The Navy wanted to make money to build a first-class battleship formation. After its attempt to make money at home failed, it was unwilling to give up the plan for a first-class battleship formation, nor was it willing to eliminate other battleships to free up military spending.
Finally, I set my sights on Nanyang!
Because they remembered that when they were expanding in Nanyang a few years ago, a large amount of indigenous property was confiscated. According to the fine tradition of the empire, the confiscated assets and indigenous compensation that they obtained in that year totaled more than 10 million Chu Yuan, which was the sum of many companies. cent money...
The Ministry of Finance takes the bulk on behalf of the treasury, but the military also takes a lot.
Among the military's money, the navy, as the main promoter of the Nanyang strategy, occupied a major position in a series of operations. Even though the battle after the landing was mainly fought by the army, the navy still took the lion's share.
After all, a series of transportation and maritime operations are all handled by the navy. To put it bluntly, the army is just doing a job.
In the end, the Navy allocated almost 2.5 million Chu Yuan, which was allocated to the Navy in the form of special shipbuilding funds.
The two million and a half million Yuan may not seem like much, but the navy's military expenditure has never been much.
For example, in the fourteen years of Chengshun, the total military expenditure was 40 million, but the army was definitely the largest, taking more than 30 million directly, the navy only took 6 million, and the rest was given by the Guards Taken away.
Therefore, the additional military expenditure of more than 2.5 million may not seem like a lot, but it is not a small amount for the navy.
After all, the navy's force size is far inferior to that of the army.
The total strength of the Army is more than one million. To maintain these forces and numerous small and medium-sized wars, coupled with the continuous replacement of new equipment over the years, the military expenditures required are extremely huge. This more than 30 million is actually not enough for the Army. It's not enough, otherwise the Army wouldn't call for self-reliance, carry out large-scale military reclamation, farm its own fields and raise pigs, just to save military expenses.
As for the navy, the number of personnel is actually far less than that of the army. A battleship only requires a few hundred personnel. Even if it is a hundred battleships, the number of troops required is only tens of thousands. What's more, the Chu army has not yet So many battleships.
As for warships such as cruisers and frigates, and auxiliary warships such as transport ships, they actually require fewer personnel.
Then add some logistics support personnel from various naval bases, and then there are the Marine Corps.
Today, the total strength of the Chu Navy is actually just over 80,000, and the Marine Corps and base logistics personnel account for more than half.
In addition, the navy itself will also establish settlements in the naval base, raise pigs and grow vegetables, etc., to provide local supplies for the troops stationed in the base.
Therefore, although the navy's military expenditure is less, the navy's life is actually still manageable.
However, this is all under the premise of not expanding or building new warships on a large scale, especially expensive things like battleships.
The navy wants to build a large number of first-class battleships, which are very valuable. One of them costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
With more than a dozen ships, a year's worth of naval military expenses would have to be filled in.
Therefore, the Navy is under great pressure to expand its first-class battleship fleet. After all, if the first-class battleships are expanded, the third-class battleships, cruisers, and frigates that cooperate with the battle must also be expanded accordingly.
You can't let a first-class battleship go to sea alone to fight!
Fortunately, there were more than two million in additional military expenditures in the past two years, which allowed the Navy to achieve certain shipbuilding plans. However, now it seems that the money is almost spent, but military expenditures have not increased.
Under such circumstances, they naturally want to make another fortune in Nanyang...
In addition to making a fortune, the navy also wants to further promote the empire's Nanyang strategy. As long as the Nanyang strategy is implemented, the cabinet will have to give money no matter what.
The emperor is not hungry enough to send troops yet.
In November of the 14th year of Chengshun, the navy officially submitted its Nanyang expansion plan, the focus of which was to capture the city of Malacca!
And then control the entire Strait of Malacca!
Today's Malacca City is still in the hands of the Portuguese, but today's Portuguese rule in Malacca City is already shaky, and the Dutch and the Kingdom of Johor are putting too much pressure on them.
In addition, Portugal is still at war with Spain internally and has no ability to reinforce its overseas colonies. Now the Portuguese's overseas colonies can basically only rely on themselves.
