Chapter 282: Longyan Campaign Record (5)

After the main boiler body was carried back, the accessories delivered in succession over these boatloads were finally put to use. Then, not two days later, thick smoke began billowing from the Rear Palace's backyard.

With this huge spectacle, the number of people bringing chickens, ducks, meat, and eggs to the Rear Palace to sell suddenly multiplied — everyone wanted to go to the backyard and see whether that big iron furnace belching black smoke was roasting children for some ritual.

So Ding Liqiu immediately ordered the backyard to be cordoned off separately. No matter who came, they could all get a chance to tour it and even drink a free bowl of hot tea boiled by the furnace — unexpectedly, this move won immense praise among the locals.

At the same time, boats brought another large batch of "Overseers" from downstream. These were all men who had done construction work in Dayuan for ages. As soon as they arrived, they carried leather whips and short clubs, wore pencils tucked behind their ears, and clamped work-point ledgers under their arms, then began directing the laborers the county yamen had conscripted from the surrounding villages to build the dock.

A new trade also spread among the crowds: anyone who could carry back a basket of coal could exchange it at the dock for salt, rice, or silver.

Most common folk didn't believe it. These people, long tormented and wary of the authorities, didn't trust in pies falling from the sky. Yet, driven by the harshness of their impoverished lives, there were always a few willing to be the first to try.

And so, an old farmer with a face full of wrinkles came from twelve li outside the county seat. He walked with a stooped back, carrying a basket of coal he had dug from Heipi Gully behind his village. Then, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, he exchanged it for a wooden ladleful of white salt crystals — mountain folk normally ate yellow or black salt grit.

Sometimes, to buy a horse's bones, you don't need a thousand pieces of gold; one ladle of salt is enough.

From this point on, an endless stream of "coal carriers" appeared, and there were even women and children among their ranks.

Things are forever in flux. Once a few large clans near the coal-producing areas figured out the situation, they sent men overnight to seal off the sites. Some began setting up checkpoints to collect taxes; others outright forbade outsiders from digging coal, allowing only their own people to profit.

Snow-white rice and salt crystals — just gone like that? Could the dark-skinned mountain folk tolerate this? Consequently, several large-scale armed clashes rapidly erupted over the mining rights to coal that had been utterly worthless just days before, resulting in twenty or thirty lives lost and countless wounded, both serious and minor.

Such swift developments left County Magistrate Yu utterly dumbfounded — in fact, he hadn't even fully thought through the causes and consequences or the subsequent effects of this "salt for coal" business, and yet matters had already escalated to this point.

Master Yu felt inexplicably agitated.

There had been too many things these past days that he couldn't adapt to quickly enough. This bunch of Short-Hairs kept stirring up trouble: moving into barracks and hauling in a giant iron furnace, building a dock and cooking up the salt-for-coal scheme — all of it left him, a man accustomed to the slow rhythms of the medieval era, utterly overwhelmed.

Master Yu now felt that things were slipping out of control.

So when Ding Liqiu came running over demanding that the county yamen dispatch manpower to set out together with the Red Spear Camp to suppress the civil unrest, County Magistrate Yu was extremely reluctant: you people stirred up this mess, and now you want me to clean it up?

In the end, after much coaxing from Ding Liqiu, Master Yu grudgingly agreed, but still laid down three ground rules: the yamen runners were only to maintain order, not be responsible for any fighting, and there had to be benefits for him afterward.

Early the next morning, the vast and mighty troops set out. The ranks included not only the main force of the Red Spear Camp but also over a hundred yamen runners, along with several merchants led by Dong Daxing and their attendants.

The moment to display strength arrived quickly: in front of a mine pit, 200 men of the Red Spear Camp stood in confrontation with nearly 800 natives. The yamen runners and merchants, meanwhile, had long since run off to a safe position in the distance to watch the show.

The show was quite a spectacle.

160 soldiers holding red-and-white wooden-shafted long spears first formed a square formation and slowly pressed forward. Just as the two sides closed to a distance of 20 meters, the spearmen, under the command of an electric megaphone, instantly dropped into a kneeling firing stance, and then the 40 bird-blunderbuss men in the center of the formation unleashed four volleys of rotating fire.

The Spanish Square that the transmigrators were cosplaying, though a poor imitation that fell far short of the original, was more than enough to deal with these clan forces who only knew how to brawl.

The 40 bird-blunderbuss rounds knocked down over twenty men on the spot, and immediately after, the spear formation charged — under the pressure of identically dressed soldiers advancing in lockstep, slowly bearing down on them, the natives began retreating in panic without any surprise.

The next moment, two U. S. military-issue concussion grenades were hurled from the formation by someone of very high altitude, and then the natives collapsed. Centered on the impact points of the two grenades, a dense mass of mountain folk were knocked flat, while on the periphery, many more clutched their ears, drooled, and staggered about like walking corpses, stunned into idiocy.

A routed force is the easiest to deal with. The soldiers of the Red Spear Camp began using the backs of their blades and the shafts of their spears to beat down every native lagging behind.

Next came the campaign to assault the tulou.

In the final years of the Western Jin, a million noble clans, driven by the chaos of war, set out from the Central Plains and took the first step of their southward migration. During the Tang and Song dynasties, several more large-scale southward migrations occurred, entering Gannan and Gandong, then advancing into Western Fujian and Minbei.

