In addition to the inability to agree on political issues such as the transfer of troops, there is another point on which the two sides cannot agree.
After the negotiators of the Da Chu Empire demanded that Zheng Zhilong's troops surrender, the armed forces would belong to the Da Chu Empire Navy, while a large number of ordinary merchant ships and ordinary sailors would be taken over by the Ministry of Finance and transformed into shipping companies directly under the Ministry of Finance and operated according to regulations.
However, for a large number of ordinary young people, especially those on Dayuan Island, the ownership of the land they cultivated will be recognized and will become a common people's life in the future.
It can be regarded as a resettlement plan for the hundreds of thousands of ordinary sailors and young men under Zheng Zhilong's command.
And this, Zheng Zhilong is even less likely to agree to.
The Da Chu Empire regarded these merchant fleets as the official assets of the Zheng Zhilong Group. After defecting, they naturally became the official assets of the Da Chu Empire.
Treat the people who are colonizing the island as ordinary people trying to resettle.
But in Zheng Zhilong's view, these merchant fleets and the young men who immigrated to Dajuan Island are all his private property...
You want me to surrender, but you also want to confiscate my private property. Isn’t this nonsense?
This made many senior officials in the Da Chu Empire extremely dissatisfied, especially Chen Xingkai, who was in charge of police affairs.
Thousands of ships, what the hell are you telling me as private property?
Even if it is private property, I have to confiscate it.
Many vassal kings and dignitaries who were confiscated by the Chu Empire said that their tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of acres of land were private property, and they were confiscated one by one by the Chu Empire.
Even those officials who surrendered knew that the Chu Empire valued land. Many of them took the initiative to give away a large amount of land at home in order to show their intention to surrender and to be able to get along better in the officialdom of the Chu Empire in the future. Donate it, or sell it to the local government at a low price as official land.
In the Dachu Empire, hundreds of acres of land, thousands of acres of land, can be officially regarded as your private property... But if you have tens of thousands of acres of land, even if it is a well-behaved land, the tax bureau will have to trouble you every day .
Otherwise, why do you think the tax department is either searching homes every day or on the way there?
It's not that there are really so many people armed to resist taxes or large-scale tax evasion, but that the tax department is specifically keeping an eye on some wealthy families.
Whenever you have any minor tax problems, they will immediately notice you and pounce on you to bite you.
If you resist even a little bit, you will be slapped with the title of armed tax resister and your house will be ransacked.
The reason is still a large amount of money, food and land!
Families that own tens of thousands of acres of land these days are all guilty of original sin. If they are copied one by one, they will definitely not kill anyone by mistake.
The Tax Department, in the hands of Luo Zhixue, not only collects taxes, it is also an important tool used to redistribute the means of production!
It's just that most of the time it's done in the name of tax collection.
You think, the tax department is so cruel to the wealthy gentry, and you, Zheng Zhilong, still want to keep thousands of merchant ships, almost the entire Dajuan Island and the people on the island as private property...
In Chen Xingkai’s words: It’s broad daylight, what are you dreaming about!
By the way, Zheng Zhilong also has his own reasons.
Where did the youth and land on this island come from? He had worked hard to recruit young people in the past few years, and then slowly cultivated and developed it.
And this costs money!
Three taels for each person, and one cow for three people!
In addition to organizing the food, drink and sleep during the transportation process, there are also grain seeds, agricultural tools, rations, etc. needed in the early stage of opening the settlement.
This costs a lot of money.
Nowadays, the Chu Empire is going to wipe out Zheng Zhilong's many years of hard work with just a casual word. Zheng Zhilong will naturally not be happy!
The opinions of the Dachu Empire and the Zheng Zhilong Group were too different, so it was naturally impossible to reach a consensus, so they remained in a stalemate and occasionally fought.
However, Zheng Zhilong has become increasingly irritable recently.
Because as time passed and the situation became clearer and clearer, Zheng Zhilong no longer saw any possibility of truly resisting the Chu thieves.
At least it can't be defended on the ground!
At this point, Zheng Zhilong is more pessimistic than others, and this pessimism does not mean that he is timid. It is purely because he saw the fighting method of Chu thieves when he was in Ningbo, and after seeing it, he was shocked and even shocked. fear.
In early February, when the Chu army attacked Ningbo, Ningbo was in danger. Zheng Zhilong, who was stationed in the Zhoushan Islands at that time, sent two thousand troops to cross the sea from the Zhoushan Islands and march along the river from Dinghai to reinforce Ningbo city.
However, after his two thousand men went to Ningbo City, they never came back... because just three days later, the two thousand men of his army were wiped out together with more than three thousand young officers and soldiers in Ningbo Chengli!
The confidant spies reported that when the Chu army attacked Ningbo City, they fired guns and artillery with great momentum!
There are at least ten nine-jin long cannons, more than twenty five-jin long cannons, and large sky-high cannons with bullets weighing dozens of kilograms.
It cannot be stopped by human power!
The Ningbo city wall only resisted for a day or two before a short wall was blasted through.
Immediately afterwards, thousands of armored soldiers entered the city, and the defenders inside the city suffered numerous casualties.
