The Han culture is spreading strongly in Southeast Asia

Chapter 790 The Great Colonization Begins
For mediocre people, the drastic fluctuations in Southeast Asia would cause them to lose a lot of land, which would be a loss.

But for true heroes, this is precisely a major reshuffling, an opportunity for themselves or their children and grandchildren to rise above others.

The words of Li Luanxuan, the governor of Xinma, were not wrong. These densely populated and prosperous areas located at river mouths and estuaries were once rainforests covered with trees more than 20 years ago.

The rainforest has become so prosperous today thanks to the pioneering efforts of generations. Who knows, the rainforest of today might become a prosperous town in the future?
This principle applies not only to powerful clans like the Ma family of Panyu, but also to the more prominent vassal states and relatives of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia.

Now that they have territory, where will their sons and grandsons go to expand?

Naturally, the development will take place deep in the rainforest. In this way, in another twenty or thirty years, there will be another fertile land, and the remaining sons who cannot inherit the family business will also have their own foundation.

Therefore, when the imperial court's order to redeem the land of wealthy families reached Southeast Asia, some powerful families in Singapore and Malaysia were only willing to give up their land after being lightly slapped twice, while others cooperated voluntarily as soon as the order arrived.

Even in Nanji Province, some hereditary garrison commander positions offered by the imperial court became highly sought after, attracting fierce competition from wealthy families in the prefectures and counties.

Nanji Province, Jinshi Junbo territory, Xin'an County, Shanlu Town, Shoushi Fort.

In Southeast Asia, such administrative divisions meant that the area was a fiefdom entirely controlled by Chinese relatives and kin.

A Junbo territory is roughly equivalent to a smaller prefecture or state in the entire land of China. A Junzi or Junnan territory is roughly equivalent to a county, and a Zhenshoushi territory is roughly equivalent to a township.

Although the territory is not very large, Namchi Island (Java Island) is extremely rich, especially after the Chinese brought advanced farming techniques and large-scale water conservancy projects, the yield per acre became even more exaggerated.

Even without counting the fish catch from the river and the nearby bay, the territory of Jinshi Junbo is about 3.5 million shi, the territory of Xin'an Junnan is about 1.2 million shi, and even the Shanlu Fortress of Shanlu Town has at least 600,000 shi.

The reason for using the stone price, which was only popular in Japan more than 20 years ago, to calculate land value is because this method was very useful during the process of colonization and the establishment of feudal states.

The value of this fiefdom can be clearly and explicitly demonstrated by the amount of rice. Although it is a bit silly to measure the value of all products in a country like Da Yu, which has a large economy and high level of activity, it is not a big problem if everyone around uses rice.

Since everyone agrees on the standard of stone height, it can reflect the value of this land quite accurately.

Of course, this also shows that the social atmosphere in Dayu, the most important province in Southeast Asia, possibly without exception, is conservative.

In the present-day Nanyang region, the main economic activities of the other provinces are mostly logging, leather processing, bird's nest harvesting, tin mining, silver mining, gold mining, rubber tapping, sugarcane planting, banana planting, spice cultivation, and fisheries development.

In particular, the various dried goods, seafood, and salted fish transported back from Southeast Asia were the most popular foreign products among the people inland of China.

Those extremely salty sea fish even became the most important source of salt for many farmers, and directly bankrupted the salt merchants who had been prosperous for thousands of years.

This also freed up a lot of capital and manpower for industry and commerce in Jiangnan. Tens of thousands of salt farmers who used to make a living from salt either went into factories or went to Southeast Asia.

As a result, the salt in China now mostly refers to refined white salt, and the brownish-yellow coarse salt mixed with sand has basically disappeared.

It can be said that these specialties from the six provinces of the Southeast Asian envoy region were the main reason why the people of Southeast Asia were able to live a good life.

This is also an important reason why Guangzhou, which is considered the capital of Nanyang people, has made rapid economic progress after losing the monopoly of foreign trade such as the Thirteen Factories, and has left Nanjing far behind.

