This look is that there is less reading, and the opening is a joke, Wang Zhenyu hahadaxiao helped him up and said: "Mr. Long doesn't have to be polite, you don't need to call the Lord or anything in the future, it's okay to call the big name directly." In the future, you will be the martial arts instructor in our army and my adjutant, with the rank of major, and you will be a family from now on. ”

Looking at her husband who was in a big mood, Ye Ziwen suddenly had a strange feeling, this bad husband, stinky husband, is it really to travel with him to relax?

After receiving Long Tingjiu, everyone still went to Yongshun to play according to the original jihua. This time, because Tian Yingquan arranged it very properly, everyone fully experienced the feeling that the apes on both sides of the strait could not stop crying, and the light boat had crossed the Ten Thousand Mountains. The scenery on both sides of the Mengdong River and the mysterious cave finally made Miss Ye happy. Ye Ziwen even said coquettishly to Wang Zhenyu in public: "Husband, we will come here when we have a holiday in the future, okay?" ”

Wang Zhenyu thought to himself, you are a student of me, the town guard, and I actually have a holiday. But since my wife brought it up, of course, it was good to say it casually, but I forgot about it later......

Since ancient times, Sichuan has been a land of abundance, with rich land and a large population. However, at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty and the end of the Ming Dynasty, the population of the area was almost extinct due to the impact of war. The first was the most efficient massacre on the shijie maintained by the Mongols, and the second was the result of Zhang Xianzhong's highly revolutionary proliferation.

Thanks to Zhang Xianzhong, Sichuan has ten rooms and nine emptiness, in order to ensure the local economic development. The Qing Dynasty, which had been upgraded from a bandit group with the right to illegally harm to a statistical group with the right to harm legally, had to carry out the famous Huguang reclamation of Sichuan in history. This also caused some northerners in later generations to listen to the accents of Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei provinces when it was difficult to distinguish, of course, southerners could not distinguish the accents of Henan and Anhui, Shandong and Shanxi.

The world is not chaotic, and the world is not at peace!

The former is determined by the regional characteristics of the Sichuan people, and the latter is caused by the geographical characteristics of Sichuan.

The so-called regional characteristics of Sichuan people, the first point is that they can endure hardship, and the opposite point is that they are bloody.

To put it simply, those who can endure hardships are basically honest people, and honest people are the most terrible ones to start a fire.

Just over a year ago, the Qing Dynasty's self-consciously lofty magnates finally foolishly and frantically provoked the Sichuanese. As a result, the resulting Baolu Movement eventually evolved into the Xinhai Revolution that destroyed the Qing Dynasty, which was really the first chaos in the world.

The honesty of Sichuan people is despised, and the bloody nature of Sichuan people at the end of oppression is terrifying. humble, timid, cowardly; Heroic, fearless, majestic; Such contradictory personalities are intertwined in the bones of Sichuan people, thus influencing the direction of Chinese history again and again.

After Huguang filled Sichuan, the Sichuan people in turn exported two things to Huguang. One is the divine soldier, this Wang Zhenyu has already dealt with Jingzhou, and almost suffered a big loss, this divine soldier itself is armed by religious people in order to protect themselves and resist bandits. As a result, like all armed forces in history, when they have developed to an extreme, they have changed qualitatively, from self-preservation to bullying and endangering one side. The second is the Elders' Association, when people talk about the gangsters in the Republic of China, they will always say that there are Hongmen in the south and the Qing Gang in the north, and it seems that there are only these two gangs in China. In fact, in Sichuan, Hunan, Shaanxi, and Hubei, the elders can speak and count, and the elders are one of the specialties of Sichuan.

The Brotherhood, originated in Sichuan and Chongqing, is a secret society organization active in the Yangtze River basin in modern China, with great momentum and influence. Among them, the elder brothers in Sichuan and Chongqing are called Paoge.

Although the revolutionaries repeatedly emphasized in their propaganda for the needs of the revolution that the Brotherhood originated from Hongmen, in fact, the real source of the Brotherhood should be the Sichuan word for robbers.

It itself is an underworld organization composed of displaced people, and the earliest official record appeared in the late Yongzheng and early Qianlong periods, and it has little to do with Hongmen. This organization has neither the great ideal of opposing the Qing Dynasty and restoring the Ming Dynasty, nor the ambition to unify the rivers and lakes. Their greatest pleasure is to occupy a dock and mingle for a lifetime.

After a hundred years of development, relying on the Yangtze River shipping, the Elders' Association has gone out of Sichuan. The self-proclaimed Hanliu who stayed in Sichuan, and the part that went out of the Yangtze River had contact with the Green Gang, and after friction and confrontation, in order to distinguish themselves, they called themselves the Red Gang.

In this way, the Elders' Association, together with the Green Gang and Hongmen, became one of the three major gangs in modern Chinese history.

As for the celebrities who came from the elder brothers' robes, I won't list them all here, and the Overseers have all been out, which is not unusual.

But at the moment, Wang Zhenyu is very worried about this organization, because on his own territory, the Elder Brotherhood not only exists, but also is very prosperous.

In the first battle of Jingzhou, Wang Zhenyu was in a good hurry, and the bandits and divine soldiers in this period did not have enough strength to challenge the government. If the Protectorate War broke out in 1916 and the Northern Army suffered a crushing defeat, it would not be a matter of suppressing bandits, but how not to be suppressed by bandits.

When the Northern Army was defeated, it was very lacking in virtue and threw the weapon in Xiangxi, and it didn't matter how to lose it. The important thing is that after there were guns and cannons, the bandits and divine soldiers in Xiangxi inflated like blowing up balloons. The 600-year-old banditry in Xiangxi has reached the climax of history, but unfortunately there is no such thing as a while in history.