Under such circumstances, let alone the Dutch who wanted to take Malacca, even the Chu Empire couldn't help but be tempted.
The reason why we didn't take action in the past few years was because there was no suitable springboard. The Chu Empire couldn't start all the way from Guangzhou, wander on the sea for a few months and then attack the city of Malacca.
That's just brain-burning.
But it's different now. The Chu Empire has obtained the Beijia area from the Kingdom of Siam.
To the south of the Bekka area is the Kingdom of Aceh, and to the southeast is the city of Malacca.
Under such circumstances, it is entirely possible to rely on the Bekka area, and then send troops to parts of the Malay Peninsula controlled by the Kingdom of Aceh, and then attack the city of Malacca.
They can even take advantage of the trend and continue eastward, launch an attack on the Kingdom of Johor, continue to control the entire Malay Peninsula, and fully control the Strait of Malacca.
This plan of the Navy aroused the interest of the cabinet.
In particular, the navy said that if it wanted to fight, it would actually not require much force. It could basically sweep across the Malay Peninsula by sending three marine regiments from the Pekka area.
The navy is fully capable of ensuring the smooth operation.
Moreover, Malacca has been run by the Portuguese for many years, and the wealth there must be indispensable. In addition, other places in the Malay Peninsula will also be captured in the process of conquering it.
Even if this vote cannot replicate the previous profits from the Siam Kingdom operation, it should still be able to make a fortune.
The investment is limited, but the income is relatively high. Moreover, these incomes are divided among multiple parties according to the previous scale, and the cabinet can take the lion's share.
It is not surprising that the cabinet is interested in this.
Of course, these are just the most superficial reasons.
What really gets the support of the empire's top brass, especially the business community, is that if the operation goes smoothly and the empire fully controls the Strait of Malacca, it means that the empire has completely opened up the channel to the Indian Ocean, and there is no need to worry about the Strait of Malacca being controlled by others. Danger occurs.
At the same time, after the Strait of Malacca is opened, the merchant ships of the Chu Empire can directly enter the Indian Peninsula and even West Asia, without having to let the Dutch and Portuguese act as second-hand dealers.
In the past two years, although the Great Chu Empire also wanted to directly get involved in trade in the Indian Peninsula and even the West Asian region, the Great Chu Empire was too far away from the local area and it was troublesome to project troops, so it was unable to gain access to the Indian Peninsula and West Asian regions. A true colony.
Without colonies, the merchant ships of the Chu Empire, even the merchant ships of the Nanyang Trading Company, would actually have to look at the faces of the Portuguese and the Dutch to trade.
If people don't give them face, it will be impossible for the merchant ships of the Chu Empire to enter the local ports for trade.
Even if you can enter these ports now, you still need to pay a large amount of tax.
The most important thing is that even if the goods arrive, they can only be handed over to Denmark, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom for sale.
The commercial network of the Nanyang Trading Company of the Da Chu Empire was unable to directly establish its own commercial network on the Indian peninsula due to the lack of colonies.
This is equivalent to the fact that the Chu Empire worked hard to engage in Indian trade, but in the end all the money was taken away by other Western colonists, and he only got some hard-earned money.
In addition, a more important point is that in recent years, the wave of boycotts of products from the Chu Empire in the Indian Peninsula has become more and more frequent.
In order to protect their fragile handicraft industries, a large number of local indigenous kingdoms began to refuse the entry of goods from the Chu Empire, especially cotton.
This has made the high-level industrial and commercial circles of the empire want to send troops to teach them a lesson, so that the natives know what freedom of trade means!
Unfortunately, India is too far away, and although the empire also has ports facing the Indian Ocean coast in Dagon and Bekka in Myanmar, the Strait of Malacca behind it is controlled by the Kingdom of Johor, which has close relations with the Dutch, and then there is the city of Malacca Also in Portuguese hands.
This means the road back is unstable!
Once the Chu Empire entered the Indian peninsula to colonize on a large scale, it was basically equivalent to leaving behind the Dutch and Portuguese, and even the British and Danes, in Indian trade.
