436th VI

On the 18th, the preparation time slip was read, and the sixth life experience was launched.

……

In 1551, Wei Fengfu died and was succeeded by his third son, Wei Yixiao, who was the tenth emperor of the Wei Xia Dynasty.

In 1563, Wei Yixiao died and was succeeded by his eldest son, Wei Daodan, who was the eleventh emperor of the Wei Xia Dynasty.

In 1565, Wei Daodan died childless, and was succeeded by his younger brother Wei Daoqi, who was the twelfth emperor of the Wei Xia Dynasty.

In 1579, Wei Daoqi died childless, and was succeeded by his younger brother Wei Daoya, who was the thirteenth emperor of the Wei Xia Dynasty.

From 1564 to 1582, when Wei Dongsheng left, the Vietnamese-Wu War was still not officially over.

During this period, the maritime hegemony of the Yue State became weaker and weaker, and the coastal vassal states seized the colonies of the Yue State all over the world.

Among them, the Wu State, a victim of the Vietnam-Wu War, is a well-deserved pioneer.

Wu took the lead in breaking through the maritime blockade and encirclement network that the Vietnamese and Wei had painstakingly managed for many years, and rushed to the west coast of North America along the Pacific route.

The breakthrough in the direction of the African route has made more brilliant achievements. Wu not only made a series of important breakthroughs in the South Seas, India, East Africa and other regions, but also bypassed Africa and went north, successfully gaining a colony in Guinea, Africa. The vigorous maritime merchants of Wu not only provoked the maritime hegemony of Vietnam and the defense of the country, but also disdained the coastal hegemony of Spain and Portugal. Wu maritime merchants rode to the Iberian Peninsula and skillfully took advantage of the contradictions between the countries to make the hometown of Spain and Portugal jump. Based on the simple value that the enemy of the enemy is a friend, Wu Guo immediately reached a strategic cooperation agreement with England and the Netherlands, and obtained the right to operate a trading port in England and Wales.

Gaining a firm foothold in Africa, Wu set his sights on the east coast of the Americas. The center of gravity of the Vietnamese Penglai is on the west coast, and the control of the east coast of the Americas by the Vietnamese Penglai and Wu Penglai is relatively weak, and the large coastal areas are undeveloped wastelands, so the efficiency of the land enclosure of the Wu State is extremely high. In the area of Suriname and French Guiana in South America, the Wu State enclosed and established the Wu Penglai; On the east coast of North America, the Wu enclosure announced the establishment of the Beilai Jiedu Envoy.

Of course, as a late-developing country, Wu also has many shortcomings.

If you fight one-on-one with Yue and Weiguo, it is impossible for Wu to win such a hearty victory.

However, Wu Guocai will not be stupid and fight alone.

In order to contain the counteroffensive of the Yue State and the Wei State, the Wu State actively contacted the royal family, the Lu State, the Zhao State, the Yan State and other vassal states, and held high the banner of "respecting the king and seeking rebellion" to establish a powerful anti-Vietnamese alliance. Taking Penglai as an example, after Wu set up Wu Penglai in South America, it immediately invited Wu to establish the Lu Xinlai Governor's Mansion in the north of Wu Penglai, and invited the royal family to establish the Xia Nanlai Festival in the south of Wu Penglai. The state of Shandong has two provinces, Shandong and Henan, and the royal family has four provinces, including Hubei, Jiangxi, Anhui, and Jiangsu, and its human resource reserves far exceed those of the vassal states such as Guo, Weiguo, and Wu. Wu used the colony as a bait to invite the two countries to send army garrisons, and the south and north of Penglai of Wu suddenly had security guarantees, and the Yue State had to take the lead in conquering the fortress of the royal family and the Lu State before there was any hope of substantially threatening the Wu State.

Wu also used a similar method when he ran the North American colonies, inviting Lu and the royal family to contain the counteroffensive of the Vietnamese Penglai and the Wei Penglai in the south and north respectively. In this way, the Lu State established the Lu Beilai Festival Envoy on the east coast of North America, and the royal family also established the Xia Beilai Festival Envoy on the east coast of the Americas.

