Among those who came eastward, Felipe IV was undoubtedly the most miserable.
Because he once claimed to be the "King of the Earth", but he was the only one who came to China as a prisoner.
"Kneel down!"
In the twenty-ninth year of the Apocalypse, when the returning Holy Emperor's fleet arrived in Manila, Felipe IV was asked to kneel down and apologize to the monument to the Han victims erected here.
Felipe IV was forced to kneel down in front of the monument and his forehead was pressed to the ground.
This scene was a big shock to the accompanying Westerners.
Before this, they had never seen with their own eyes any Western nobles being insulted like this, even in their own Europe.
What's more, Felipe IV is now considered a famous monarch in Europe.
boom!
One knock is not enough.
Felipe IV was pressed to the ground by Ming soldiers, and his forehead once again came into close contact with the stone slab.
boom!
boom!
It wasn't until Felipe IV's forehead was bruised and bruised that the Ming soldiers stopped him from doing this.
"good!"
"good!"
"good!"
The Han people in Manila who were watching around cheered.
Most of them were Han Chinese who had witnessed the atrocities of the Spanish with their own eyes, so they were naturally very excited.
However, they did not expect that His Majesty the Ming Emperor would actually send troops and travel thousands of miles to capture and punish the King of Spain.
For a time, the image of Ming Dynasty became particularly tall and majestic in the eyes of many local Han people.
I don't know who it was, but first shouted: "Long live the Ming Dynasty!"
"Long live the Ming Dynasty!"
"Long live the Ming Dynasty!"
"Long live the Ming Dynasty!"
…
Other Han people responded.
This scene shocked the nearby Westerners. They did not expect that the Easterners in these places would support their empire so much.
For the accompanying Spanish merchants, they did not even want to believe that they had once ruled here, and instinctively thought that this was the ancestral land of these Eastern people.
"Their handicraft industries seem to be very developed, especially the textile industry, because their cloth is so cheap!"
"My God, their products are really rich. You can actually see a vehicle that can be ridden directly without a horse. It is made of iron and is called a bicycle. I don't know what physics principles are used in it."
"They seem to have mastered a magical magic that can make the silk threads in the glass cover glow so brightly that they don't need candles for lighting!"
…
Descartes, like other Westerners, also had a great shock to the Han Chinese world in Manila.
Moreover, while taking a break in Manila, he went to the city to investigate and discovered more things that shocked him.
"This is really a magical country. Just like they can make iron ships sail quickly on the sea, they seem to have mastered many academic secrets!"
Therefore, Descartes couldn't help but write down all this in his diary and expressed his emotions.
Of course, it cannot be ruled out that he wrote the diary because he wanted to return to China and make a fortune by publishing his own diary of Chinese experiences, that is, the diary of Ming Dynasty experiences.
In this era, most foreigners directly referred to any Chinese dynasty in history as China, and most of the Chinese dynasties in history also called themselves "China" or "Zhonghua".
Therefore, Descartes also called the Ming Dynasty China.
Back to the topic.
Descartes may have this idea, and there is basis for it.
Because in this era, all books about China, that is, the Chinese Dynasty, were very popular in Europe.
However, what Descartes didn't know was that the Han settlement area he saw now was not the core ruling area of the Ming Dynasty.
Now, what he saw was only a Han vassal region relatively close to the Ming Dynasty.
Next, when Descartes came to the chicken coop, he further discovered that the Ming Dynasty was actually richer than he had seen before.
Although the chicken coop is from Taiwan, and Taiwan was developed relatively late by the Ming Dynasty, it was only after Tianqi came to the throne that it was established as a capital and immigrants were developed.
However, it could not withstand the booming economy of the entire Ming Dynasty. In addition, the Jilong area had a superior geographical location. Merchant ships from Ningwen, Shaotai, and Nagasaki to Manila to sell goods had to dock here, and goods heading north from Fujian, Guangdong and Nanyang had to be docked here. They gathered here, so in just over ten years, many towns have developed in the Jilong area.
"This place is bustling with people, and there are many cargo ships. Some market towns have tens of thousands of homes! It is more prosperous than Marseille and The Hague, and it is richer than Manila before. This should be the richest place in China. It is really unimaginable. Why do these Easterners have so much wealth and goods?”
Descartes couldn't help but sigh.
And when he landed in Ningbo and set foot on Zhongtu, the core ruling area of the Ming Dynasty, he was further shocked by the wealth here.
"Oh my god! I have to take back what I said before. When I came to what they call Middle Earth, I found that I could no longer describe everything I saw in words. I should have really arrived in the kingdom of God!"
"Because here, every one of their manors is a work of art! The brocade worn by everyone seems to be a work of art. They are all gods-like figures, polite and elegant. There seem to be only nobles and gentlemen here. No wonder their People say that their country makes no distinction between nobles and commoners.”
"There are many cities that never sleep here. When I went to a place called Nanjing, I found that the towns along the way were more prosperous than my French capital. Thousands of lights were as bright as day, and glazed boats were wrapped in brocade and silk. When I arrived, Nanjing gave me a new perspective on the giant cities in the East, because I saw the huge glazed pagoda here, and their Great Baoen Temple, which was really shocking!"
"They are really a paradise! There are simple and elegant bluestone roads that connect private gardens with different scenery together, and there are also wide roads made of concrete that lead straight to the sky, with people running and leaning on them. A locomotive that moves forward mechanically.”
"They can also transmit messages thousands of miles away, and get news thousands of miles away through something called a telegraph, and they get it very quickly. Also, they can make a steel monster that spits white gas enforce their traffic rules. On the iron track, running non-stop day and night! I am now in the belly of this iron monster. I am trying to learn their language. I like to learn their language and then know the secrets of electricity and calculus. Know what they call the three laws of mechanics.”
Descartes carefully recorded everything he saw, and the longer he came to the Ming Dynasty, the more he discovered that the gap between his own Europe and the Ming Dynasty was really huge.
Especially when he saw monks, Taoist priests, and missionaries all preaching their religions in a city, and when he learned that there was no church in the Ming Dynasty and the separation between secularity and religion was clear, he began to believe that this was really his utopia.
"Now I'm looking forward to meeting their emperor, the emperor who is interested in natural philosophy!"
Descartes wrote in his diary.
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