This will inevitably be met with strong backlash!
No one wants their family's wealth to be robbed by the Chu Empire.
Cutting off people's wealth is like killing their parents. It's a shame that these four colonial countries that rely on India and Southeast Asia trade can be convinced.
Both the English and the Danes are easy to say, but the Danes are not very powerful, and the English colonies are limited to the Indian Peninsula. Moreover, England is still fighting a civil war and has no intention of colonial expansion.
But the Portuguese and the Dutch, especially the Dutch, would not sit idly by.
You must know that a large part of the profits of the Dutch East India Company came from the trade between Southeast Asia and India. To put it bluntly, it was a second-hand dealer, constantly buying goods from the Chu Empire to India, and then selling Indian cotton and other goods to the Great Chu Empire. Chu Empire.
After making money on this route, they exchanged the money for silk, spices and other valuable goods and transported them back to Europe for sale.
Once the Chu Empire established a direct foothold on the Indian Peninsula, what would happen to them, the Dutch, as second-hand dealers?
For their own sake, the Dutch backlash will be strong.
Under such circumstances, control of the Strait of Malacca has become a top priority.
Without controlling the Strait of Malacca, rashly intervening in the Indian peninsula to colonize would be tantamount to handing over the back to the Dutch, which would be too risky.
Now the navy has proposed to fully control the Strait of Malacca, which is very attractive to the cabinet.
Especially the Navy said that the cost would not be very high. Those natives are just scum. If you win a casual fight, you will have a lot of money!
Although the cabinet can actually guess that the navy has its own little ninety-nine, in the final analysis it is for military expenses.
But as long as the navy can bring greater benefits, a wave of cabinet investment is not impossible.
As a result, the two sides, who were still cursing each other, soon sat together and began to discuss the feasibility of controlling the Strait of Malacca.
During the cabinet discussions, Guo Quanshu, on behalf of other members of the cabinet, made a number of demands to the navy. These demands can be summed up as follows: money can be given, but it must be done with less, and secondly, it must be earmarked for specific purposes.
This money is used to fight wars. You are not allowed to take the money on the front foot and then build some first-class battleships on the back foot. If the Navy dares to do this, the cabinet will dare to cut the Navy's regular military expenditures next year.
Even if the matter goes before His Majesty, their cabinet will never give up!
The representative of the Navy had a dark face, Damn, who do you think our Navy is? Our Navy doesn’t even bother to be sneaky. This money must have been used for the Battle of the Strait of Malacca and will never be used for other purposes.
But just after the negotiation ended, and before the money arrived, the Navy had secretly placed an order for two first-class battleships...
However, after the order was placed, the Navy made some calculations and realized, hey, the military expenditures given by the cabinet may not be enough!
After all, the rest of the Malay Peninsula is quite large. If the navy wants to use the marines to rush there, it will not take too little time and money.
The people in the cabinet were not fools. They had already calculated it carefully with an abacus before giving the money. Although the money was a lot, it was definitely not much.
The navy wants to embezzle hundreds of thousands of Chu Yuan to build a new first-class battleship. Naturally, this gap will be difficult to make up.
But after the navy brass thought about it, they felt that it was too expensive to fight on their own, so they might as well hire the Army to be a thug!
So, the Navy found the Army: Turtle son, your father and I are going to build a big one in the Strait of Malacca recently, but the troops are a bit weak. In this way, you will send thousands of people here to make a difference.
I'll pay for the shipping and ammunition, and you can share some of the loot later.
As soon as the army heard that there was such a good thing, he immediately agreed.
As for the navy's bad words, that's okay. As long as they have money, it doesn't matter if they make some mockery of the navy.
The Army has been crazy poor recently... The Hami Battle cost the Army a lot of money, and it is estimated that it will have to continue pouring money into it in the next year or two, but it will not get a cent of the spoils.
Now that the navy wants to pay for them to go to Southeast Asia to fight and train troops, and also allows their officers to accumulate some military merits, the army naturally has to rush to do it.