Three countries, including Wu, the royal family, and the Lu state, broke into the new land of Penglai at one time.

Of course, the royal family and the Lu State will never be willing to be the lackeys of the Wu State. When the two countries gained a foothold in Penglai, they both began to expand to varying degrees based on their own interests. Taking Lu as an example, it threw off Wu and the royal family, independently attacked the colonial strongholds of the Nanlai Jiedu envoy of the Yue State in Argentina and Uruguay in South America, and announced the establishment of the Lu Nanlai Jiedu Envoy.

There is cooperation, and there is struggle, which is the norm of the Triple Alliance.

Zhao and Yan were also allies deliberately wooed by Wu, but unfortunately they regretted missing the second wave of great voyages set off by Wu.

Since the establishment of the Yan Kingdom, it was trapped in the early days of the Yuanmeng and the remnants of the Jurchen aborigines, and there was almost no spare energy to participate in the game of hegemony among the Central Plains. Later, the successive vassal kings of the Yan Kingdom worked hard to conquer Jilin Province, Heilongjiang Province and the Outer Northeast, and the land area gradually expanded. Unfortunately, due to the feudal values, many of the conquered territories became the private property of the viscounts and counts, and the vast territory could not substantially enhance the national power of the Yan State.

Passed to the seventh generation, Wei Jilei, the vassal king of Yan who succeeded to the throne at an early age, was extremely disgusted with the aristocratic class that was in charge of their own affairs, and immediately after he regained power, he immediately set out to attack the aristocratic forces in the country, and successively transferred the noble territories in the elite region to the northern wilderness where birds don't. The benefits are obvious, a group of big nobles moved out in embarrassment, and indirectly included the Russian Far Eastern Federal District into the sphere of influence of Yan, which instantly became a rotten country with a land area of nearly 7 million square kilometers, absolutely similar to Russia in the real world.

However, the disadvantages are equally significant.

After Wei Jilei took power for more than 40 years, he gradually became old and frail, and the aristocratic group immediately began to counterattack, and Yan's domestic affairs were suddenly chaotic. When Wu advanced along the Pacific waterway to the west coast of North America, he invited Yan to establish a colony on the west coast of North America.

Zhao Guo also had no time to look east at this time.

As the effect of Wei Jilei's centralized reform gradually appeared, Wei Shunzong, the vassal king of Zhao, also wanted to expand the centralization of power, and took advantage of the situation to drive the great nobles out of the local elite area. It's a pity that Wei Shunzong's ability is not as good as Wei Jilei, the vassal king of Yan State, but the combat effectiveness of the nobles of Zhao State is far better than that of Yan nobles. After the failure of the centralized reform, Wei Shunzong rode out to Wei and fought against Zhao from a distance. Not long after, around political issues such as the aristocratic faction of Zhao and whether Wei Shunzong would return to China, and around the distribution of interests to the sea, the four northern feudal states such as Wei, Jin, Zhou, and Zhao once again launched a great chaos.

Wei Shunzong fled from Wei in embarrassment, the nobles of Zhao were busy dealing with the chaos of the four feudal states, and the small court of Zhao still had the heart to be greedy for a share of maritime trade.

It is said that it is an alliance of anti-Vietnamese feudal forces, but the only ones who are worthy of the trust of Wu are the royal family and the Lu State.

The alliance and cooperation of the three countries is known as the Maritime Alliance of the Three Kingdoms.

The Yan State had just ended its civil strife, the four feudal states of Wei, Zhou, Jin, and Zhao were fighting, the royal family and the Lu State were indirectly intervening in the chaos of the four feudal states, and the Maritime Alliance of the Three Kingdoms continued to play games with the alliance of the two countries on land and sea.

This era is so chaotic and so tyrannical.

This was the year 1582, when Wei Dongsheng VI came to be.

Compared with the fifth generation, Wei Dongsheng's identity background continued to decline, and his nominal father was only the son of a merchant in Jiaxing Mansion of Wu State. To Wei Dongsheng's surprise, the sixth generation did not fall to the son of the town mayor, but completely withdrew from the bureaucracy and became a grass citizen.

