This trading company was backed by high-ranking officials from the Ming Dynasty. They didn't know whether to say they were brave, that they regarded wealth as life, or that they really wanted to surrender to the Chu Empire.
Well, no matter what their inner thoughts are, but now they are all in trouble!
As long as the news that they colluded with the Dachu Empire and helped the Dachu Empire purchase and transport these prohibited materials was revealed, it would be easy for the entire Li family to be exterminated, and they might all be punished by the Nine Clans.
They have done much more than the Shanxi merchants who supplied supplies to Dongdu...
In just over half a year, Fenghe Trading Company continued to supply large amounts of saltpeter, sulfur, iron and copper materials to the Chu Empire.
These strategic materials ensured the production of weapons and ammunition for the Chu Empire to a large extent. In this way, enough weapons and ammunition were accumulated to occupy the northern part of Chu, and now they are crossing the river south.
To put it bluntly, every victory in the Chu Empire, not even a single place captured, was inseparable from the efforts of Fenghe Trading Company...
Because there is no saltpeter, sulfur and other supplies provided by Fenghe Trading Company, the ammunition supply of the Baoxiang Army must be reduced by at least 30%.
The lack of so much ammunition must have greatly affected the strategies of the Chu Empire.
Fenghe Trading Company even spent a lot of money and connections to open up the entire Yangtze River waterway and coastal trade routes in order to meet the needs of the Chu Empire.
They purchased large quantities of saltpeter and sulfur directly from maritime merchants, and then transported them to Hanyang via the Yangtze River.
They also sent people to Sichuan, northwest and other places to open channels to purchase saltpeter, sulfur and other materials from these places and transport them there.
More and more strategic prohibited materials are being purchased and transported, and the prices are getting cheaper...
According to the information voluntarily revealed by the uncle and nephew of the Li family of Fenghe merchants, in order to contact the source of goods and open up the Yangtze River navigation, so that ships full of prohibited materials can reach Hanyang smoothly.
Their master personally wrote more than ten letters, visited many people, and even impeached a fourth-grade red-robed official who was in the way.
Finally, this channel for the procurement and transportation of strategic materials such as saltpeter, sulfur, etc. was opened, which was enough to cause the Li family to be confiscated and exterminated a hundred times by the Ming Dynasty.
The uncle and nephew of the Li family deliberately revealed this news, just because they thought that if the world changes, you, Luo Chu, must remember the contribution of our Li family.
The master of their Li family still hopes to continue to be an official, no matter whether it is an official in the Ming court or an official in Da Chu...
No matter what Li Jiafeng and his trading bank's inner thoughts were, one thing is undeniable. Fenghe Trading Company made an indelible contribution to the rise of the Chu Empire.
Luo Zhixue even considered that if the Li family is wise enough, they can find them a title or something. It is also possible for the Li family to continue to be an official if they want. In short, all treatment will be favorable.
Well, the premise is that you are knowledgeable enough!
Otherwise, Luo Zhixue would be willing to humble a group of ministers, especially the ministers of the Ministry of Commerce and Finance, who would not agree.
Nowadays, many people in the Dachu Empire mention Fenghe Trading Company. They love and hate it. What they love is that they have huge energy and can supply a large amount of strategic materials. What is cruel is that the prices of the materials they provide are very high.
In the past six months, the Ministry of Commerce and Trade of the Dachu Empire has paid more than one million taels just for the purchase of materials to Fenghe Trading Company.
This much money is enough to make many people unhappy.
However, Fenghe Commercial Bank seems to have realized this problem recently, or it has begun to consider the future. The prices of materials supplied to the Dachu Empire have been reduced several times in a row.
When the Baoxiang Army captured Xiangyang City, they lowered the price once. When the Baoxiang Army captured Hanyang City and proclaimed themselves emperor and founded the country, they lowered the price again.
Now that the Chu Empire had captured Wuchang City and was on the verge of conquering Chunan, Fenghe Trading Company took the initiative to come over and said that the price of this material supply could be lowered.
In addition, the Li family also has many other industries in the Huguang area. Each of these industries will pay full tax, and their industrial branches in various places will actively bear some local expenses, such as building bridges and paving roads.
The whole performance is an advanced example of an outstanding gentleman!
The Li family is also very smart and knowledgeable enough.
Luo Zhixue is also quite satisfied with this. The Li family is smart, and he likes to deal with smart people.
Therefore, he had already revealed it to Fenghe Trading Company through his ministers, expressing that he was very pleased with the Li family's proactive behavior in sharing the empire's worries.
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After crossing the Yangtze River and heading south, the Chu Empire not only occupied Wuchang City, a strategically extremely important city, but also gained huge gains in terms of money and food.
This made everyone in the Chu Empire feel very happy.
The senior officials are happy because with so much more money and food, the financial operation of the entire Chu Empire will be healthier. Even while maintaining large-scale military expansion operations, part of the money and food can be squeezed out to restore local people's livelihood. .
For example, more water conservancy facilities should be built in Nanyang, Xiangyang, and Yunyang areas to help local farmers resume planting to alleviate the problem of reduced food production caused by local droughts.
For example, through large-scale work-for-relief programs in various places, we can absorb more homeless refugees and provide them with a job that can make them hungry. This can not only provide relief, but also prevent these refugees from becoming homeless thieves again. question.
At the same time, large-scale work-for-relief projects can also build more water conservancy facilities to stabilize food production.