The four million square kilometers of Southeast Asia, this economic hinterland, is simply too perfect. Its complementarity with the Chinese mainland is even more perfect than that between England and India.

However, while most provinces were engrossed in exporting large quantities of raw materials to mainland China and developing cash crops, the Nanyang Envoy's office still had two provinces that did not primarily produce cash crops.

That is the Minh Huong River Plain (Mekong Delta) of Nam Chi Province and Jit Nam Province. These two provinces have always adhered to basic agriculture as the mainstay, that is, they mainly produce grain.

Among them, Nanji Province produced the most grain, which not only provided food for about 30 million people in Southeast Asia, but also transported grain back to China every year, solving the food problem for at least 15 million people in Fujian and Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

Such a typical agricultural province naturally tends to be conservative in style. It could even be said that at this time, Nanji Island was the closest among all the Southeast Asian missions to China during the Han and Tang dynasties in terms of governance system and folk customs.

Shanlu Fort is quite large, as it was one of the earliest developed areas in South Ji Province.

Fort San Lu, including the districts of Sinan and Jinshi, is located in eastern Java, about 20 kilometers northeast of Surabaya, the capital of the famous Surabaya province, and faces Madura Island across the sea.

The lord of this fortress was also very famous, not just very famous, but famous throughout the world. The lord and garrison commander of the fortress was none other than the renowned Yamagami Toru, who personally killed the former Emperor of Japan with a handgun.

However, Yamagami Toru has now changed his name to Tang Tetsu. Because of the surname Yamagami, it is obvious that he was originally a Japanese. Mo Zibu's own perverse sense of humor was satisfied, but Yamagami Toru, whose original name was Yamajiro, was in great pain.

Fortunately, Mo Zibu was a very magnanimous monarch. After learning of Yamagami Toru's suffering, he did not blame him for being ungrateful and even refusing the emperor's bestowed surname. Instead, he wrote a large brush and bestowed upon Yamagami the surname Tang again, and Yamagami Toru became Tang Che.

When Shanlu Fort was built, it was intended for military use, so it was constructed entirely in the style of inland forts.

However, as the local natives were gradually assimilated and eliminated, this place with a small port by the sea and fertile surrounding land no longer needed to use fortresses to protect itself.

So ten years ago, Tang Che (Yamagami Tetsu) moved the entire Shanlu Fort to this small fishing village by the sea, and it gradually developed into a large port town on East Java Island.

In Shanlu Fort, the entire town is oval-shaped, with two main streets intersecting in a cross shape in the center. The garrison commander's office is located at the intersection, where there is a large square. On weekdays, the garrison commander would post all orders he issued and all criminals he punished here.

Therefore, this place has become the liveliest place in the entire town. Everywhere you can see women wearing t-shirts with vests and very thin gauze skirts, and men wearing half-sleeved shirts, shorts, and straw sandals, laughing and joking as they walk by.

The heat in Southeast Asia was so intense that the Han Chinese who migrated there made numerous subtle changes to their clothing. Among the most common changes was the widespread popularity of various garments that exposed the arms and calves.

Even for women, even in the most conservative province of Nanji, clothing that exposes arms and legs has become the most suitable and fashionable choice.

At most, when there are many people around, wealthy women in the family might choose to wear a light gauze dress to symbolically cover themselves up, while those from ordinary families don't care about such things at all.

As noon approached, Tang Che (Yamagami Tetsu) drove a gas-powered motorcycle, chugging along towards the government office. Behind him followed a dozen or so feudal soldiers wearing short-sleeved shirts, carrying muskets, and with samurai swords at their waists.

As a vassal from the Eastern Seas Envoy's Penglai Province, which was originally Kyushu Island, Tang Che's fiefdom still had a strong Japanese influence, even more so than in other fiefdoms.