The Changting region north of Longyan is also known as the "Hakka Capital" of Fujian. From here, the ancestors began their southward journey, and places including Longyan, Sanming, and Zhangzhou all became key starting points and major gathering places in the formation of the Hakka people.

At this point in the 17th century, over 80% of the local natives in Longyan were Hakka. And what is the most famous thing the Hakka people left for later generations? The Hakka Tulou.

The Hakka Tulou, listed in the World Heritage List, have lower levels built from rammed clay, sand, and stone, while the upper levels are wooden structures with sandwiched panels.

These tulou are usually massive structures in concentric circular or square shapes. A single so-called tulou is essentially a small fortified village with strong defensive capabilities, housing dozens of households and several hundred people of the same clan, young and old.

And the hallmark of a large clan in southwestern Fujian was typically a cluster of tulou. Three to five, or seven to eight, perfectly circular tulou gathered among the mountains — from a distance, they looked like a pile of alien flying saucers, an icon of Hakka culture.

The Red Spear Camp's next target was the nearby Chen Family Tulou Cluster.

The tulou, so effective against bandits in ordinary times, proved useless before a certain army. Before the able-bodied men who had fled back into the tulou could organize an effective defense — in truth, those stones and ash bottles couldn't be called effective — the attack from this side had already begun.

The concise and effective assault was divided into two steps: Step one, use industrially machined bird blunderbusses to suppress the wall tops; step two, the demolition specialists charge.

Since even so many machine guns and rifles back in the day couldn't stop the Communist demolition specialists' assaults, still less could 17th-century natives.

Only a few among those huddled behind the wall saw that darting figure rush over. The two ash bottles hastily thrown out were like melon rinds tossed over a partition wall — useless for anything but scaring people.

The next moment, the wooden stockade gate was blasted into splinters by a gunpowder pack, and once the short-jacketed soldiers charged into the tulou, the Chen family could only surrender.

This Tulou Campaign was the 1st Company's first battle on the Ming Continent.

Although they had held back somewhat in terms of equipment, the soldiers, whose level of organization far surpassed the natives, still took down their opponents as easily as chopping melons and vegetables.

The Chen family thought disaster was now upon them.

After the first tulou, where the clan's able-bodied men had gathered, was breached, the entire clan was in fact a lamb awaiting slaughter.

Everyone knew that the reason local bullies could contend with bandits and the authorities was by relying on their turtle-like strategy of clustering together as a clan.

Now, under the watchful eyes of the crowd, the Chen family had not only been utterly routed in open battle by soldiers far fewer in number than themselves, but even their hardest fortress had been breached with ease.

This method of breaking a stronghold, seemingly simple yet imbued with dense high technology, not only completely annihilated the Chen family's will to resist but also left the onlooking bystanders utterly astonished — in the aftermath of their shock, the expressions on some faces turned dark and uncertain.

Next came the time for post-war judgment.

And what shocked everyone was that the swaggering soldiers not only refrained from large-scale plundering and ravaging in the Chen Family Fortified Village, but instead summoned the leaders of every faction to the Public Office in the very center of the tulou. Then, Ding Liqiu, Ding Scribe, stepped forward and solemnly announced a piece of good news: Heipi Gully Mining Limited Liability Company was hereby established, effective immediately!

The mining company's shareholders were composed of the following parties: the transmigrator side, responsible for purchasing products and contributing technology and machinery as their stake; the county seat merchants, responsible for providing start-up capital and management; and the Chen family along with several nearby large clans, responsible for providing manpower.

The agreement was signed very quickly.

The merchants led by Dong Daxing had long been prepared, while the local boss, the Chen family, had already lost all bargaining power — the corpses of dozens of able-bodied men and the shattered stockade gate made the Clan Leader exceptionally clear-headed. Between clan extermination and signing some damned contract, everyone knew which to choose.

The plaque-hanging ceremony for the mining company, cold and awkward, was thus completed amidst bayonets and pools of blood.

Only after this came the reckoning process: the soldiers had not been deployed for free. If the Chen family were not punished, wouldn't that mean anyone could violently resist the law?

Therefore, one hundred able-bodied men of the Chen family were "confiscated" as punishment. These men would work for three months at the county seat dock construction site. The transmigrators would only provide meals, no wages. As for fines and such, honestly, that paltry bit of silver was something certain people truly looked down upon.

However, what the transmigrators looked down upon did not mean others disliked it — Wang Haogu, Wang Scribe, who had come forward on behalf of the County Magistrate to assess this operation, promptly stepped up.

Once Wang Scribe jumped out, he immediately pointed out from a commanding height: First, the back taxes the Chen family had owed the authorities over the years should be settled while they were at it.

Second, since this newly opened commercial firm wanted to run a mine, it needed to purchase an official permit from the county yamen and would be subject to taxation going forward — in fact, most of the coal mine sites were barren official land, so it was only proper for the newly established company to buy the land deeds.

The Chen family members standing to the side wanted to curse at this moment: so this was what they'd been waiting for all along.

Yet when the blade is the butcher's cleaver and you are the fish on the block, understanding it is of no use. The Chen family had suffered a catastrophic defeat this time: in an imagined brawl against incompetent soldiers, the Chen family had not only lost several dozen able-bodied men but also gained over a hundred wounded, lost several hundred piculs of grain and rice plus a huge sum of silver, and on top of that, had a hundred laborers forcibly taken away.

Severely wounded in their essence, the Chen family's miserable state spread overnight to all nearby powers.