If these measures, such as large-scale work-for-relief measures and the restoration of agricultural production, are implemented properly, the results will be huge.
But the problem is that these measures also require money and food to support them.
Why was the Ming court still unable to solve the problem of the uprising of peasant armies led by Shaanxi? One rebel army was wiped out today, and another rebel army emerged tomorrow.
It's because they lack the money and food needed to restore local people's livelihood!
This also led to the fact that they could only suppress the rebels militarily, but they were unable to solve the problem of the rebels at the root.
Why did the rebels arise? The main reason in the early stage was due to extreme natural disasters such as droughts in the local area for years, coupled with increasingly heavy tax assessments.
This led to a large number of farmers going bankrupt and starved of food. In order to survive, the farmers began to rebel and seize food, and eventually evolved into a large-scale insurrectionary army.
When these rebel armies reached this stage, due to their continued size, they were forced to continuously plunder the countryside and attack cities to steal food.
Officers and soldiers will naturally send troops to suppress the encirclement and suppression.
The large-scale fighting between the rebels and the officers and soldiers further caused a larger-scale man-made disaster. A large amount of farmland was abandoned, which further aggravated the disaster in the western Shaanxi and Henan areas.
Under natural disasters and man-made disasters, local people can no longer survive. These people, either forced or voluntary, will eventually join the rebel army.
In this ongoing process, the officers and soldiers are also continuing to exterminate the rebels. And so far, it is relatively easy for the officers and soldiers to attack the rebels, and they can basically hit them accurately.
However, the problem lies after the fight!
The imperial court sent a large army to wipe out the rebels, and after they were defeated, they left it alone...or in other words, they were incapable of taking care of it.
The local people's livelihood has not been restored, and a large number of surrendered rebels or refugees cannot be properly resettled, especially some of the rebels who accepted the recruitment. Although the court accepted their recruitment, it often just allowed them to be stationed in a certain place to fend for themselves.
After a few months, the rebels who accepted the recruitment realized that they were starving to death again... so they raised the flag to rebel again.
After the other defeated rebel armies were dispersed, they would slowly continue to gather their remaining soldiers or hijack the refugees to grow and develop again.
In this way, the court discovered that all the rebels could not be killed at all. If one rebel was killed today, another would appear tomorrow, and more would appear in a few days.
The thieves are like weeds, burned over and over again, but they also grow tenaciously over and over again, and the longer they grow, the more lush they become.
If there were no big changes in the late Ming Dynasty, for example, there would be no rise of the Chu Empire.
Then the struggle between the Ming court and the rebel army has only one outcome: the rebel army will kill the Ming court sooner or later!
This is also the result in history.
Li Zicheng and others were defeated several times and then raised troops. Finally, they entered the capital and forced Emperor Chongzhen to Meishan.
Looking at the struggle between the rebels and the Ming court, we will find that pure military suppression is useless. The only way to truly solve the problem of the rebels is to restore the local people's livelihood.
What the Chu Empire is doing now in the northern Chu region, especially in Nanyang Prefecture, Xiangyang Prefecture, Yunyang Prefecture, and Junzhou, is to restore people's livelihood.
Coupled with strong military repression and control, to keep out the insurrectionary armies such as Gao Yingxiang and Li Zicheng from the outside world, and also keep out the Ming army, preventing them from coming over to burn, kill, loot and destroy people's livelihood, then the people's livelihood in this area can be improved. Continuous recovery.
As long as people's livelihood is restored, the survival soil for the rebel army will no longer exist.
However, doing this requires money and food.
Helping farmers resume farming requires money and food, and helping farmers survive the lean period also requires a lot of money and food.
And does the Ming court have so much money and food?
they do not!
Or it means that there was so much money and food under the dynasty, but the finances of the Ming Dynasty did not.
This would be tragic.
The Great Chu Empire was different. The Great Chu Empire seized a large amount of money and grain through the war. At the same time, after occupying areas such as Northern Chu and Wuchang Prefecture, it also obtained a large amount of local food.
The finance department now has more than 10 million taels of cash in stock, and the food stored in it is even more huge.
Only a small part needs to be allocated to a few prefectures in the north where the disaster is more serious, so that the local disaster problem can be alleviated, thereby curbing the production of large-scale refugees at the root.
Even if some money and food were allocated to restore people's livelihood in some severely affected areas, the Dachu Empire still had enough money and food to maintain large-scale military expansion.
On October 26, Luo Zhixue officially awarded the designations of the 5th and 6th Divisions at the imperial military meeting, and appointed Han Ziping, the former commander of the 1st Infantry Brigade, as the commander of the 5th Division. At the same time, he was promoted to the rank of Major General. Former artillery director Major General Zhang Malin was the commander of the Sixth Division.
On the same day, the General Staff Department, Military and Political Department, etc. were ordered to start preparing for the establishment of the 7th Division, the 8th Division, the 2nd Mortar Regiment, and the 3rd Mortar Regiment.
The expansion of the Great Chu Empire did not stop due to the Battle of Crossing the River, nor did it stop due to the large-scale work-for-relief in the northern Chu region. Instead, it continued to expand at a high speed.
During this expansion, Major Gao Zheng, who had led the assault battalion in the Battle of Wuchang and led the first batch of troops to invade the city, was promoted as he wished and was transferred to the Sixth Division to serve as the 24th Step. The deputy commander of the Corps was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel at the same time.
