Chapter 481: The Qing's English Friends (Requesting Monthly Tickets)

Zheng Zhilong frowned and did a quick calculation for Zhu Cilang. "Thousand Years, a large bird-ship can carry at most two or three thousand piculs of rice... Even if rice in Annam, Champa, and Water Chenla is dirt cheap, getting it aboard still costs four or five mace of silver per picul, doesn't it? The price difference on a whole shipload of rice is only two or three thousand taels, and once you subtract the sailors' wages and the cost of repairing the ships, there's not much left!"

Zhu Cilang laughed. "Old Father-in-Law, your arithmetic is wrong!"

How could it be wrong? Zheng Zhilong thought to himself. I'm very good at arithmetic! I keep accounts worth millions every year, and I don't even need to count on my fingers...

Zhu Cilang thought to himself: You think you can out-calculate me? My math is excellent — I'm the kind of top student who nearly got a perfect score on the gaokao math exam... Back in the day I kept accounts worth tens of billions without counting on my fingers!

Besides, the business of buying rice in Annam, Champa, and Water Chenla isn't done the way you're doing it at all. The money in this business isn't in selling rice — it's in colonization!

As far as Zhu Cilang knew, colonization could lose money or make money. Losing-money colonization was for seizing territory — you could also see it as a long-term money-burning investment.

Profitable colonization, in turn, came in two kinds. One kind existed purely to make money — for example, the Dutch East India Company's colonization of Taiwan was for the purpose of obtaining a trading foothold with China and Japan.

The other kind was gaining both wealth and land — making money while also taking the territory.

Right now the Great Ming had a pile of troubles at home and abroad, and its purse was hardly full. It couldn't afford to burn money on colonization at a loss — that would ruin it. At the same time, the Great Ming had a large population, unlike the sparsely populated Dutch, so it couldn't think only of money and ignore territory. Therefore it had to take the path of gaining both wealth and land!

And in gaining both wealth and land, wealth still came first, land second! The key lay in first finding an industry that could "draw in people" — even if it earned only a little, or earned nothing at all, it still had to attract a certain number of people from the homeland to the colony.

Only when a colony's population rose could it further develop industry and cities, and only then could it occupy the land and obtain rich returns.

Now, the rice trade with Champa and Water Chenla might not yield rich profits, but it could be done on a very large scale. At this time the Mekong Delta was still very underdeveloped, with vast tracts of land available for cultivation, yet it was not entirely without foundations either. There was a port city called Prey Nokor that had developed quite well. This city was the future Saigon and Ho Chi Minh City. At present it was still territory of the Kingdom of Water Chenla, but more than twenty years earlier it had been granted to a daughter of a Nguyen lord of Quang Nam who had married the King of Water Chenla, and so it had become a haven for Annamese refugees fleeing the Trinh-Nguyen conflict.

And these Annamese refugees were close to the Han people of the Great Ming in ethnic blood, living habits, language, and writing. Moreover, at present there was no formal Kingdom of Annam — there was only the Great Ming's Annam Military Commission!

In other words, Annam was not now a truly independent state, but a native-office regime subordinate to the Ming dynasty. This matter went back to the decline and usurpation of Annam's Later Le dynasty. In the early sixteenth century, the Later Le dynasty of Annam entered what was called its "era of decline," with the imperial clan slaughtering one another and powerful ministers seizing the opportunity to rise. One of these powerful ministers, a man named Mac Dang Dung, ultimately became all-powerful and played out the farce of abdication and usurpation.

But this usurpation was not carried out cleanly. The other two powerful minister families of the Later Le dynasty, the Trinh and the Nguyen, refused to accept the Mac usurpation — they wanted to usurp the throne themselves! Mac Dang Dung had beaten them to it, so they had no choice but to become loyal ministers of the Le restoration. They found a distant relative of the Le house and set him up as emperor, then fought against Mac Dang Dung. They also sent men to Beijing to seek aid from the Jiajing Emperor. The Ming dynasty was Annam's nominal suzerain, after all! It could not ignore a usurpation within a tributary state, could it?

So the Jiajing Emperor dispatched a great army to chastise Mac Dang Dung. When Mac Dang Dung saw how things stood — he could not even handle the troops of the Trinh and Nguyen families, and if a Ming army was added on top of that, was he not doomed? — he offered his territory in submission to the Ming, wanting to be a loyal subject of the Ming. When the Jiajing Emperor saw that Annam had inexplicably returned to the fold, he naturally stopped attacking Mac Dang Dung and enfeoffed him as Annam Military Commissioner.

