Zhao Yan stayed in Taiyuan for half a month, and all over the country concentrated the silver, silk, and jewelry in Taiyuan, and the silver taels confiscated were 58 million taels, and the value of those silk silks and jewelry should be about 10 million taels, and these things are not very easy to realize.

Copy the Jin merchants, this year's finances don't have to worry, now Shandong's financial expenditure is relatively large, this is also a helpless thing.

A lot of silver had to be spent.

However, there are not many opportunities like this, and the Jin merchants, as the largest merchant gang in the north of the Ming Dynasty, have not many goals if they are raided by Zhao Yan like this.

Coupled with those real estates, as well as some industries distributed by Jin merchants outside, it is no problem to collect hundreds of millions of taels in the accounts this time, but it may take longer to realize.

When Li Zicheng entered the capital, he was able to confiscate thousands of taels of silver from officials, not counting real estate! In the Jin Shang investigation of hundreds of millions of taels of assets, it is not far off, after all, this is the top business gang in the Ming Dynasty, and its financial resources are naturally not comparable to those of Lu Shang.

Of course, there are still goals, and there are currently two more goals.

One is the two Huai salt merchants, and the other is the Zheng Group.

The silver of these two targets is also very large, and when there is a shortage of money, they will be slashed out. In half a month, Zhao Yan can be said to count the silver until his hands cramped.

It's been almost a month, and I have to hurry back to guide the scientific research work, and the work of copying the house in Shanxi has been almost completed, the cash and valuable things have been moved to Taiyuan, and the real estate has also been sealed, and it will be left there for the time being, waiting for the people from the Ministry of Commerce to come and receive it.

So Zhao Yan took Mao Yuanyi and others back to Zhaojiabao.

Naturally, the gold, silver and jewelry were taken away, and there was also a group of Jin merchants, who had to be brought back to Zhaojiabao for a good trial.

Jin Shang played a typical collusion between officials and businessmen, and if they dug all the way, they could really get many officials off the horse, which was a great opportunity for Zhao Yan to suppress political opponents.

Zhao Yan's team can be described as vast, except for the 5,000 armed police troops left in Shanxi, and the armed police sent to other provinces to seize the Jin merchant industry, the rest of the horses have withdrawn.

The speed of the return march was relatively slow, and it took Zhao Yan half a month to return to Zhaojiabao.

As soon as he returned to Zhaojiabao, Zhao Yan filled the precious metals of about 61 million taels of gold, silver and copper into the vault, and those jewelry, calligraphy and paintings, antiques, jade and other items, Zhao Yan asked people to screen them, and all those fine products were left, and then put them in the Denglai Museum for collection.

Zhao Yan plans to wait for the price of these things to increase in the future before selling, anyway, there is no shortage of silver now, so I want to store it in the museum!

As for those real estates, they are not in a hurry to sell them for the time being.

The 5 million mu of land in Confucius Mansion in Shandong Province has not yet been sold because of the sharp drop in land prices. The number of acres of land confiscated in Shanxi has not yet been counted.

But it's also coming soon, and a group of accountants are constantly calculating there.

Soon the real estate in Shanxi also counted part, more than 300 houses were confiscated, most of them were luxury houses, and the number of acres of cultivated land confiscated reached about 10 million mu, and most of them were concentrated in the essence of Shanxi, mostly distributed in Datong, Xinzhou, Taihou, Linfen, Yuncheng, Changzhi and other larger basins. In addition, there are some lands distributed in the small basins of Yangquan, Shouyang, Xiangyuan, Licheng, and Jincheng in the east.

There are eight years of money in the confiscated villages, all over more than a dozen big cities, there are hundreds of semicolons, at present, the ticket numbers of Jin merchants are not too many, but there are also some, most of them are distributed in the northern provinces.

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Qianzhuang has become a kind of financial organization that reads and operates, not only operating exchanges, but also lending, providing the convenience of issuing posts and withdrawing money. In addition, a number of small-scale money exchange shops and money and rice shops are quite active in rural areas.

Compared with banks, this kind of bank is not so professional, but it also has a certain similarity with the bank.

These banks do not have much deposits, but they also have the function of collecting funds, but they only provide merchants with the convenience of long-distance trade, and do not absorb deposits and issue loans on a large scale like banks.

Zhao Yan didn't intend to swallow the funds that were absorbed, after all, this was not the money of the Jin merchants, and whoever it belonged would be returned, so Zhao Yan allocated these money banks to Denglai Bank, and asked Denglai Bank to receive these money banks, and then return the collected funds.

As for those usury, the small amount is not needed, but the larger amount is wanted, but no interest is charged.

