In October, good news came from Goryeo: Myo-cheong and Wang Kai fought a battle, and Wang Kai was defeated. The situation in Goryeo is now very tense.
The more tense the situation in Goryeo, the better it is for Zhao Huan.
During this period, Wang Kai spent his time fighting with Miao Qing and writing letters to Zhao Huan.
The letter requested His Majesty the Holy and Benevolent Emperor of the Great Song Dynasty to send troops to support Goryeo, quell the traitors, and restore order to the nation.
In his spare time, Zhao Huan also wrote back to Wang Kai, in which he condemned Miao Qing's disloyal act and stated that the Song Dynasty would not stand idly by.
Upon receiving the Emperor's hand, Wang Kai was so excited that he couldn't sleep.
So he waited and waited in the palace until the winter months when it started to snow, but the Song army still did not make a move.
The lives of ordinary people in Goryeo were already showing signs of collapse due to the war.
Wang Kai finally couldn't sit still any longer.
Wang Kai was restless, but Zhao Huan was leisurely and carefree.
A major event has recently occurred in Tokyo, one that is enough to attract the attention of the imperial court.
Li Qiu'e, the manager of Li's Cloth Shop, heard that she went to Qiongzhou a few months ago and learned a new way of weaving cotton clothes from the Li people.
The new cotton-padded coats launched by Li's Cloth Shop are now cheap and sell well. When winter came, the first batch of goods was sold out within a day.
Next, Huaxing Textile Machinery worked day and night.
Suddenly, cotton-padded coats became popular in Tokyo, and they were sold at very affordable prices, only two hundred coins apiece, making them affordable for ordinary families.
This made Li Gang and Zhong Shidao extremely happy.
The mass production of these cotton-padded coats perfectly filled the gap in the army's needs.
Nowadays, the northern border of the Song Dynasty has moved much further north, and it gets very cold there in winter, so the army's need for cotton-padded clothing has become increasingly urgent.
However, traditional cotton clothing weaving methods simply cannot keep up with this demand.
Now, Li's Cloth Shop has changed this situation.
More accurately, it was the imperial court's road construction in recent years that improved the efficiency of commerce, allowing Li's Cloth Shop to have a sufficient supply of goods and continuously invest in production.
Therefore, the Privy Council ordered a batch of urgent cotton-padded clothes from Li's cloth shop.
There are a total of 50,000 items!
This made the owners of other cloth shops in the capital city extremely envious. At that time, the commerce of the Song Dynasty was still in its most primitive and wild growth stage. The market was blank and there was no competition at all.
As long as you're willing to invest money, you can make money!
Within just half a month, cotton clothing manufacturers in Gyeonggi-ro sprang up like mushrooms after rain.
Everyone knows that the imperial court needs cotton-padded clothes, and with the imperial court as the biggest buyer, there is no worry about not being able to sell them.
Even though the imperial court's needs were saturated, the common people were a vast, dark continent, where money was everywhere.
As a result, the merchants of Tokyo, like hungry wolves, began to spend money to hire people to produce cotton-padded clothes day and night without getting tired.
By this year, Huaxing spinning wheels had become widespread in Tokyo, and steam engines were being used in conjunction with them.
For the first time, private capital began to bleed people dry and tasted the sweetness of it; capital began to bare its sharp fangs.
Throughout the streets of Tokyo, job postings were everywhere, requiring applicants to be able to use a steam engine.
For this reason, some people even established trading companies to teach people how to use steam engines.
It was in this year that the Song Dynasty began to have the atmosphere of the industrial age.
Moreover, many people with foreign features appeared on the streets of Tokyo.
Since the Song Dynasty reclaimed the Hetao region, many merchants from the Western Regions began to travel long distances to Bianjing (Kaifeng) to conduct business with the Song Dynasty.
Furthermore, many people from Central Asia who came to Tokyo fell in love with this most prosperous city in the world.
