In the thirteenth year of Shaoning (1699), when a group of new immigrants were digging ditches near the Guangfeng River (present-day Sacramento River in the United States) to build water conservancy, they accidentally found a shiny piece of metal on the riverbank. After being identified by the officials and scholars of the cantonment, it was unanimously agreed that the metal was gold.

In the days that followed, more settlers found gold in varying quantities on the banks of rivers and streams, which were no less large, fine, and in good condition than those mined from several gold mines in Hanzhou.

When the Xuanzhou Governor's Office heard the news, it immediately requisitioned 400 villagers to block the gold mining area around Guangfeng, kept it a secret for the time being, tried to cover up the discovery, and sent a fast boat back to the mainland to report urgently to His Majesty the Emperor and the cabinet government.

However, the plan of the Xuanzhou Governor's Office did not succeed, and rumors of gold began to circulate throughout Yinzhou, and spread to the Northern Ming, Japan, Qin, Nanyang, and Han continent as merchant ships departed from the port.

The news even spread to the British colonial territories on the eastern side of the continent and the western colonial territories in the south, and to Europe, causing everyone to be excited.

Out of the yearning for gold and the thirst for wealth, the people who came to Xuanzhou to pan for gold were not only nearby residents, as of the fifteenth year of Shaoning (1701), the news had spread almost all over the world, in order to make a fortune, a large number of gold diggers began to pour into Xuanzhou.

The first gold prospectors to come to Guangfeng were the people under the jurisdiction of the Xuanzhou Governor's District, who gave up the crops in the fields, the cattle and sheep that grazed the cattle and sheep, and the work in the factories.

Although the Xuanzhou Governor's Office tried its best to prevent the gold prospectors from mining at will, the frenzied gold diggers, driven by greed in their hearts, ignored the ban.

In the end, what made the governor's palace even more helpless was that the requisitioned township soldiers had just finished their rotation period, so they threw down their muskets, picked up shovels, pickaxes and screens, and threw themselves into this feast of wealth sharing with the surging gold rushers.

In the early days, panning for gold was relatively easy. The forces of tens of thousands of years of crustal movement piled gold up the surface of Mount Sihua (present-day Sierra Nevada), where it was carried downstream by the river and finally settled in the gravel beds of rivers and streams. Gold diggers can pan for gold directly in streams and river banks, and can even pick out gold flakes and nuggets directly by hand.

Almost all of the early gold prospectors were handsomely rewarded, and they were able to collect large amounts of gold with ease – even a gold prospector could collect enough gold to change their fortunes.

It is estimated that the average value of the gold found by a gold prospector each day at that time was 10 to 15 times the daily wage of a worker in Hanzhou.

Early gold prospectors also benefited from Xuanzhou's broad and lax regulatory environment. Because it is too far away from Hanzhou itself, the entire Yinzhou region has not received much attention from the cabinet government, and the management model is also a limited autonomy model, except for a few dozen core colonial officials sent by the mainland, in the local area is basically appointed residents with a little prestige as civil affairs officials, although the legal system cited is from the mainland, but also according to its own actual situation, it also borrows from the traditional system of some southern and western Mexico.

Seeing that the order of the gold mine was becoming increasingly chaotic, the Xuanzhou Governor's Office simply carried out standardized management and rectification of the entire mining area in accordance with the Mexican mining law.

Under the Act, all prospectors apply for a piece of land at the Governor's Palace, and after approval, their title is valid only for as long as the land is mined.

In the Yinzhou area, after all, there was no local grassroots management system, and the local governor did not have a standing army in his hands, so there was no way to stop the gold prospectors from swarming. Under the temptation of gold, if it is forcibly banned, I am afraid that it will not be eaten by these crazy gold diggers.

From the fourteenth year of Shaoning, many people came here in search of gold. By the fifteenth year of Shaoning, the number of gold diggers had exploded, and people who had heard the news began to arrive from all over the world.

These gold diggers are not only Qi people, but also people from the Northern Ming Dynasty, Qin State, Luzon, Weiguo, England, Spain, France, Germany and other countries and regions have also come here. In the fifteenth year of Shaoning alone, about 60,000 people poured into Xuanzhou, of which about 20,000 came from other countries.