And just like that, the Kingdom of Annam ceased to exist!

Unfortunately, the Mac lord who became Annam Military Commissioner still could not defeat the remnants of the Le dynasty. In 1592 he lost the capital Thang Long, and his remaining forces fled to the Ming.

The restored Le dynasty then submitted to the Great Ming and requested the restoration of the name "Kingdom of Annam." But the Ming court did not agree; it merely transferred the title of Annam Military Commissioner to the Later Le dynasty.

Yet the chaos within Annam did not end with the Later Le restoration. On the contrary, it became even more confused.

Because the Later Le dynasty itself had no real strength — it had been restored only through the support of the Trinh and Nguyen lords. After the restoration, it was naturally the turn of the Trinh and Nguyen lords to usurp the throne. But there was only one throne — who was to usurp it? So the two families went to war. At the same time, the Mac family, which had fled to the Ming for refuge, had not yet gone cold. In 1600 they briefly restored themselves and seized Thang Long. Though they failed to hold it afterward, they fled to Cao Bang Province in northern Annam and held it as their own.

In addition, there was a Vu family that had played a major role in the collapse of the Mac dynasty. In 1599 they raised troops in rebellion, styled themselves the Long Binh King, and also carved out a territory in the north of Annam.

Thus within the territory of the tiny Annam Military Commission there now existed four regimes, fighting among themselves into a complete mess, while outwardly all had to acknowledge the Great Ming dynasty as their "good father."

And yet this very Annam still had strength to spare to bully the Kingdom of Champa and Water Chenla to its south — and it was not even the Trinh, Nguyen, Mac, and Vu all bullying them together. A single Nguyen lord of Quang Nam alone had Champa and Water Chenla suppressed. From this one can imagine how weak those two countries were.

And Zhu Cilang, who aspired to be a great colonizer, was also very weak at present. He might not even be able to destroy the four "little lords" of Annam.

Yet he needed to import grain from overseas and at the same time acquire arable land, in order to ease the contradiction between people and land at home. So he could only pick on Champa and Water Chenla, the weakest of the weak... And he did not even dare to send a great army in high dudgeon to destroy their states — because the great armies all had to be used against the Tartars and Li Zicheng. So he could only coax and deceive his way into taking advantage of Champa and Water Chenla.

Seeing that Zheng Zhilong did not understand, Zhu Cilang patiently explained: "Old Father-in-Law, buying rice from Annam, Champa, and Water Chenla to sell in Quanzhou and Shanghai indeed earns little — after costs, it might not even make money. But you must understand: if we pay half a tael of silver per picul to buy rice from Annam, Champa, and Water Chenla, and buy it in large quantities, then people will certainly go there to open up land and plant.

Leaving Annam aside for the moment, both Champa and Water Chenla have vast tracts of wasteland and fertile soil that can be opened up. And the national strength of these two countries is utterly feeble. Even Annam, split four ways, can bully them at will — how much more so our Great Ming Celestial Dynasty?

Now our Celestial Dynasty is short of grain at home. To borrow their fertile land to open up and plant is their honor! And we would not be planting their fields for nothing — we can protect them from being swallowed up by the Nguyen family of Annam. For their kings and nobles, would that not also be a fine thing?"

Zheng Zhilong still did not understand. This might be a good thing for the kings of Water Chenla and Champa, but what benefit was there in it for the Zheng family?

Zhu Cilang continued: "The rice of Water Chenla and Champa needs to be transshipped through ports and trading towns. And those transshipment ports and trading towns can naturally be made into our territory... In this way we will have lasting footholds in Water Chenla and Champa. Water Chenla and Champa also lie on the trade routes by which merchant ships travel between China and the Southern Seas. Once we have footholds there, it will be much more convenient for our merchant ships to go to the Southern Seas and to Siam. Your Zheng family's maritime territory can expand accordingly as well.

Moreover, Water Chenla and Champa also have many specialty goods that can be sold for good money — ivory, rhinoceros horn, ebony, agarwood, yellow wax — and they can also grow sugarcane and produce sugar. As long as we have footholds there, all of these can become sources of wealth for us."

It did seem to make sense... Zheng Zhilong felt a little dizzy listening to this. It was clearly a rice-buying business, so how had it turned into seizing other people's territory, establishing ports and trading towns, and taking all their specialty goods for oneself? This sounded like something the Tartars and the Western barbarians would do! Our Great Ming Celestial Dynasty was supposed to be a dignified superior state — how could it also engage in such swindling, bullying villainy?