang Pu values the most, force can conquer the world but cannot rule the world, and the final domination of the world still depends on cultural soft power, not military hard power.

In terms of population, in the past 50 years, Wang Pu or the cabinet of the Ming Empire has vigorously pursued the national policy of one colonization strategy, on the one hand, wantonly plundering the population of the colony, castrating men as laborers, and selling women to the Han people in China, so as to promote the growth of the Han blood population, and then in turn export the Han population to the colony!

Under the encouragement of this national policy, in the past 50 years, the non-Han population of the empire and its colonies has decreased sharply, such as the Japanese, who are basically no longer available, such as the indigenous people of Southeast Asia, who were extinct as early as 20 years ago, and the Indians, when they were first conquered by the Ming Dynasty, there were still more than 80 million people in India, but now there are less than 3 million indigenous people left in India itself.

In contrast, fifty years ago, the Ming Empire had a population of only 150 million, but fifty years later, the population of the Ming Empire has exploded to more than 960 million! Moreover, these more than 960 million people are all Han people, all of whom are the people of the Han nation, and there is no non-Han population.

With a population of 960 million, what is this concept?

You must know that the total population of the world at that time was only a little more than one billion, in other words, the non-Han population at that time was less than 100 million, of which there were about 50 million people in Europe, about 30 million people in Africa, and more than 10 million people in the rest of the continents!

There is no doubt that the improvement of the level of productivity and the official policy of encouraging fertility in the Ming Dynasty have played a decisive role in the growth of the population, but it is undeniable that non-Han women, such as Japanese women, Southeast Asian indigenous women, Indian women, Australian indigenous women, Indian indigenous women, etc., have made great contributions to the explosive growth of the Han population.

Culturally, the Ming Empire also pursued a brutal policy of extermination.

Once it became a colony of the Ming Empire, all documents other than Chinese characters would be banned, and all languages other than Chinese would be officially banned, in fact, this policy was somewhat redundant, because cultural genocide was less important in the face of a brutal genocidal policy.

If a race is exterminated, then their language, culture, customs, etc., will also lose the basis of their survival.

The people who replaced them in the colonies were all Han Chinese, and since the Han people spoke Chinese and wrote Chinese characters, who would inherit those stiff and difficult foreign languages and languages?

The exception is, of course, archaeologists and historians, whose profession is to unearth these languages, scripts, and ancient civilizations that have disappeared from history.

All in all, after 50 years of great development, in 333 years of the Ming calendar, the Ming Empire has become the absolute superpower in the world at that time, the so-called Western powers standing in front of the Ming Empire, just as small as ants standing in front of the elephant, if it were not for the long distance, the difficulty of troop projection and logistics supply, the Ming Empire would be able to sweep Europe in minutes.

If it continues to develop at this rate, the Ming Empire can only become stronger, while the European countries can only be weaker, at most in another ten years, the Ming Empire will be able to sweep Europe without much effort, however, someone can't afford to wait, this person is Wang Pu!

Wang Pu is over eighty years old, and he doesn't know when he will close his eyes, so he must sweep Europe in his lifetime, and solve the last big belly "white Europeans", as long as the "white Europeans" are solved, the Ming Empire will no longer have enemies, and the Han nation will no longer have a big threat.

From now on, there will only be one nation in the world, that is, the Han nation, from now on, even if the Ming Empire will inevitably decay and split, it is just a dispute between the same nation, it is just a fight between the same culture, this is like a fight between two brothers, he can't take care of so much as a father, and he doesn't want to care.

Nanjing, Qinyuan.

Wang Pu was lying on his back in a rocking chair, listening to his great-grandson Queen Siyi read the newspaper to him, the old guy is eighty-nine years old this year, and his teeth have fallen out, but his ears and eyes are bright, and his appetite is also good, at least it doesn't look like he is about to die, and he still has several years to live.

"Grandpa." Wang Siyi held the newspaper and read it in a childish childish voice, "The newspaper said that the two houses of the National Assembly are about to formally pass a resolution instructing the Ministry of Railways to build a trans-Siberian railway, stretching from Beijing to Qucheng at the western foot of the Ural Mountains. ”

"Qu Cheng?"

Wang Pu's cloudy old eyes gradually became brighter, this Qucheng he knew, it was the historical Yekajielina Fort, but in this world, there was nothing to do with the Russian woman, the Ming Empire named this emerging city Qucheng in order to commemorate the outstanding contribution of Qu Shiyun, the governor of the northern provinces.