Usury is a common means for these Jin merchants to make a fortune, in addition to the money bank usury, there are pawnshops like usury.

The number of pawnshops is more, the pawnshops of Jin merchants are all over the Ming Dynasty, most of them are concentrated in the north, and a few are involved in the south, but there are more commercial groups in the south, and the Jin merchants are not so mixed in the south.

According to the confiscated contracts, these Jin merchants owned more than 500 pawnshops, and more than 100 of these 500 pawnshops have been raided.

There are more than 400 other places in the provinces that have not yet been raided, but they have also been sent to raid them.

If you confiscate these money, you can collect a considerable amount of silver. Zhao Yan is not very good at this aspect, and the surname Suo left these things to Zhao Quan to deal with.

He went to the Academy of Science and Technology to guide scientific research.

After several months of preparation, the steam engine manufacturing plant has already started, and so far five more steam engines have been built.

As soon as these steam engines were produced, they were assigned to various research groups.

The Ordnance Bureau was the first to successfully apply the steam engine to stamping and drilling, which is not a technical thing.

After all, stamping and drilling technology has long existed in Shandong, but it uses hydraulic power.

The hydraulic stamping is not very stable, and when the river dries up, it cannot be started, which also greatly affects the production of weapons in the Ordnance Bureau.

With the steam engine, it is equivalent to having a machine with greater power, more stable output, no location restrictions, and can greatly reduce production costs.

The Ordnance Bureau soon applied the steam engine to the production of weapons and munitions.

Cold weapons are now forged directly by steam engines, plate armor has also begun to be forged with steam engines, and muskets have also been drilled with steam engines.

A high-power steam engine can drive dozens of drill bits, and the production of muskets increases dramatically for a time.

The current musket Zhao Yan is not very satisfied, and is making people study the continuous musket, and the musket of black powder can also be fired continuously, there is no doubt about it.

However, in the research of smokeless gunpowder, Zhao Yan also devoted more energy.

Zhao Yan has a specific formula for smokeless gunpowder, but the chemistry is not very perfect, and in this year's budget, there is a project to establish a systematic collection of experimental materials, which is Zhao Yan's order to improve this aspect.

Since the beginning of the year, a special department has been set up to collect materials for scientific research, and it is a large collection, all kinds of materials and materials, will be collected in large quantities, and then classified and stored for scientific experiments.

In terms of chemistry, it is necessary to correspond to the scientific name and the specific substance, although the chemical system of Denglai is very advanced, but the people of the Academy of Science and Technology have not studied it thoroughly.

This year, there are more manpower, and research funding has also increased.

Since the beginning of the year, researchers from the Department of Chemistry have begun to conduct a large number of experiments, constantly verifying Zhao Yan's chemical formula in the textbook and matching the elements.

The report submitted by the chemical group said that smokeless gunpowder could be produced by six months at the latest.

When the time comes, Zhao Yan directly draws the design drawings of Mauser 98k, and the combat effectiveness of the army will have a huge improvement.

In addition to muskets, artillery is also an important thing.

In war, Zhao Yan has always tended to use machines to deal with the enemy, rather than using ** to fight wits with machines, which can reduce casualties and minimize casualties.

Of course, the cost of war also has to be taken into account.

It is said that the reason why the Empire of Buluo is declining is because the war dragged him to death.

In the production of artillery, the Ordnance Bureau has also begun to experiment with the use of open-hearth steel and steam engines to make new artillery.

After the entry of open-hearth steel into application, the weight of the gun will be significantly reduced.

After the use of steam engines and lathes, the specifications of the guns will be more uniform, and after the appearance of smokeless gunpowder, the power of the guns will also be greatly improved.

At present, the steam engine manufacturing plant has determined three steam engine manufacturing specifications, one is the steam engine used in the textile factory, which is small and can drive 300 spindles, and the efficiency of the textile factory has been improved again.

The other two, one is forged and the other is drilled, both of which are things that the Ordnance Bureau wants.

These three specifications of steam engines have been determined, and the steam engine manufacturing plant is making every effort to expand its manufacturing capacity, and the personnel of the steam engine manufacturing plant have rapidly expanded to more than 10,000 people.

These people are distributed in various manufacturing plants, and each manufacturing plant is responsible for the manufacture of a certain part. These manufacturing plants, in turn, are looking into the use of steam engines to provide manufacturing speed and quality.

Under the huge power of the steam engine, the productivity is simply increasing rapidly, and the application in the manufacture of the steam engine is rapidly improving the production efficiency of the steam engine.

After the manufacturing efficiency of the steam engine is improved, it will also drive more industries into the era of productivity leap.

