Chapter 490: This Land Is Joy Enough — No Need to Campaign in Person

In the early winter of the second year of Shunzhi of the Great Qing, just as the envoy Bruce of the Kingdom of England was traveling overland into Liaodong with his country's local specialty, the Hongyi cannon, pressing on day and night toward Beijing, the Great Qing's Imperial Uncle Regent Dorgon already knew that the Great Qing was now secure!

Securely standing firm in the Central Plains, no longer so easily driven back to their old home in the northeast. And the key to making the Great Qing secure was not the local specialty from the Kingdom of England — Dorgon did not even know about that matter yet!

The key to stabilizing the Great Qing was the smooth progress of land enclosure by the Plain Green Banner and the distribution of land by headcount in Henan, Shandong, Northern Zhili, and other places.

Beginning in the eighth month, Dorgon had been making inspection tours back and forth through the prefectures of the Eastern Depot, Yanzhou, Jinan, Guide, Kaifeng, Hejian, Henan, and others, pressing forward with land enclosure and land distribution in each locality... This was an enormous administrative undertaking! At least a hundred million mu of land had to be redistributed, touching the vital interests of over ten million people.

And in order to better advance the land enclosure and land distribution, Dorgon had also transferred from Beijing such good bondservants of the Eight Banners Han Army who had followed from beyond the pass as Fan Wencheng, Ning Wanwo, Ma Guozhu, Xu Shichang, Xu Mingyuan, and others, appointing them as "Land Enclosure Imperial Commissioners" and "Land Distribution Imperial Commissioners," with sole charge of these two great matters of land enclosure and land distribution.

These bondservants from beyond the pass had no interests within the pass, so whether it was enclosing land or distributing land, they suffered no harm from it. With them as the backbone, plus several hundred officials selected from the Eight Banners Han Army and the Plain Green Banner to serve as "lesser imperial commissioners," they had brought all the prefectures of Henan, Shandong, and Northern Zhili that required land enclosure and distribution under control.

The matter of land enclosure was easy to handle, mainly in the prefectures of Shandong and eastern Henan, where there were hardly any people to begin with — the original inhabitants had either fled or been killed in the back-and-forth seesaw fighting, and those who remained were not many at all, nor could they possibly raise an uprising to resist the enclosure.

Once the land was enclosed, a hundred thousand Green Banner troops moved in and distributed the fields household by household — this method of distribution was not entirely the same as that of the Eight Banners. The Eight Banners distributed land first to the princes and high officials, and second to the banners themselves. They did not directly give the land to the soldiers to cultivate.

But the Plain Green Banner distributed land to each household, with twenty million mu of land distributed according to the size of one's official rank, so that every man had a share.

After the distribution was complete, they would not immediately stop paying grain and wages either, but would continue to pay them as usual for three years... What to do after three years, they would decide when the time came.

And after receiving land, the Green Banner soldiers became rotation troops who were both soldiers and farmers. They would take the niru as their unit, concentrating on building fortified settlements to live in, farming the land during the busy seasons and drilling as soldiers during the slack seasons.

What these Green Banner soldiers would become in the future was hard to say, but for the present they were all satisfied and had temporarily settled down, casually working the land on one hand while waiting to attack Qufu again — within the city of Qufu there were mountains of gold and silver, and all around there were the tombs of successive generations of the Yansheng Dukes that could be excavated!

This temptation was simply too great! Everyone was craning their necks waiting for it!

But the matter of distributing land by headcount was somewhat thorny — after all, there were still many scattered anti-Qing forces in various places! As soon as the decree on land distribution by headcount was issued, it stirred up a small upsurge of anti-Qing resistance.

However, under Dorgon's all-out suppression, the territory of Henan and Shandong had not produced too great a disaster — in fact, he did not necessarily have to confiscate the land of the scholar-officials. As long as the landlords agreed to pay grain tax at the standard of four sheng per mu, he would recognize their ownership of the land.

But the problem was that with the great reduction of population in the north and the beginning of the land distribution by headcount, land was no longer valuable; people were the most important means of production.

Under these circumstances, how could there still be peasants willing to pay gentry rent that exceeded the imperial grain tax?

Without peasants to rent the land, what use was it for landlords to have so much land? And they still had to pay the grain tax...

It was no exaggeration to say that this wave of land distribution by headcount was the final expropriation of the northern gentry-landlord class.

And by the winter of the second year of Shunzhi, with the end of the autumn harvest and the arrival of the "grain tax season," resistance in the "Qing-occupied areas" of Henan, Shandong, Northern Zhili, and elsewhere had basically come to an end. Only Shanxi was not very peaceful.

Because under the lure of the "preferential tax rate" of paying four sheng of imperial grain tax per mu, almost all the peasants still renting land chose to become obedient subjects of the Great Qing.