This also seems to be related to the great victories that the Song Dynasty achieved in its wars in the northwest in recent years.
After the trade routes were opened, the Western Regions seemed to have reopened the door to the world.
The Silk Road, which had been closed and blocked for hundreds of years, is slowly recovering.
For those in the Western Regions, the goods and prosperity of the Central Plains that were once only recorded in books are now something they can experience firsthand.
Zhao Huan was thirty-one years old that year, and he had been back in the Song Dynasty for seven years.
It was snowing heavily outside.
However, in the last month of the seventh year of the Jingkang era, all the highest local administrative leaders in the country came to Tokyo.
The officials reported on their respective situations this year in the imperial court.
At the age of thirty-one, Zhao Huan, sitting on the throne, already possessed an imposing aura that commanded respect without anger. In particular, his two sword-like eyebrows furrowed slightly, giving people an oppressive feeling like Mount Tai.
After listening to reports from various places, the officials of the court publicly raised questions for discussion in the court. For a full half month, they debated and compromised almost every day.
Seeing the officials arguing heatedly in the court, the emperor felt quite gratified.
Problems can only be solved through debate, and Zhao Huan hated those old foxes who only knew how to protect themselves and never said a word.
Do you think I spend so much money every month to invite you here just so you can stand in the court without saying a word?
In that year, the Song Dynasty advanced the five-year highway plan that the emperor had given to Xu Churen the year before.
The nationwide highway system was laid very smoothly, especially after the advent of the steam engine, which increased the speed of cement production several times over. With the increase in cement production, the speed of road laying greatly increased.
Now, not only are all the highways from Tokyo to the four major secondary capitals completed, but the highways from Jiangling Prefecture to Tokyo, Yingtian Prefecture to Tokyo, Daming Prefecture to Tokyo, and even Qingzhou to Tokyo, as well as Zhengzhou and Luoyang to Tokyo, are basically open to traffic.
Because of the large-scale infrastructure construction, the efficiency of commerce and trade has improved rapidly, and the development of commerce and trade has achieved a small leap. Zhao Ding reported that the printing volume of paper money in the seventh year of Jingkang was six times that of the previous year.
The commercial tax submitted by the Zhou Dynasty this year is three times that of last year.
In the seventh year of the Jingkang era, the entire Song Dynasty experienced a leap forward!
Some say that perhaps it was because the Song Dynasty had suffered too many disasters in the sixth year of the Jingkang era that things finally turned around and the good times were over.
Not only did the emperor return victorious from his northern expedition to the grasslands, but the country also enjoyed favorable weather, peace, and prosperity.
Take Jingdong Road for example. It suffered from the Yellow River flood two years ago. In just one year, the seventh year of the Jingkang era, it recovered to the level of the third year of the Jingkang era. The self-repair ability of the people also made a leap after the overall environment improved.
The most direct manifestation of this is that many places have grain surpluses this year!
Thanks to Chen Fu's diligent efforts in developing the Jiangnan region over the past few years, an unprecedented bumper harvest has been achieved.
This further strengthened Zhao Huan's determination to launch a northern expedition against the Jin state.
At the end of the year, Zhao Huan received intelligence from Goryeo.
In desperation, Wang Kai has begun making contact with the Jin Kingdom, possibly seeking to use Jin troops to fight against Miaoqing.
In fact, this reflects Wang Kai's dissatisfaction with the Song Dynasty, and he now intends to side with Wanyan Sheng.
This was a situation that Zhao Huan had anticipated, and he was also thinking that the situation would develop in this direction.
After all, Wang Kai was the legitimate ruler; killing him without a proper title would provoke a nationwide rebellion in Goryeo.
Goryeo is much richer than Japan, and the people there are very arrogant, making them quite troublesome to deal with.
It had to be done step by step. The first step was to send troops to garrison the capital. The second step was to force Wang Kai to rebel against the Song Dynasty. Once conclusive and compelling evidence was found, the royal family would be deposed.
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