But the destination of the immigrant fleet was not the mainland, but the Zhoushan Islands.
To be precise, it is the archipelago south of Daishan Island, bordering the mainland.
Among them, a quarter of the ships stopped at Daishan Island, two-thirds of the ships docked at Zhoushan Island, and the remaining ships went to Jintang Island, which is closer to the mainland.
Zhoushan Islands were inhabited by our ancestors in ancient times. In the Spring and Autumn Period, it belonged to Yue and was called "Yongdong". In the Tang Dynasty, Wengshan County was established separately, but it was later abolished and incorporated into Yin County. In the Song Dynasty, Wang Anshi established the Zhoushan Islands as Changguo County.
From the Southern Song Dynasty to the Yuan Dynasty, maritime trade flourished. Zhoushan was promoted from a county to a prefecture and prospered for a time because of its "dangerous sea routes" and "population doubled by ten thousand".
But in this dynasty, Emperor Taizu strictly enforced the maritime ban, and Zhoushan suffered a devastating blow.
In the 19th year of the Hongwu reign, Tang He requested that the residents of the Zhoushan Islands be relocated to the mainland and the able-bodied men be incorporated into the Ningbo Guard on the grounds that the islands were "isolated islands prone to bandits". This caused many human tragedies at the time.
But Zhoushan's location is too good, with rich fishery resources, and it is a natural maritime trade transit station, and it is also very close to the mainland. Ordinary people who can't make ends meet can row over by sitting on a door panel.
Over the next hundred years, the Zhoushan Islands gradually regained their inhabitants. Shuangyu Island on Liuheng Island became the maritime trade center of East Asia and a sea paradise for smugglers.
Unfortunately, the good times did not last long. Merchants and pirates were often two sides of the same coin. While trading, they would also plunder coastal residents, and the "Japanese invasion" along the coast resurfaced.
In the 26th year of Jiajing, Zhu Wan, the governor of Zhejiang and the admiral of Fujian and Guangdong military affairs, was ordered to come to resist the Japanese pirates. After arriving, he found that the Japanese pirates at this time were no longer the Japanese pirates of the early years of the country. Although there were indeed a large number of Japanese ronin among them, they were just hired thugs. The sea merchants who hired them and most of the sailors were natives of the coastal areas of Fujian and Zhejiang.
Zhu Wan then strictly implemented the baojia system of joint responsibility along the coast, vigorously rectified coastal defense, and in the following year sent a large army to capture Shuangyu, where he executed all captured criminals who colluded with the Japanese. Finally, he spared no effort to block the Shuangyu Port to prevent future troubles.
However, due to the large population and limited land, maritime trade has long been the most important means of livelihood for residents in the southeast coastal areas, and almost every household is directly or indirectly involved in it. Moreover, the backers of the sea merchants are the powerful families, so Zhu Wan was impeached for killing without authorization and was dismissed from office for questioning.
Zhu Wan was a man of high character, and upon hearing the news, she committed suicide. Before she died, she said, "I am poor and sick, and I am also arrogant and conceited. I cannot bear the humiliation of the court. Moreover, even if the emperor does not want to kill me, the people of Fujian and Zhejiang will not let me go. I will die by myself, without the help of others."
After Zhu Wan's death, Wang Zhi tried to rebuild the former glory of Shuangyu in Ligang, Zhoushan. However, in the 32nd year of Jiajing, Wang Rong, the governor of Zhejiang, ordered Yu Dayou to capture Ligang again, and Wang Zhi was defeated and fled to Japan.
After Wang Zhi surrendered and was captured, his remnants once occupied Zhoushan, but were completely wiped out by Qi Jiguang in the Battle of Cengang in the 36th year of Jiajing.
These experiences of being wiped out by the imperial court exposed the shortcomings of the Zhoushan Islands, which were too close to the mainland's important money and grain areas, making it difficult for the imperial court to tolerate them and easy to be attacked by sea. Since then, merchants and pirates have stayed away from Zhoushan, and the once noisy Zhoushan Islands have completely quieted down.