When one person can do the work of a hundred people, the productivity is theoretically increased by a hundredfold, and the amount of things produced is a hundredfold greater.

Of course, this is industrial productivity, and after deducting some industries whose productivity has not been improved, then the productivity will be doubled from the assumption at the beginning, and slowly increase upwards, how many times it will increase, which is equivalent to producing several times more things than before.

While the steam engine factory was trying to apply the steam engine to the manufacture of the steam engine, other industries also began to pay attention to the steam engine.

The power team is using steam engines to study thermal power generation, the Navy is using steam engines to study ironclads, and the Ministry of Transportation is using steam engines to study trains.

Of course, these are relatively large technical surnames. Among them, the ironclad ship is the most difficult, the thermal power generation is the least difficult, and the train is relatively easy, after all, the railway has been repaired and broken, as long as the linkage device and shock absorption device are figured out, but this involves the shaping of steel.

The parts manufacturing plant is also studying the use of steam engines for parts manufacturing, which also coincides with the research of the steam engine manufacturing plant, so the two sides are jointly researching.

The advent of the steam engine was an all-round improvement.

The cement plant also uses the steam engine in cement production.

In the past, the cement plant used animal power and water power to roll the material, but now it has been replaced by a steam engine to roll the material, and the efficiency is not a little bit, but a huge improvement.

The cost of producing cement has been reduced again.

This also means that the cost of building infrastructure will be reduced.

After the blast furnace and open hearth are put into use, the cost of steel will also be greatly reduced, which can also reduce the construction cost of infrastructure and reduce the support of military spending.

It's just the power of a steam engine.

can make a society enter the era of take-off.

Technology is not a thing that makes it profitable. The most important thing is to maintain the advanced surname, as long as you are more advanced than others, you can develop very smoothly.

If everyone else has entered the era of internal combustion engines, and a certain country is still using steam engines, then the production cost is higher than others, and it lags behind others in competition, so it will not make money, let alone invest in new research and development.

At present, there are still many industries that plan to use steam engines to replace manpower, animal power, and water power, but the manufacturing speed of steam engine manufacturing plants is not very fast, and many industries cannot get steam engines.

The manufactured steam engine is mainly focused on the manufacture of parts.

As long as the speed of parts manufacturing goes up, the steam engine can build as much as it wants. Other industries will give them a few units for application experiments first, but they are not in a hurry to equip them on a large scale.

"Within this year, the steam engine manufacturing plant should be able to complete a significant increase in manufacturing efficiency, and a large number of steam engines will be produced next year."

Li Weiping, who was in charge of the steam engine manufacturing plant, reported to Zhao Yan.

"We must pay close attention to research." Zhao Yan nodded with satisfaction, and then admonished. He is relatively relieved about the application of steam engines, after all, everything has come out, and it is only sooner or later that it is applied to various industries.

But it's better sooner than later.

Of course, the management and development of Shanxi was immediately put on the desk by Zhao Yan.

When a large number of steam engines are used and thermal power generation is applied, the demand for coal will increase significantly, and the coal mining industry will also enter the corresponding development.

Coal mining in Shanxi will inevitably damage the environment, but it is a necessary process to pollute first and then clean up, of course, it is still necessary to minimize the damage to the environment, after all, Shanxi's ecological environment is really fragile.

Zhao Yan remembers that the country's largest coking coal producing area seems to be located 15 kilometers west of Taiyuan City, with reserves of tens of billions of tons, nearly 200 tons of coking coal.

In fact, coal in Shanxi is simply everywhere.

In later generations, Shanxi was simply a barren province of agriculture, with only more than 800,000 mu of cultivated land in the province, and most of the mountains were bare.

It is a province where energy and minerals are the main economy.

It doesn't matter where the mine is opened, there are coal mines everywhere anyway, and most of the cultivated land in Zhao Yan's hands definitely has mines.

Shanxi's agriculture is not very important, and Shanxi's grain in the future will be supplemented by commercial grain from eastern and southern Liaodong.

At present, Shanxi has been controlled by Zhao Yan, but it is only officials, and there are armed police forces in Shanxi, and there are still soldiers and horses in Shanxi.

However, now Chongzhen has begun to lay off officials and troops in various places on a large scale, and the soldiers and horses in Shanxi have been cut almost nothing in this month.

Shanxi is basically what Zhao Yan said, Governor Ruan Jingyuan is just an elevated existence, and at the same time he is also very cooperative with Zhao Yan, basically he can't interfere in Shanxi.

However, the officials in Shanxi have not been fully dispatched, so Shanxi is still in a situation where Zhao Yan controls and controls it incompletely.