The reason wasn't that the Japanese preferred to associate with other Japanese when they arrived in Southeast Asia; in fact, after migrating south, the Japanese were very reluctant to associate with other Japanese.

This way, outsiders can immediately tell that they are not Han Chinese, and may even mentally label the area where they congregate as a Japanese settlement and discriminate against them.

Don't think this is an exaggeration. Just think about it: if we go back 30 years to 1995, let alone US citizenship, even a green card was a symbol of being superior. In ordinary places, if you got drunk and beat someone up, no one would dare to interfere.

This is in China, where it has already taken a rather tough stance against the Americans; one can only imagine its prestige in other countries.

At that time, China's status in the world was far higher than that of the United States in 1995, and there was no obvious difference in appearance between Japanese and Chinese.

This illustrates just how important a Chinese identity is to the Japanese.

They would never maintain Japanese traditions again, nor would they ever live among Japanese people. They would rather all their Japanese compatriots not recognize them.

So much so that there is a way to identify Japanese people in Dayu: if you encounter someone who always mentions the Han and Tang dynasties, always writes about the Yellow Emperor and the Yan Emperor, likes to find fault with other people's accents, treats the locals so aggressively that you feel it's a bit excessive, and speaks and acts like an ancient gentleman, even giving you the feeling that an ancient person has stepped out of a book, then you've got it right.

This guy is 80% Japanese, and the remaining 20% ​​are either Koreans from the peninsula or high-ranking officials from Gyeonghan who claim to be emperors.

Real Han Chinese are not as pure as they are.

The only exception was Tang Che (Yamagami Toru). Many Japanese heroes liked to flock to Yamagaku Castle to seek refuge with him because Tang Che killed Emperor Kōkaku with a single shot.

For Japan as a nation and for the Wa people as a people, their interests in this time and space must have been severely damaged, because the concepts of nation and ethnicity that were almost formed have disappeared.

But for each individual Japanese person, from the Shogun Tokugawa Ienari to the indentured laborers transported to Southeast Asia, as long as they were alive, they benefited greatly.

The prestige of a Han Chinese at that time was something that later generations could hardly imagine.

Six hundred and twenty million people enjoy more than 28 million square kilometers of land, enjoy the global trade deficit, and enjoy the support of more than 20 million native serfs.

He has no shortage of houses, land, and wives. Even in Southeast Asia, where there are few Han women, as long as you lower your standards, you can marry three or four native women without any problem.

The government not only doesn't stop it, but also rewards you, because if a Han Chinese marries another woman, there will be three to five fewer indigenous people in the future.

Compared to the situation in later generations where marrying a Burmese woman required paying a dowry and worrying about her running away, there's no comparison. Furthermore, maintaining the vitality of such a vast territory and developing its richer areas as quickly as possible meant that every human resource was extremely valuable, essentially eliminating the possibility of capitalists and landlords forcing a able-bodied man to his death.

In such an era, it goes without saying what kind of salary an ordinary Han Chinese could earn or how high their social status would be, and even decades later, their descendants would not live a better life than they do now.

As for the original Japanese, even a hatamoto with a salary of 5,000 koku dared not eat and dress freely, a samurai with a salary of 1,000 koku had to be very careful in making ends meet, a samurai with a salary of less than 500 koku could not survive without borrowing money, and a samurai with a salary of less than 200 koku would definitely have most of his family members in a state of semi-starvation. As for the common people, they could hardly get enough to eat, even with wild vegetable porridge, all year round.

Now, the quality of life for each of them has improved by at least a hundredfold.

Faced with such terrifying benefits, let alone Emperor Kōkaku, even if all the Japanese emperors were brought out together, these Japanese would not hesitate to rush forward and chop them all into mincemeat.

Therefore, Tang Che was admired by all the Japanese people, who believed that part of their good life was due to Tang Che's decisive shot that killed Emperor Kōkaku.