Some of the defeated soldiers wanted to escape by boat along the river, but unexpectedly, the Chu thieves set up artillery on the riverside, directly blocking the defeated soldiers who tried to escape by boat.
At the end of the battle, more than 5,000 Ningbo defenders were wiped out, and no one could escape.
If this was just hearsay, then when the Chu army attacked the coastal town of Dinghai, Zheng Zhilong saw the Chu army's fierce offensive with his own eyes.
When attacking such a small town, the power of its guns and artillery is so great that it is simply impossible for the defenders to compete with their flesh and blood.
In terms of field battles, Zheng Zhilong once sent troops to land in a detour and tried to sneak a flank attack.
The result is even worse!
More than a thousand Zheng Zhilong's troops, who came ashore to carry out a sneak attack, hit the iron plate directly. Before they could even find the main infantry of the Chu army, they were captured by the cavalry regiment of the Sixth Division of the Chu army's Sixth Division. Living……
Under the threat of the cavalry, these troops under Zheng Zhilong could not even move. They could only passively form defensive formations, trying to form formations and then slowly retreat to the seaside, and then retreat sideways with the support of warships.
But I didn't expect that these damn Chu thieves cavalry directly pulled out four field cannons weighing two and a half kilograms.
After a shelling, their formation could no longer be maintained.
After the formation collapsed, they were charged and killed by Chu thieves and cavalry...
The result was naturally another great rout, with only a hundred lucky people left to escape, and the rest either died in battle or were taken prisoner.
After this series of small and medium-sized battles in Ningbo Prefecture, Zheng Zhilong's troops lost at least more than 3,000 people, and Zheng Zhilong fully realized the terror of Chu thieves!
With this fighting power, no wonder it can beat Ming Dynasty officers and soldiers while they are hanging!
If we were to fight in an upright manner, I'm afraid I'd have to kneel down immediately when the pirates came!
The guns, especially the artillery, are so powerful.
After seeing how powerful the Chu thief was, Zheng Zhilong no longer had the courage to resist the Chu thief.
Now they are able to defend Chongzhen Island and Zhoushan Islands only by relying on the advantage of their fleet, but on land, they are absolutely unstoppable.
But if you ask Zheng Zhilong to be so willing to leave the mainland and retreat to a place where birds don't shit on Dayuan Island, he won't be willing to do it.
It took him so many years to successfully clear his name and land ashore, but he is not willing to go back to being a pirate!
However, if you ask him to have all his family property confiscated and then just become a naval general or civil official in the Chu Empire, to be honest, he is not willing.
In short, Zheng Zhilong is very confused now!
The monarchs and ministers in the Chu Empire don't know about Zheng Zhilong's dilemma, and they don't care!
For the Dachu Empire, the Zheng Zhilong Group seems difficult to deal with, but the threat to the Dachu Empire is very limited.
The reason why Zheng Zhilong's troops are strong lies in the strength of his fleet.
And the Dachu Empire is actively responding to this!
Otherwise, do you think that the more than 20 Daye-class frigates and multiple Xiangyang-class cruisers of the Dachu Empire Navy were prepared for this?
It was not prepared for Zheng Zhilong.
The current Da Chu Empire's navy is still a little weaker. It cannot even defend the entrance of the Yangtze River to the sea. It can only rely on the forts along the river to stop the intrusion of Zheng Zhilong's fleet.
But you can’t stand it. The Chu Empire has money, a large number of craftsmen and resources!
In order to build warships, the Chu Empire established the first naval shipyard on the Huangpu River in Songjiang Prefecture!
In addition to this shipyard that specializes in building large maritime warships, the Dachu Empire also has many shipyards that can build large warships and are directly affiliated with the Ministry of Industry.
Including Hanyang Shipyard, Yuezhou Shipyard, Daye Shipyard, Jiujiang Shipyard, Anqing Shipyard, Dangtu Shipyard, and Jinling Shipyard.
Basically, it is spread out along the Yangtze River.
These are shipyards directly under the Ministry of Industry and used to build large ships. They are all shipyards that can build offshore combat ships such as Daye-class frigates.
If it is a shipyard that builds small and medium-sized ships of tens of tons, one or two hundred tons, then there are even more. The Ministry of Industry will set up a shipyard in many places with lakes and rivers, large or small, mainly to build various They are mainly civilian-like ships, and some of them will also build some inland river warships.
The Dachu Empire has invested huge manpower and material resources in building shipyards in the past year, which has resulted in more than 20 Daye-class frigates, which are being built in a comprehensive and simultaneous manner.
Hanyang Shipyard, currently the largest and most technically capable shipyard, has started construction of five Daye-class shipyards at the same time!
The First Navy Shipyard in Shanghai County, Songjiang Prefecture, is still under construction and is still built on a deserted beach, but its scale is so huge that the Navy even mobilized troops from the shore to participate in the construction of infrastructure projects. .
Currently, three 700-ton cruisers have been built at the shipyard, and the plant is still building more and larger shipyards. Jinling Shipyard is also building such large shipyards.
According to the speed at which the Da Chu Empire builds shipyards and starts construction of warships, in two or three years, the Da Chu Empire's navy is expected to have dozens of serious large warships.