The main problem is that Shandong's system has not yet been transplanted. Although it is said that Shanxi's bandits and thieves have been eliminated, and the famine has not had much impact under the relief, the management is not as refined as Shandong.

"Immediately send officials to Shanxi, take over the administration of Shanxi, and set up local police, health and epidemic prevention, road and water conservancy repairs in each county." Zhao Yan said to Zhang Buyun.

"Should our agricultural tax collection law be transplanted to the past?" Zhang Buyun asked.

"The cabinet has already made Shanxi all tax-exempt, and we won't accept it." Zhao Yan thought for a while and said, in Shanxi should mainly develop the mining industry, agriculture basically has no future, and the essence of Shanxi, many are already in hand, this agricultural tax is not interesting, at the same time in Shanxi's land annexation is higher, for the development of the mining industry is also beneficial, after all, mining needs miners.

"My subordinates understood." Zhang Buyun said.

Soon, Shandong began to transfer officials again, this time to serve in Shanxi prefectures and counties, but a lot of officials had to be transferred, and grassroots officials also began to expand.

Although Zhao Yan's series of actions disgusted many scholars, there are still many literati who come to Shandong to find jobs, and there are more and more of them.

Not everyone can get famous, and if they can't get into the fame, they can't be tax-exempt, what Zhao Yanai does has nothing to do with them, most of those talents and the following literati don't mix well, and coming to Shandong is their best choice.

In Shandong, as long as there is culture, as long as you are willing to study hard in training, it is possible to be a big official.

And Zhao Yan also gave these literati a very high salary, if they go to school as a teacher, their life will immediately become a well-off level, and it is harder to be a clerk, but the development potential is great, and the treatment is also very good, but the clerk is much stricter than the teacher in the selection, and he is not educated to do it, and he has to work seriously.

A large part of these street literati have been filled into teachers and grassroots officials, and those senior scholars who support and even have a fanatical attitude towards Zhao Yan, and those who have been promoted to many people, have been transferred to Denglai University, and some have chosen official careers, and the ability of these scholars is generally higher. In addition, if you have a meritorious name, you may be promoted to a greater surname, although Zhao Yan's system does not value meritorious fame, but meritorious fame still has some influence, but it is much more important in terms of ability.

Now as Zhao Yan becomes more and more famous, many of those literati and scholars have come to Shandong to seek refuge in him, after all, many people can see that Zhao Yan's power is now like Zhongtian.

Even if some scholars were opposed to Zhao Yan's methods in dealing with the tax-free class, they still came to Shandong to take up their posts, wanting to get a piece of the pie when Zhao Yan seized the world in the future.

There are really a lot of such people, but Zhao Yan does not refuse to come, as long as he comes, they are all welcome. After all, Zhao Yan has already formed a system of his own, and the anti-corruption efforts are so strong, no matter what his character and starting point are, it is very easy to be assimilated into the cogs in this system under various constraints.

Since the beginning of the year, in just four months, Shandong has recruited more than 5,000 literati, all of whom have been transferred to the training class.

This is a rudimentary process of study and investigation, and every month there is a tael of silver and a stone of rice and wheat, which is enough for these literati to study with peace of mind.

Learn Arabic numerals, learn some Shandong systems, and then you can transfer them to the new training course, and the second training course is more advanced.

There are those who are responsible for administrative training, teaching them what they need to do after they go to the grassroots level, how to do it, what their attitude should be, and the inculcation of some development theories.

There are also those who are responsible for commercial training, and the trained personnel will be transferred to the Ministry of Commerce, which manages ten departments: textile mills, banks, grain banks, post stations, iron and steel mills, salt works, glass factories, cement factories, purchasing bureaus, and statistical bureaus, all of which require a lot of manpower.

The Ministry of Commerce, on the other hand, focuses on absorbing experienced shopkeepers. This time the raid on Jin merchants really caught a lot of shopkeepers, their owners fell, plus Zhao Yan used coercive means, and gave a generous treatment, they were all willing to serve Zhao Yan, after all, working for a businessman is not as promising as serving a giant like Zhao Yan, this is for the benefit of children and grandchildren!

More of them were asked by the Ministry of Education to leave, and they were all transferred to the Normal College to study, and the people who were wanted by the Ministry of Education were all highly educated, and those who were not very well educated were lost to the Ministry of Administration and the Ministry of Commerce.

Other departments also select personnel and send them to their respective training courses.

In Zhao Yan's view, officials also need professional surnames.

Each kind of official is responsible for different things, and the things to be learned before taking office are also different, as long as the officials can be professional, the management will become more and more sophisticated.

This year, the number of literati who have defected to Shandong has increased unabated, which makes Zhao Yan very proud, and it can be regarded as a clear view of the literati group of this era.