Until the end of the Longqing period, a man who was determined to be the king of the sea ruled the Ming Dynasty's sea borders and took the Zhoushan Islands into his arms without any hesitation.
However, Zhao Hao was unwilling to reopen a port in such a sensitive place as Zhoushan. First, the history here was too easy to cause controversy. Second, Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou were all under his control. Why bother to build a trade center on an island? Wouldn't that be redundant?
So in the first few years, apart from the weather station that provided typhoon warnings to the mainland, Zhoushan only had the Jiangnan Security Group training base on Shengshan Island.
It was not until the beginning of the century-long immigration that the Zhoushan Islands finally found their place again and became the group's northern immigration distribution center and the group's largest immigration transit base.
Except for immigrants from Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan and Guizhou who transit through Hong Kong, immigrants from other provinces in the country must first be concentrated in Zhoushan and then distributed to various administrative regions overseas.
Due to the speed of transferring immigrants overseas, it is inevitable that a large number of immigrants will be stranded on Zhoushan Island, waiting an average of three months before they can depart, and sometimes even up to half a year.
Because the group's sea territory is too vast, the speed of sailboats is limited, and it is restricted by climatic factors such as typhoons and monsoons, this is currently difficult to improve.
The Jiangnan Group, which emphasizes scientific management and is accustomed to careful budgeting, will naturally find ways to arrange things for these prospective immigrants to do, and will not let them waste their time or eat food for nothing.
The Zhoushan Immigration Distribution Center was upgraded to an Immigration Training Center directly under the Immigration Commission. After the original immigrants were assigned, the immigration education that was carried out separately by each administrative region was concentrated in the Zhoushan training center.
This will not only allow immigrants to receive more professional training, allowing them to devote themselves to their new lives in a more relaxed and excellent state, but also reduce the burden on each administrative district, and enable them to obtain new immigrants with higher quality and better adaptability to group management, which is a win-win situation for all.
After 16 years of construction, the Zhoushan Training Center has grown larger and larger. Currently, there are 12 training detachments and 240 training teams on the main island, Daishan Island and Jintang Island, which can provide three-month training for 480,000 prospective immigrants at the same time.
When the country no longer relied on the sea and the government no longer set limits on itself, people soon discovered that the Zhoushan Islands were completely integrated with Jiangnan. It was close to Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou, with extremely low transportation costs and short transportation distances.
With the unprecedentedly strong production capacity in the Jiangnan region, as long as transportation is not a problem, it is not difficult to maintain the operation of such a super base. Moreover, the island's immigrants, training cadres, group employees, and security forces add up to more than 500,000 people. Such strong consumer demand directly led to the economic take-off of the nearest Ningbo Prefecture, and the areas of Shaoxing and Hangzhou also benefited greatly.
This is also the most incredible thing about those traditional scholars. Zhao Hao and the Jiangnan Group spent money like water and made big investments continuously, but they never wasted money and labor like Emperor Yang of Sui and Emperor Chengzu. On the contrary, they made everyone richer and the market more prosperous. It is really unbelievable.
But the miracle happened right before our eyes. After watching it for more than 20 years, even the most stubborn old man could not accept it.
~~
After arriving in Zhoushan, prospective immigrants will be handed over to the management of the training center.
The training center completely breaks up the prospective immigrants into small family units and organizes them into different training teams, so that they can adapt to living with peers from all over the world.
Li Shouzhong and Gaoda were assigned to the 58th Training Brigade, which was headquartered in Wangqingao on Zhoushan Island.
Ao is the name for the plains between mountains in the coastal areas of Fujian and Zhejiang.
Zhoushan Islands are actually a group of islands that have emerged from the water. Therefore, there are many mountains and few flat lands, and even less land suitable for farming. Moreover, most of the land is located at the foot of the mountains and along the coast, and salinization is very serious.