Although the rewards of arriving in Xuanzhou are enormous, the cost of the journey is also enormous for many people, even the people of Qi.

First, most gold prospectors had to borrow money or spend their life savings to make the journey happen – with the intervention of the Qi royal family and cabinet government, barriers were erected by sea and land to prevent more gold prospectors from coming to Xuanzhou.

Second, the predominantly male gold diggers had to leave their homes in search of wealth, leaving their wives alone to raise their children and support the elderly, and to take on all the family responsibilities that would have been shouldered by their husbands.

But all the effort was worth it – almost everyone made a fortune if the gold diggers had come early enough.

Despite the staggering reserves of gold in rivers and streams, a large number of gold prospectors quickly ran out of easily mined gold. By the sixteenth year of Shaoning (1702), most of the gold that the prospectors could find had been mined, which meant that more complex and difficult mining methods had to be employed.

Some gold diggers began to band together and use irregular small kiln mining, i.e. digging 6-13 meters deep shafts along the creek and tunneling tunnels from the bottom of the shaft in all directions to obtain deep gold deposits. Or divert an entire stream to get gold at the bottom of the exposed riverbed. In the eighteenth year of Shaoning (1704), some gold prospectors' alliance began to purchase explosives and use the blasting method to mine gold-bearing rocks.

In the early days of the gold rush, finding gold was as easy as taking candy from a baby's hands, but now that gold reserves are dwindling, it increasingly requires extremely meticulous steps and more investment to continue.

Those who have spent their life savings to reach Xuanzhou will find that they can only dig gold using more specialized mining techniques and equipment, which must have been very painful for them - as individual gold diggers, they simply do not have the professional means of mining and cannot afford to buy advanced equipment. Their frustration quickly turned into hostility and accusations.

The gold diggers of Qi believed that gold diggers from other countries had robbed them of the gold that should have belonged to them. Looting, killings, assaults, confrontations, and ...... of all kinds of violence erupted throughout the goldfields, causing great chaos in the Guangfeng area.

In order to curb the gold mining of outsiders, the Xuanzhou Governorate announced the implementation of an exotic mining tax in the first year of Taiping (1705), and all foreign gold miners engaged in gold mining (except those employed by domestic mining trading companies) must pay ten yuan of gold per month, or the equivalent of gold, to the governor's palace.

People got rich in the Xuanzhou Gold Rush by different means, some were above board, some were despicable, but in any case, one of the biggest winners was the Xuanzhou Governor's District.

Before the Gold Rush began, Xuanzhou was a remote territory too far from Han Continent proper, a symbol of the empire's vast territory, sparsely populated and with little hope, and countless immigrants and exiled prisoners sent to the area were all overwhelmed by the unknown fate.

Clearing, logging, fishing, everything is so monotonous and primitive.

However, the emergence of gold and the surging flow of people brought about by the gold rush made Xuanzhou suddenly burst into great vitality in a short period of time. The population size has increased from less than 20,000 to more than 100,000 in just a few years.

Although Xuanzhou benefited greatly from the discovery of gold, it was Huaiyuan City that really benefited. In the thirteenth year of Shaoning, when gold was first discovered, the city had only about 2,400 inhabitants. At first, the discovery of gold did nothing for the city, and it was even bad luck - in fact, people left the city in search of gold in search of a fortune, making the city an empty city in an instant.

However, it quickly rose to prominence and developed into a thriving city. With the arrival of many gold diggers and merchants, the number of local residents swelled to 30,000 in the sixteenth year of Shaoning, making it the largest city on the west coast of the Yinzhou mainland.

In order to meet the needs of the growing number of immigrants, new industries have sprung up, such as inns, restaurants, technical houses, teahouses, carriage and horse shops, as well as many factories and trading houses.

With a thriving city, strong demand, and abundant finances, Huaiyuan's infrastructure was quickly improved, with city streets, sewer networks, uniform residential apartment buildings, and especially regular air routes to mainland Hanzhou and the Ryukyus, making the area more closely and frequently connected with the outside world.

It is not only the infrastructure that is thriving, but also the construction of roads, municipal squares, temples, schools, libraries, etc. In order to meet the needs of more new immigrants, agriculture also began to develop on a large scale.