This move eliminated the usurpers and rebels on the Japanese islands, and through enormous risk, it brought about its own success and the well-being of all the Japanese people.

"Zhang Taijun, we're going to attack the natives of Pangyue Mountain this time. Do you want to join us?"

Although Tang Che (Yamagami Toru) was in a hurry to get on his way, he still stopped his car to ask a question after seeing a strong farmer standing by the roadside.

Although the rainforests of Nanji Island (Java Island) are relatively small compared to other places, they are still standard tropical rainforests. Because the indigenous people were not good at farming and had little value, the clearing of the indigenous people slowed down after the first million people from Guangxi who went to Southeast Asia all had families.

Even today, 300,000 to 400,000 indigenous people still live in the mountain rainforests of central Java. The slave-catching teams of Nanji Province only go into the mountains to capture slaves when there are not enough women to marry the newly arrived Han Chinese.

"Sir, I won't go. The rice is growing very well this year, and this is a crucial time. We can't do without you." The farmer's name wasn't Zhang Taijun, but Zhang Tai. The "Jun" at the end was a customary honorific.

Of course, this name did not come from Japan, or perhaps Japan learned it from the Tang Dynasty.

It became popular again because at that time, the most prestigious title in Southeast Asia was that of a feudal lord, so the Han people picked up the title of "lord" again, implying that the other party would be promoted and become wealthy.

At this time, there were also many farmers like Zhang Tai in the territory of the feudal lord.

They were not subjects directly under the rule of a feudal lord, but free people, or, in the context of the time, "customers."

These clients were tenants who came from all over to rent land from the lord after his fiefdom was established. They were similar to the lord's tenants, but had much greater personal freedom, and the relationship was a two-way selection process.

The feudal lord had too much land, and it would be difficult to manage it all himself, so he needed tenants with good farming skills to rent it out.

For the Han Chinese who went to Southeast Asia, not everyone was suited to wielding weapons, nor did everyone have the ability and resilience to carve out their own territory.

Therefore, many small households without the support of large families would directly rent land in the territory of the feudal lords to make a living.

"I heard that your younger brother is also coming to Southeast Asia. Mr. Zhang, could you please write a letter? I have three hundred acres of fertile land here, and I need a skilled farmer to manage it."

Tang Che (Yamagami Che), the garrison commander of Shanlu Fortress who possesses assets of 600,000 shi (a unit of dry measure), not only addresses his clients as "sir" but also displays a somewhat ingratiating expression.

This is because excellent farmers like Zhang Tai are extremely rare in Southeast Asia. After they contracted the land, they could provide a large amount of tax revenue with almost no intervention from the lords. Who would complain about having too many such people?

Zhang Tai certainly hoped his younger brother would come too; his previous silence was a way of asking for a higher price.

Besides basic benefits, there's also the issue of finding a wife that definitely needs to be resolved.

Another person cannot cultivate 300 acres of intensively cultivated land alone; they also need to be accompanied by some docile native serfs for management and command.

“It’s not that I don’t want to give you an official position, but Wanlongbo’s side is also recruiting people. I heard that if you go there, you’ll be given a local woman as a wife.”

Zhang Tai feigned a troubled expression and spoke with a smile. He knew that Tang Che was gathering the vassal troops and was definitely going to capture slaves deep in the rainforest, so he was targeting the right person.

"Country bumpkins? Who wants country bumpkins these days? Hahahaha, look at this!" Tang Che laughed loudly and had someone bring a woman over from behind.

Only then did Zhang Tai realize that there were more than a dozen people following behind the vassal guards, and that the woman who had been brought over was actually a white European.

Although Zhang Tai always felt that European whites were not as pleasing to the eye as Chinese whites, compared to the natives, they were undoubtedly worlds apart.

Her skin tone is a bit like frozen pork, but it's still fair. She's a bit slender but has a large frame. She'll grow out of shape with time. She has a lot of freckles on her cheeks, but overall her eyebrows and eyes look quite pleasing to the eye.