This is also an era of rampant materialism, and it is also an era of some integrity, which is very contradictory.

If you have money and can give people a future, those literati will serve them.

will stick to the bottom line, that is, that is, a small part. Those who have no bottom line, in this melting pot of Zhao Yan, will also force them to have a bottom line.

…… At the same time, Zhao Yan was also paying attention to Chongzhen's actions.

At the same time as Chongzhen was disarmed, Chongzhen was determined to concentrate all the soldiers and horses in the Gyeonggi area. The entire elite officers and soldiers of the Ming Dynasty have been transferred to Gyeonggi, and many of them are already on the way.

For example, Sun Chuanting had already dismissed most of the Shaanxi border army and went to Gyeonggi with a small centaur to accept the reorganization.

And Zhao Yan is Chongzhen withdrew from a province, he sent a provincial armed police, the situation in Shaanxi is special, Zhao Yan hurriedly transferred the 01 and 02 infantry brigades of the second division to Shaanxi.

After all, the frontier still needs to be guarded, and the thieves need to be suppressed. A 5,000-strong force in other provinces is about the same, and two infantry brigades are needed.

But Shandong is empty.

Although Shandong can recruit hundreds of thousands of people at any time, it is not too formal after all.

At present, Chongzhen's troops are not to be worried, and the Manchu Qing are finished, and Yue Ben is even more subdued, and there is no force around Shandong that can pose a threat.

And inside Zhao Yan, there will basically be no problems, because the soldiers support him, who would dare to rebel against him? And none of the subordinates are centralized.

There is not the slightest problem internally, but there is still to be precautions, and the bill to expand the army again is on the table.

The People's Armed Police Force will be expanded to the four provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, and Yunnan, with a total of 22,000 personnel. And Fujian is Zheng Zhilong's territory, and Zheng Zhilong has completely controlled Fujian's soldiers and horses.

According to the estimation of the General Staff, Chongzhen and Zheng Zhilong are considered to have hooked up, and under the oppression of Zhao Yan, these two difficult brothers began to unite.

Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, and Yunnan have all been retrenched and their officers and troops have been abolished, and if there are no troops there, it is indeed easy for problems to occur.

After all, there are many ethnic minorities in the southwest.

Only 5,000 armed police troops are sent to each province, which is still a little thin. For this reason, Zhao Yan immediately transferred back the three mountain regiments trained in the DPRK and sent them all to the southwest region.

Before setting off, the mountain regiment and the Southwest Armed Police Force all received new regulations. This is a regulation that deals with ethnic minorities as well as some emergent problems.

After all, the southwest region is too far away, and it is easy to reach the whip, and the information transmission is not so fast, so when an incident occurs, these troops must have their own reaction as soon as possible.

The regulations are not very cumbersome, and bandits and bandits are all exterminated. All Tusi rebellions will be suppressed by force. The rebellious ethnic minorities all moved 500 miles inward.

As for the treatment of ethnic minorities, Zhao Yan still follows the rules of the Ming Dynasty - the matter of relocation and land change can be put aside for a while and come back slowly.

Like the agrarian ethnic minorities in China, Zhao Yan still intends to adopt a policy of Huai Rou, after all, these ethnic groups and the Han have lived together on this land for thousands of years, and they have more or less different degrees of sinicization, and their ancestors are the same as the Han people, but in the process of cultural formation, they have been marginalized.

And those nomadic and nomadic ethnic minorities, Zhao Yan used an iron-blooded policy, these ethnic minorities have no similar surnames to the Han people, and there is only naked hostility in this era, a hostility between barbarism and civilization.

At the same time, the troops in the southwest should also cooperate with the local government to keep the administration of the southwest from collapsing. Guangxi, Guizhou, and Yunnan each have a mountain regiment.

Guangdong, on the other hand, did not send a mountain regiment, after all, Guangdong is a place with a relatively high degree of control, and although rebellions are common, the intensity is not high, and the 5,000 armed police force is enough to deal with it.

Shandong, on the other hand, will again be expanded by three infantry brigades, the second division will have seven infantry brigades, two infantry brigades will be responsible for the defense of Shandong, and one infantry brigade will be used as an emergency force.

In this expansion, 72,040 people will be recruited again, and the total strength will increase to 510,860.

What Zhao Yan had to admit was that Chongzhen's disarmament, coupled with the original surname of the expansion of the Shandong Army, made Zhao Yan's forces extremely dispersed...... It's just that after the war against Mongolia, Zhao Yan's forces can shrink a little.

At this time, the war against Mongolia had already begun

(To be continued)