In fact, for many, agriculture is the true treasure of the gold rush. The gold diggers, who had made a fortune, were almost indifferent to all kinds of expensive food, and paid large sums of gold and silver very generously when purchasing.

As the supply of gold slowly dwindled, those who invested their time and money in agricultural production began to reap the benefits of the gold diggers who came to Xuanzhou and stayed.

Of course, there are also the benefits of Qi and the cabinet government. According to rough estimates, in the first five years of the gold rush, more than 200,000 people (most of whom returned to their hometowns with their wealth after the gold rush) came to Xuanzhou in search of gold, and mined a total of about 360 tons of gold, worth about 48 million yuan (based on the gold standard system implemented by the Qi State in 1688, one yuan of gold yuan is equal to 7.5 grams of pure gold), the vast majority of which flowed into Hanzhou itself, becoming one of the many riches accumulated by the Qi State.

Unfortunately, some people's success depends on trampling others under their feet, or sacrificing the public good. In the Gold Rush, two parties suffered – the environment and the indigenous.

As gold becomes more difficult to find, the means and methods of extracting it have become more destructive, which may have had a lasting impact on Xuanzhou's geography.

Gold prospectors initially used pans to mine gold, but as it became more difficult to find gold, they began to build large dredgers to mine in rivers and streams; Use explosives to blast the hillside open, exposing the gold. Almost every mine shaft was built by blasting large quantities of rock.

Hydraulic mining from Hanzhou has caused irreparable damage to the land. This method is pressurized with a steam engine to form high-pressure water, which is sprayed onto the gravel layer, and the crushed stone and the gold inside are washed into the washing tank, allowing the gold to settle at the bottom.

The problem with this method is that it causes pollutants such as gravel, silt, and metal to flow into rivers and streams, clogging nearby waterways and harming agricultural production in the Xuanzhou Valley (present-day Central Valley).

In addition to the damage caused during the actual mining process, the measures taken to sustain mining activities are equally destructive. For example, several large mining companies build barrage dams to change the direction of rivers in order to meet their water needs during the dry months. For example, in order to build an artificial canal system (for the transportation of equipment, daily supplies and gold) and to keep the mine's boilers running, a large amount of forest had to be cut down for fuel—and in order to save costs, the mines often refused to spend money on coal from Huining (present-day Vancouver Island).

Although these geographical environments have been severely damaged, they can be said to be insignificant compared to the plight of local indigenous peoples.

In the early days of the gold rush, there was a temporary shortage of food and many other supplies due to the influx of immigrants, prompting these gold prospectors to look at the local indigenous people.

From the beginning of the sneaky, to the end of the blatant use of force to loot, grain, livestock, furs, cloth (in the early days through the exchange with Qi immigrants). This kind of behavior gradually spread from the gold diggers in the former British North American territory to the entire gold mining group, and the greedy desire aroused by gold has wiped out the hearts and morals of countless people.

Some mines violently evict indigenous people and drive them out of traditional hunting areas and settlements in order to enclose land and extract gold. The once harmonious relationship between immigrants and natives in Xuanzhou has disappeared in an instant.

In order to defend their homeland, the natives began to attack the invading gold diggers, only to be slaughtered in retaliation, resulting in many casualties. During the most tumultuous decade of the Gold Rush, at least 10,000 indigenous people died directly in the various killings and reprisals of the gold diggers.

In the midst of these shocking and tragic cases, the Xuanzhou Governor's Office adopted a tacit attitude.

Perhaps, in the eyes of colonial officials, the disappearance of a large number of indigenous people would be more beneficial to them, outsiders, to "legitimately" occupy this vast land.

According to the practice of the Qi people, all places with the red Yellow Dragon Banner are Qi territory, so the forests, grasslands, mineral deposits, and cultivated land within the territory are theoretically all public land owned by the government, and can be sold to any immigrants who come to Yinzhou at a "suitable" price in accordance with the Land Grant Law, so that the local government can obtain a large amount of land revenue from it, so as to further develop and build the colonial territory.

Borderlands and Borderlands have to be a little less troublesome in terms of follow-up, isn't it?

(End of chapter)