Zhang Tai suddenly felt that his three native wives and concubines were no longer appealing, and his native wives and concubines also suddenly realized that a strong competitor had appeared. Their expressions became tense, and they all began to fawn over Zhang Tai.

"Call your brother over. When he comes, I'll give him a European white female slave to warm his feet, and five serfs as well." Tang Che laughed heartily, then took the white woman he had just shown Zhang Tai away and drove towards the government office.

"Damn it!" Zhang Tai cursed inwardly, feeling quite envious. But when he turned around and looked at the women who had been with him for five or six years and had a bunch of children, his heart softened at the sight of the panic in their eyes.

Forget it, forget it. You're a poor wretch from a family of tenant farmers for three generations in Beizhili. You've got three wives and concubines here. What more could you want?

Zhang Tai suppressed his wandering thoughts, reached out and slapped the country girl next to him, "What are you waiting for? Come on, let me buy you some cloth and make you some nice clothes so you can dress up properly."

The local women were overjoyed. They surrounded Zhang Tai, vying to lift the heavy object from his hands, and left happily.

. . . .

"Your Majesty is wise beyond compare. Your benevolent and all-encompassing Emperor has approved the serf system in Southeast Asia. From today onwards, all officials who have held their positions for more than ten years can exchange their military merits for or redeem their contracts with silver."

As soon as Tang Che (Yamagami Toru) arrived at the government office square, he immediately shouted to the officials and households who had been waiting outside, and cheers erupted everywhere.

These so-called official households were actually serfs who had been sold from Japan and Korea to Southeast Asia over the past twenty years.

Well, they can't be called serfs either, because apart from lacking personal freedom and only having half-Han Chinese identity, their treatment was much better than that of slaves.

However, no one doesn't want to climb the social ladder. If you can become a client like Zhang Tai, who would want to continue being a dependent official?

"This garrison commander will also allocate ten positions for retainers. If a retainer in the garrison makes meritorious contributions, the reward will be doubled."

Let us all work together! If we are promoted to the rank of Baron or even Gentleman, even greater wealth and honor await us in the near future!

Now, even the retainers surrounding Tang Che and the Han Chinese wandering knights who had come from all over to try their luck cheered.

This is the system within the Nanyang vassal states, a governance system that incorporates some Japanese elements and has a strong influence from the Han, Tang, and even Qin-Han periods.

The retainers of the feudal lord enjoyed treatment based on the amount of grain they received, and the lord would even directly allocate land to them; they were the superstructure of the fiefdom.

The clients were Han Chinese who were not enslaved. They often had a skill that could bring many benefits to the lord, and their personal dependence on the lord was very weak.

The main labor force in the fiefdoms consisted of government officials, most of whom were half-Han Chinese from Japan and North Korea, with a smaller number being Han Chinese convicts and Yue people.

They were the main force of production in their fiefdoms and had a strong personal dependence on their lord, but they were subject to a service period.

Below the official households are the individual households, which are mostly composed of the original Siamese and Burmese. Although they are called individual households, they are actually serfs. If the master accidentally kills one, he only needs to pay compensation of one hundred silver dollars.

Of course, they were also serfs in their homeland, because both Siam and Burma originally practiced serfdom. If they were beaten to death by their masters, they would be worth no more than ten silver dollars, let alone a hundred.

As for the lowest level, they are the true natives, who are similar to cattle and horses, just talking livestock, and don't even deserve a household registration.

This major upheaval in Southeast Asia will also profoundly affect them. The number of clients will increase significantly, official clients will gradually decrease, and a large number of white slaves will be added to the small-time client base to fill the gap.

The number of native people, cattle, and horses will increase significantly, eventually disappearing almost entirely within fifty years.

Finally, the brutal colonization of Southeast Asia, which Mo Zibu had been dragging his feet on for so long because he was afraid of the aftermath of serfdom, was about to begin.

(End of this chapter)