Even if we manage to grow crops, once a typhoon comes and seawater floods in, everything will be over.
Moreover, the Zhoushan Islands are also not immune to the drawbacks of lacking stable surface water and difficulty retaining rainfall. So it is really not a blessed land.
But we are a nation that never bows to nature, so how can we just leave everything to fate?
Our early ancestors lived in the mountains and engaged in fishing, hunting, farming and salt production. They changed their living environment bit by bit by "growing grass to surround the embankment, building sluices beside the mountains", constructing ponds to prevent tides and creating dikes to reclaim land, turning the vast sea into mulberry fields.
Similar to the situation on Chongming Island, the Zhoushan Islands are located at the confluence of the Yangtze River, Yong River and Qiantang River. Huge amounts of silt are rushed into the sea with the waters of the three rivers, dyeing the entire Hangzhou Bay into a yellow-brown color.
Therefore, the Zhoushan Islands are actually standing on muddy tidal flats. Especially during the Tang and Song dynasties, after Chongming Island was formed at the mouth of the Yangtze River, the siltation of the coastal tidal flats in Zhoushan was accelerated, making large-scale polder fields possible.
Moreover, during the Song and Yuan dynasties, the Zhoushan government organized the people to reclaim land, which greatly improved efficiency and resulted in a total increase of 100 square kilometers of land and more than 100,000 acres of arable land.
However, after our dynasty forcibly relocated more than 30,000 residents of the 46 islands of Zhoushan to the inland, a large number of seawalls built during the Song and Yuan dynasties gradually collapsed due to disrepair, and a large amount of gentle slopes and dry land became barren because no one cultivated them.
Although the island was later repopulated, a large-scale project like repairing the seawall required government organization and sufficient labor to carry out, which was obviously beyond the capabilities of Xu Dong, Wang Zhi and others.
But Jiangnan Group is known as a construction maniac, and has a steady stream of free labor. Moreover, they have accumulated a wealth of "sea reclamation" technology on Chongming Island. No one in the world is better at reclamation than them...
Over the past decade or so, the captains and instructors of various training teams, leading wave after wave of prospective immigrants, have built flood-proof seawalls for the entire Zhoushan Island.
Then it expanded outwards in circles. The purpose of building seawalls is no longer to prevent tides, but to reclaim land and promote siltation like in Chongming County!
Today, the training center has reclaimed 300,000 mu of arable land, far exceeding the heyday of the Song and Yuan dynasties! A series of water conservancy projects such as reservoirs and water diversion channels have also been built, basically solving the irrigation problem.
With the addition of terraced fields on the mountain, and the large-scale cultivation of sweet potatoes and potatoes, the center has basically achieved food self-sufficiency...
So when the forty-year-old captain Wang Qi led the 2,000 immigrants from the 58th Brigade to Wangqingao, what Li Shouzhong Gaoda and others saw was a scene with layers of seawalls outside to resist the tides, thousands of hectares of fertile fields inside, white-walled and black-tiled villages built on the hillside, and several rivers winding between the villages and fields...
If there were not the sea outside, one would almost think that this was the Peach Blossom Spring that the man from Wuling in Jin Dynasty accidentally entered.
However, there is a Peach Blossom Island next to Zhoushan Island...
The prospective immigrants were all stunned. This was the paradise they had imagined.
"Brother, if we can live here forever, what's the point?" Gundam drooled.
"Look at what you have accomplished!" Li Shouzhong snorted, but a sparkling line of tears flowed from the corner of his mouth.
Wang Qi looked at their reactions with satisfaction. This was also part of the immigration training and was more convincing than any big promises...
ps. This kind of chapter is really difficult to write and is not pleasing, but I still hope to devote some words to the beautiful new world.
Well, tomorrow we will return to the old world that we love to see and hear...