As for the dangers, as for the indigenous people in Nanyang and the Portuguese, the army said that it could sweep them away by sending tens of thousands of people there. It didn't even need to mobilize troops from outside. It would be enough to directly use the troops in Nanyang.
The Army estimates that it won't even cost much ammunition... This ammunition money can save a lot of money, and when the time comes, it can make a fortune by falsely reporting ammunition consumption, exaggerating the amount and asking the Navy to reimburse it.
You can earn several waves from an armed march in one go, which is a good thing you can't find in ordinary times.
At this time, the Army did not know that the Navy had reached an agreement with the Cabinet. The Navy had received millions of dollars of investment from the Cabinet... Oh, no, it was temporary war funds!
This war cost includes the cost of large-scale landing operations.
However, the Navy feels that its marines are not large in number and are scattered in various places. It is not only troublesome to mobilize, but also more expensive.
It's better to hire an Army worker to save money!
Of course, this kind of thing was just hidden from the Army at that time. Within two days, the Army knew the news... After learning the news, the top brass of the Army were furious!
These bastards in the Navy eat their own meat and give us the Army some leftovers, and they also want our Army to work for them to make money for them.
Think beautifully.
As a result, the Army soon proposed the so-called Malay Peninsula Plan... launch an attack directly from the Pekka area to the east, capture the Kingdom of Aceh's territory in the Malay Peninsula, capture Malacca, and then capture the Kingdom of Johor and other places, comprehensively Conquer the Malay Peninsula.
Well, just as the Navy's combat plan has nothing to do with the Army, the Army's combat plan also has nothing to do with the Navy.
For logistical material transportation, the worst case scenario is to hire merchant ships in advance to transport and store them in the Beijia area, and then the army will directly sweep them away.
As for the Dutch East India Company's blockade afterwards, the navy can't just sit idly by and do nothing!
The most important thing is to swallow the meat first, and we will tell you how to end it later...
And the respective operations of the army and navy... made His Majesty Luo Zhixue, the Emperor of the Chu Empire, speechless!
Forget about being shameless and forget about the overall situation. All you have in mind is military spending.
Finally, he personally issued an order for the cabinet, the army and the navy to sit down and have a good talk.
As for the matter of controlling the Strait of Malacca itself, Luo Zhixue is still very supportive. This place has to be fought anyway, and now the time is relatively mature. At least the Portuguese and English are at war in their own country, and the Dutch are also facing war in their own country. A lot of pressure.
At the same time, the Da Chu Empire has also gained a foothold in the Nanyang region, with Beijia as its advance base.
The feasibility of capturing and controlling the Strait of Malacca is very high.
As for whether once the war breaks out and trade with the Dutch is cut off, it will affect the development of the domestic industrial and commercial economy.
Although there will be some impact in a short period of time, after taking Malacca, the Chu Empire will not hesitate to expand colonies on the Indian Peninsula. By then, with the huge Indian Peninsula market as support, the empire's industry and commerce will not be affected. If it is affected, there may even be opportunities to take off.
After all, the market in the Indian Peninsula and even in West Asia is still very large.
As for the conflict with the Dutch, which cut off the European market through the Dutch channel, the place only had silk and porcelain, which seemed expensive and the total trade volume was not small, but the actual export goods were not many.
These things actually have little impact on the current economic system of the Chu Empire, and are far less influential than cotton cloth.
What's more, the European colonies in Southeast Asia and India were not Dutch.
There are also Spanish and English people.
In particular, there is no conflict of interest between Spain and the Empire. The scale of trade has been expanding in recent years, so Spain is also an important channel for the Empire to export valuable goods to Europe, and the Dutch are not the only channel.
What's more, the trade between the Chu Empire and the European market is one-sided...
It was the European market that needed Eastern goods such as silk and porcelain from the Chu Empire, not the Chu Empire that needed them. It was the Europeans who traveled thousands of miles across the ocean to China to buy silk and porcelain. It was not the accumulation of goods from the Chu Empire. He traveled to Europe to sell silk and porcelain.
Without the Dutch, merchants from other countries would continue to take risks and transport goods from the Chu Empire to Europe for sale.