The titular father died in 1578, leaving Wei Dongsheng with a small wholesale business.

This small business is so small that it doesn't even have a formal name, and people often refer to it by Wei Dongsheng's father's name; After the death of the titular father, this small business was generally called "Xiao Wei Family Firm", and this "Xiao Wei" refers to the young Wei Dongsheng.

Wei Dongsheng simply flipped through the account book, and before 1578, the annual net profit of the Xiao Wei family firm was about 350 silver yuan; From 1578 to 1582, the annual net profit decreased year by year, and in 1581 the annual net profit was only 105 silver dollars. There are two main reasons for the sharp decline in profits: first, after the death of Wei Dongsheng's nominal father, the Xiao Wei family firm has no leader, and its business ability has declined; Second, the shopkeeper and manager entrusted by the nominal father filled their pockets and secretly appropriated the profits that should have belonged to the Xiao Wei family firm.

Despite this, the Xiao Wei family firm can also provide Wei Dongsheng with 105 silver dollars every year, and he doesn't have to worry about food, clothing, housing and transportation for the time being.

The silver dollar denomination here is a monetary revolution set off by the Great Voyage of the Yue Kingdom, and the huge import of gold and silver led to the gradual transformation of the Wei Xia Empire from the copper standard to the silver standard. Near the alliance between the two countries, Wu also followed the trend and adopted a silver standard monetary policy, with ten silver dollars equivalent to about six taels of silver in the past.

When Wei Dongsheng was the son of the prefect of the Longbian Prefecture of the Jiaozhi Domain, his nominal father left him more than 300 acres of fertile land and a number of workshops, with a net income of about 90 taels of silver per year. After a simple conversion, 90 taels of silver is equivalent to 150 silver dollars, and the inheritance obtained from the fourth generation seems to be similar to the inheritance obtained from the sixth generation.

That's not true.

Even if we ignore the evil slaves and bullies in the fourth generation and the management in the sixth generation, assuming that the inheritance is really only 150 silver dollars and 105 silver dollars, the social status of the two generations is thousands of miles apart.

The simplest example is land.

To this day, land annexation is still the ultimate dream sought after by the whole people, and even if the small people in Shengdou are lucky enough to have a surplus of money, they often buy land for heirlooms as soon as possible. When the nominal father of the sixth Wei Dongsheng was alive, the commercial bank had a net profit of about 350 yuan a year, and even if the land of Wu rose to 20 silver yuan per acre, he could buy 10 acres of land every year, and slowly became a small landlord with dozens of acres of land.

It's a pity that the Wei family only has 9 acres of fertile land to inherit.

It was not that the nominal father was unwilling to buy more land, but that he did not dare to buy a large amount of fertile land, because the land area of the present day was vaguely tied to social status. The prefect's home of Wu has the right to own hundreds or even more than 1,000 acres of fertile land; The county magistrate of Wu may also have the right to own more than 100 acres of fertile land, but how can a small businessman deserve to own hundreds of acres of fertile land?

If the nominal father dares to buy land on a large scale, the exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous taxes attached to the land will inevitably follow, and the nominal father will be compensated for planting for one year.

To put it simply, only the social status of avoiding exorbitant taxes can be qualified to become a high-spirited big landlord. Otherwise, not only will the land not be able to generate income, but it will also become an ATM for local officials, after all, the "landlords" will not be able to run the temple if the monks run away. The social status of the titular father is not enough to dismiss the petty officials, so he does not dare to buy land and heirlooms even if he has money.

Obviously, the Wei family of the sixth generation was just a small rich family.

The experience of the first and second generations, Wei Dongsheng was born in the family of kings; The experience of the third and fourth generations, Wei Dongsheng was born in the family of the eunuch; In the fifth generation, the mayor of the town, who has the authority of the county, may be regarded as a civil servant with real power, and can barely be said to have been born in a family of officials; In the sixth life, Wei Dongsheng's background identity has been reduced to the level of "commoner", at most he is a rich man with little money or his own business.