Chapter 127: Refusing the Kingly Rule

Salt-drying requires a great deal of land. The historically famous Tainan Qigu Salt Field, at its peak, covered 2,700 hectares.

So the Transmigrators did not, and could not, send troops to protect the salt field. The natives' harassment style — casually wandering over now and then to take a head — was the most troublesome scenario for an elite defense setup with few hands and strong firepower.

What the Crossing Faction hoped for most right now was for the opponent to come swarming out. Even if Zheng Zhilong's entire Ming army came charging, they would stake their ammunition reserves to annihilate them in one decisive morning battle, winning a resounding reputation and three years of peace.

But the natives couldn't do that. The natives played the harassment game, and that was disgusting. The Madou and Xiaolong societies north of Xingang Creek — poverty limited their chieftains' imagination, and to this day they had not come to Dayuan Island to pay respects to the lords of the superior state. Whether they sent word through the Xingang Society people, or told the younger brothers who came to sell deerskin to carry back a message, it all sank like a stone in the sea. This was called strategic playing-dead, and the hostility was already very clear.

Since they couldn't hold it, they had no choice but to attack.

They hadn't moved before because the area north of Xingang Creek had not yet been put on the development schedule. Also, unlike in history, neither the Chikan New District nor the Kiln District Industrial Base had suffered native harassment during construction — the Xingang Society and Damujiang Society had historically organized night raid teams and killed Dutch soldiers on night watch when Chikan was being fortified.

This gave the Transmigrators a false impression: that the natives understood the stakes, that they could be reasoned with.

Only after getting slapped in the face by the Madou natives did it dawn on them: their way of reasoning was probably wrong, and the old way of reasoning was still more effective...

Today's meeting was to end the discussion and decide directly whether to fight or not. As for how to fight, Han Bo, appointed on the spot as "Tainan Region Pacification Commander-in-Chief," smoothly produced a plan he had long since prepared.

The Transmigrators were different from colonizers. Colonizers came to plunder, so they had no scruples; if they couldn't gain a foothold, they could simply leave and go back to their country.

But the Transmigrators had no country to go back to. In a sense, they could afford to lose even less. So Hangzhou was their homeland, and Dayuan was now equally their homeland. A civilization that wanted to take root here in industrial civilization would inevitably operate differently from the Dutch way of doing things.

The Dutch way of ruling Taiwan historically was the standard scorched-earth policy: whenever they accumulated enough troops and resources, the Red Hair would summon the native auxiliaries of the Xingang Society to serve as Auxiliary Soldiers and guides, then dispatch over three hundred soldiers in one go to burn and slaughter the target tribe into oblivion, in order to create a deterrent effect.

In this process, the Dutch actually didn't care whether the other side resisted or not: most of the time, by the time the Dutch-Allied Forces arrived, the local natives had long since fled. But the monks could run, the temple couldn't. The island's natives were all semi-fishing, semi-farming in nature, not a Nomadic Tribe. Their villages, food stores, and grain fields — these assets didn't have legs.

Historically, the Madou People had pulled one over on the Dutch.

On June 13, 1629, the Madou People, by diligently carrying the Dutchmen's packs and firearms across the river first, then carrying the Red Hair lords across on their backs, struck mid-crossing. In one fell swoop, they drowned sixty-two Dutch soldiers who had come to loot, right in the Madou river — including one Junior Merchant and one commander.

In real history, after the Dutch resolved a series of external troubles like Hamada Yahyoe, by the time they freed their hands to take revenge, a full six years had passed.

In November 1635, Dayuan's fourth Governor Putemansi led 475 soldiers, plus nearly two thousand Auxiliary Soldiers from the Xingang and Damujiang societies, in a scorched-earth assault on the Madou region.

Every native they saw was shown no mercy; children, women, and the elderly were all killed. Three thousand native houses were burned.

On the first day of the war, the Madou People did resist. But when a tribe of three thousand had two hundred and sixty of its able-bodied Warriors killed, the tribe collapsed.

A month later, the Madou People who had fled into the mountains could not hold out. They all came out and surrendered, offering betel nut and saplings to express Submission... The mountains were not so easy to survive in. There was no food, and the Gaoshan Tribe were just as merciless when killing refugees.

The above was the Dutch way of reasoning. Starting with the nearest Xingang Society, nearly every native tribe had suffered the Red Hair's scorched-earth policy: the troops would come slaughtering, the natives would Escape, houses and grain fields would be burned, the natives would surrender, and nearby tribes, seeing the devastation, would hurriedly surrender too — this had become standard procedure. Different native tribes chose the same response every time, and the Dutch gleefully played the same trick over and over.

A governance style of "kill and don't bother to bury" was not what a certain faction that prided itself on high-mindedness wanted.

To be honest, a certain evil faction was actually quite willing to handle a native's entire life from cradle to grave in one package deal — civil administration was a lucrative post too! A plywood box painted with a bit of black lacquer could be passed off as Black Ebony and sold for two thousand. It was just that practical conditions didn't allow it.

First, the number of immigrants available to assimilate the natives was insufficient.

Whether it was the beggars or the refugees over in Hangzhou, the comrades at the local Hangzhou Station couldn't just drive these people in droves like Cattle to Moyun Temple. This was a secret transport process.

The fleet was also straining: three fleets were already shuttling back and forth on the Taiwan-Zhejiang route. Both the equipment and the Pilot Ships crewed by Transmigrator cadres were stretched to the limit.

The cargo throughput capacity over at Tangzhuang was equally tight, especially for grain — Dayuan currently could not produce its own grain, and the Hangzhou Station's large-scale grain purchasing also took time. If they went too crazy, they would certainly attract the attention of the authorities and the big grain merchants, and behind the big grain merchants, without a doubt, were the great Gentry. Small-timers generally couldn't get involved in the grain business.

All this limited the number of Ming People laborers coming to Dayuan. As of the 1628 New Year, the Transmigrators had occupied Dayuan for two and a half months. Ming People immigrants in place numbered 2,100, Rice reserves were 150 tons, with miscellaneous other goods in various amounts. This was already lightning speed; it was only thanks to considerable preparatory work done earlier, otherwise the current situation would not exist at all.

Originally, the plan was to reserve the "dilution quota" for the Xingang Society people. The newly opened Chikan Academy had already accepted ten Xingang boarding students, plus five native families of three specifically Selected by the Transmigrators. They were all housed in the School District Houses next to the academy. The Transmigrators planned a role-model civilizing campaign, to let the natives feel the beauty of a new life, and then gently digest the Xingang people using the advantage of population numbers.

Now this process had been abruptly interrupted.

Because the Madou and Xiaolong societies refused Submission to the kingly rule, war was imminent. So the planned "slow digestion of natives model" had turned into a hard "swallow it all half-cooked in one pot" model. This method was very strenuous; if one's stomach wasn't strong, it was easy to get indigestion. But now the arrow was on the string and had to be loosed. They could only take it one step at a time.

Everything circled back to the starting point: to develop the north bank of Xingang Creek, they first had to pacify the natives. To pacify the natives, they would again be extorted by the military brass — for drones. The newly opened Pacification Headquarters, at the very first moment, put the long-yearned-for drones onto the Military Supplies requisition list.