Wang Zhenyu was very lucky, and with the 4,000 guns of the Tiger Brigade, he cleaned up the bandits and divine soldiers who had been in the western Hunan region for 600 years. And it was people who took the initiative to come to the door to ask for cleanup, and Wang Zhenyu was embarrassed if he didn't clean up. In this operation, the bandits were the worst, and those who did not die either became coolies or changed their careers. And the divine soldiers are not much better, they have lost the qualification to organize arms, otherwise Wang Zhenyu, the demon king, does not mind killing Taoism and Buddhism, anyway, he and Niu Tou Ma Mian still have accounts to calculate, and going to hell is not such a terrible thing for him.

Under the absolute threat of force, survival and wealth, most people choose the former. And those who wanted to continue the latter were all eliminated by Wang Zhenyu without hesitation, Wang Zhenyu's attitude was very clear, and the wealth could only be given by me.

The political reforms of the Xiangxi Development Company and the county people's governance of the county have turned the merchant group into their hardcore allies and staunchest supporters.

And the phoenix walked down this time, and the pole army based on the tun army suddenly became his subordinates. Looking at the whole of Xiangxi, there are almost no opponents, except for the Elders' Association.

Long Tingjiu has been in Xiangxi for a long time, and he has naturally dealt with people from the Elders' Association, and he is an authority in this regard. Therefore, Wang Zhenyu also humbly asked him for advice on related matters, Long Tingjiu is a newcomer, and naturally he knows everything and says everything.

After listening to Long Tingjiu's introduction, Wang Zhenyu, who had always been worried about the elder brother's shili, breathed a sigh of relief, it turned out that the elder brother's association was not monolith in Xiangxi, and it was also divided into a lot of shili, probably eating on the pier. Among them, there are two more famous ones in Xiangxi, both in Sangzhi County, one is the He family and the other is the Gu family. In fact, it is a family, because the eldest daughter of the He family married the Gu family as a daughter-in-law.

The He family? Is that the marshal's house in the future? Wang Zhenyu immediately became interested, pinched his fingers, and the marshal was estimated to be only fourteen or fifteen years old now. Shen Congwen mentioned in his book that this marshal was a groom under Wang Zhenya, the guard of Changde Town, but in fact, this person's background is very extraordinary.

The head of the He family is He Shidao, and the head of the Gu family is He Shidao's nephew Gu Hu, and Gu Hu married He Shidao's eldest daughter He Ying, so the two families are actually one family.

For this Gu Hu, Long Tingjiu knows in detail, this person is tall, sociable, trustworthy, and righteous, and is the leading brother of the "Singles Club". The lofty mountains, streets and wharves on the border of Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan and Guizhou have his friends everywhere, and they are very influential in Xiangxi.

"Singles? What a single name! Wang Zhenyu teased.

After thinking for a while, Wang Zhenyu asked again: "What is the main business of these gangs?" ”

"On the surface, they are all buying coolies, tea, salt, opium, tung oil, and other messy goods, and they are all responsible for shipping." Long Tingjiu also paused slightly, and continued: "Actually, their main head is to sell illicit salt. ”

Wang Zhenyu nodded, in fact, this problem of private salt has existed in all dynasties, and until later generations, salt is a state monopoly. Even in order to maximize profits, the relevant departments did not hesitate to concoct the shocking lie that if they did not eat iodized official salt, they would have a big neck. Although lies do not stand up to scrutiny (there were thousands of years before New China, how did the Chinese avoid Big Neck Disease?). But the lovely people actually believed it, and paid for it, and what about the result of zuihou? Iodine exceedances and abundance for some people.

For salt and tobacco, Wang Zhenyu's original jihua was engaged in a franchise, after all, these two pieces are not obvious on weekdays, but once they are franchised, the profits will be very high. Especially salt, don't look at how much you can't eat in a month, but everyone has to eat it, once the territory expands, this profit is hundreds of millions. The best proof of this is that China's current tax revenue, the annual salt tax has reached an astonishing 40 million, which is the same as the customs tariff (which shows that the customs tariff is low), accounting for 40% of the total tax revenue.

Seeing this, Wang Zhenyu did not hand over the management rights of salt and tobacco to Hongshang to monopolize when he assigned the business of the Xiangxi Development Company, but kept it in his own hands. As for opium, it has to be paid, because Liu Qishan is already the largest opium dealer in Xiangxi, if you don't continue to use him, then you can only kill him and start anew, the cost of doing so is high, and it is not cost-effective to offend Hong Shang.

The profits of tobacco are not yet apparent, but the profits of salt are visible at the moment.

He Shidao, what Gu Hu and the others do, even if Long Tingjiu didn't say it, Wang Zhenyu was also clear. Because the story of the revolution with two kitchen knives has long existed in his childhood memory. A certain marshal has been following his father and brother-in-law since he was 11 years old, and the revolution developed by Zuihou is estimated to be not class conscious, and he was attacked by the government's salt department. Then after careful analysis, in fact, the government did not have its own liliang, so it made a fuss. Decades later, a group of literati in the need to serve politics described this anti-official movement of smugglers as a revolution, which was really too talented.

Wang Zhenyu made up his mind, if the He family and the Gu family could follow him, and at the same time have the ability to control the entire Xiangxi Elders' Association. Then in return, Wang Zhenyu will hand over the monopoly of salt to these two companies. Thinking of such a big temptation, no one can resist it.

Thinking of this, Wang Zhenyu asked Long Tingjiu to take his own greeting to invite these two to dinner, by the way, bring a company of the Pole Army over, and if he refused to come, he would invite ......