In short, the trade restrictions caused by the war will certainly have some impact, but they are nothing compared to the huge market gains of the Indian peninsula.
Even if the European market is completely lost, the impact will actually be small.
The imperial goods needed by the European market were mainly silk and porcelain. However, these two products actually had a very limited impact on the domestic industrial development of the Chu Empire. Their scale was not large and their share was not high.
The export commodities promoted by the Dachu Empire were actually various industrialized products. However, the cost of transporting these products to Europe for sale was too high and was not affordable for the time being.
So where is the main export market for industrial products of the Chu Empire?
That is the Southeast Asian and Indian regions, or adding West Asia and North Africa.
The distances are not too far, transportation costs are acceptable, and these places, especially India, have a large population.
And they are not a unified kingdom internally, but there are many countries that are constantly fighting each other, which means that the various export weapons of the Dachu Empire can find a good place.
If the Indian Peninsula can be controlled, then this place will be the largest and best dumping place for industrial products in the empire!
Comparing this, we can understand why the civil servants of the Great Chu Empire supported the military's attack on the Malacca Strait. In essence, the cabinet was for the industrial product market of the Indian Peninsula!
But no matter how we fight, the cabinet doesn’t care, and they can’t control it either.
Anyway, as soon as the meeting started, the cabinet has already stated that we don’t care how you two distribute or cooperate, but there is only so much money, and there is not even an extra steel penny. Anyone who has any objections will withdraw...
It is naturally impossible to withdraw, so the army and navy can only use their best to fight for it.
Again, there is only so much money, no matter who gets more, the other party will get less.
And regardless of whether you can eat it or not, just swallow the money first...
Regarding the quarrel within the military, cabinet officials said they were too lazy to listen and walked out of the meeting. Luo Zhixue even left the meeting at the beginning.
Today's meeting was destined to be a big quarrel like a wet market, and it would not be a problem for him to stay there and listen to a group of important ministers and generals swearing.
So he left early and went back to the harem to watch the performance of the Royal Music and Dance Troupe with the Queen.
This royal music and dance troupe is not a dance troupe composed of young and beautiful women who only know how to twist and turn, but a very formal palace dance performance team.
It is managed and established by the Palace Affairs Department to recruit and train musicians and dance members. It mainly focuses on orthodox palace music and dance, and is mainly used for performances on formal occasions.
This kind of dance is what later generations often call palace dance.
Queen Wang recently liked to watch this kind of serious and grand court dance. Sometimes Luo Zhixue would accompany her to watch it, but to be honest, this kind of court dance looked very boring to Luo Zhixue.
Wearing too much!
It doesn’t twist!
The only commendable thing is that the members of this Royal Music and Dance Ensemble are all beauties.
Luo Zhixue looked at the actresses on the stage and felt that their acting talents could not be wasted and that they had to rehearse some better-looking shows, especially those that reflected the comfort of summer and autumn and had thin and see-through costumes.
Otherwise, what a waste!
Luo Zhixue has always been a person who will do it when he has an idea, so he quickly told Queen Wang next to him about his idea.
After hearing this, Queen Wang was silent for a few seconds, then she forced out a smile and said, "I will make arrangements as soon as I get back!"
Luo Zhixue pretended not to notice Queen Wang's strange appearance. The husband and wife had always divided their labors and cooperated. Luo Zhixue was responsible for military and state affairs, and Queen Wang was responsible for everything in the harem.
Except for matters of principle, such as the protection of the prince, Luo Zhixue generally did not intervene in other matters in the harem, and delegated power to the queen and queen, including the draft, the promotion of ordinary concubines, etc.
Of course, there is no need to handle such a small matter as letting the Royal Music and Dance Troupe rehearse a new dance personally. The King and Queen can do it for you!
Luo Zhixue watched for a while and then left. At this time, Queen Wang also lost interest in the dance on the stage. In the future, she will probably not come to see the royal music and dance of the Royal Music and Dance Troupe.
Let's watch Kun Opera. Over the years, it has been proven that the emperor has no interest in Kun Opera and those Kun Opera actresses with ghostly symbols painted on their faces...