So by the tenth month, Dorgon returned in high spirits to the city of the Eastern Depot Prefecture, where Dodo's Grand General headquarters was located.

His "southern campaign" was just about finished, and it was time to return to Beijing to continue being his Regent.

By the way, "Hooge's corpse" had also been laid out in the Eastern Depot Prefecture for quite some days now, and it was time to haul it back to Beijing for a grand funeral.

The man responsible for escorting Hooge's body was Oboi, that loyal slave of Hooge, who now seemed to have gone over to Dorgon and Dodo. Hearing that Dorgon had returned to Liaocheng, he hurried to the Grand General's residence to pay his respects.

"This slave Oboi respectfully wishes the Imperial Uncle Regent golden peace! This slave congratulates the Imperial Uncle Regent on his good fortune!"

"Congratulate me?" Dorgon sat grandly in his chair, smiling as he asked, "What happy occasion is there? How is it that We do not know of it?"

Oboi smiled: "This slave has only just read the Capital Gazette delivered by relay post, and learned that there are barbarian envoys from the red-haired English kingdom of the Western Ocean coming to court to offer tribute."

"Oh," Dorgon said with a smile, "what good things have they brought?"

Dodo, at his side, also laughed. "Fourteenth Brother, guess what the specialty of this red-haired English kingdom is?"

"A specialty of the red-haired barbarians?" Dorgon said half-jokingly. "Could it be red-haired women?"

"Hahaha... Fourteenth Brother, are the women in your household not enough?" Dodo laughed heartily. "Fourteenth Brother, let me tell you — the local specialty of this red-haired English kingdom is the Hongyi cannon!"

"Cannon? Fifteenth Brother, you mean the red-haired barbarians want to present us with cannon as tribute?"

"That's right!" Dodo laughed. "Now our Great Qing's realm is truly secure... According to the report from the Shengjing Governor-General's office, the red-haired barbarian delegation has brought us ten horse-drawn so-called three-pounder cannon. They seem to be the same as the cannon used by the Southern army at the Battle of Qingliuxi."

"Haha, then Heaven is truly helping us!" Dorgon laughed. "We were just worrying that we had no samples to copy, and now the red-haired kingdom has delivered them to our door... We must reward them handsomely!"

Dodo added: "The King of Joseon also deserves credit. Those Englishmen first came by sea to Joseon, then traveled overland from there, and it was thanks to the King of Joseon sending men to escort them the whole way."

Dorgon nodded: "This Yi Jong is indeed a loyal slave. Later, send Ingguldai with troops to Hanyang, which can also be considered protecting Joseon from invasion by Japanese pirates. As for that so-called Jeju Island, we would need a navy for that, and right now we have no way."

"Even if we had a navy, we couldn't go!" Dodo said. "Shandong still awaits military action... While we've been busy enclosing and distributing land, Gao Hongtu, Shi Kefa, Zuo Maodi, and Zhu Yihai haven't been idle either — all these days they've been drilling troops and preparing for war!"

"No need to fear!" Dorgon smiled. "With these two moves — the Plain Green Banner and land distribution by headcount — our Great Qing is secure in the Central Plains... Shandong can be taken sooner or later."

He paused, then added: "Fifteenth Brother, don't be impatient. Once the Englishmen's cannon arrive and we copy a few ourselves, then we'll have confidence to attack Qufu."

"Good, good, good — three hundred three-pounder battalion guns... fifty gun batteries! As long as even half of them arrive, we can march north against the Central Plains! No matter how much Dorgon reorganizes, nothing can stand against cannon!"

At that same moment, Zhu Cilang was also talking about cannon — but not ten of them, rather three hundred!

A munitions purchase contract written in both Chinese and French was at that moment laid out on the table before him. The contract had been signed by Luo Dagong, the Vice Prefect of the Shanghai Trade and Foreign Affairs Bureau, acting on behalf of the bureau, with Anthony van Diemen.

According to this contract, the Dutch East India Company was to provide the Great Ming Shanghai Trade and Foreign Affairs Bureau, within two years, with three hundred three-pounder battalion guns, five thousand heavy Spanish matchlocks, and ten thousand light Spanish matchlocks.

The fifteen thousand matchlocks were nothing much — matchlocks were consumables with short service lives, so one always needed to keep some in reserve. But the three-pounder bronze cannon were very durable, and three hundred of them amounted to a full fifty batteries!

Calculated at half a battery attached to each regiment, these cannon were enough to equip a full hundred regiments... that is, over two hundred thousand, nearly three hundred thousand New Army troops!

With that many New Army troops, could the Great Qing still be secure? Could Li Zicheng still swagger? Blast them all to bits!

Just as he was feeling pleased with himself, Li Yan's voice sounded from outside the eastern warm chamber of the Hall of Overcoming Difficulties: "Thousand Years, your subject Li Yan has urgent military affairs to report!"