Liao Meng climbed down from the deck of the "Polang" with a little head-heavy foot. He was a land duck and was very dizzy as soon as he got on the boat. He hadn't changed much after so many years. Therefore, during this long-distance voyage, he spent most of his time lying on the wooden bed in the captain's "Polang" room for rest. Now when he arrived at the dock of Xinhua Port, he was weak in his legs and weak in his feet - this was dizzy. Fortunately, the symptoms were mild and he could still persist.

Seeing his soldiers lined up on the dock with the officer's command, most of them looked pretty good, Liao Meng couldn't help but smile bitterly. With the help of the loyal orderly soldier, he was sent to the guesthouse in the city to rest. As for military affairs, he had to be entrusted to the deputy company commander Bai Shui for the time being.

After several months of construction, Xinhuaburg has been very different from before. Thanks to the completion and commissioning of a wheel kiln designed to produce more than 40 million red bricks per year (currently estimated to produce more than 20 million yuan per year), the construction of Xinhuaburg has entered a period of rapid development after the dry season.

First, the construction of Xinhuaburg city. From the end of February, Shi Qinjie ordered the Eight Banners slaves to start digging mountains and quarrying on nearby mountains. Due to the dokarst karst terrain here, many of the large stones that were opened with gunpowder were large stones. These large stones were very suitable for building foundations and walls, and could be used with just a little polishing. Therefore, at no cost, the Eight Banners slaves gritted their teeth and went deep into the upstream mountainous areas, mined them one by one, and then used canoe to pull them downstream wood processing factory docks along the river, and then used several temporary rough carriages to pull the stones to the construction site.

The large-scale use of these stones greatly alleviated the dilemma of insufficient bricks in this place and strongly supported the construction of the construction site. As of the beginning of this month (October 1641), the construction length of the Xinhua Fortress wall had exceeded 650 meters. This had reached the circumference of some small local castles. Unfortunately, Schenjie had very high requirements for Xinhua Fortress, and the city circumference was more than 1,200 meters in the planning, so the current city wall was only about half completed.

Faced with such a construction maniac, the commander of the garrison here, Xu Gang, the commander of the garrison, once helplessly told him that precious building materials should be used on the three forts at the cape entrance, rather than building useless city walls. Because in Xu Gang's view, the people on the east coast only need to build the forts at the cape entrance and block the narrow waterway. Then the enemy will not be able to attack Xinhua Fort deep inside the bay, unless they give up landing from the bay entrance and attack from other places. However, in that case the problem is even greater, which means that they will at least have to cross a mountain road that is nearly twenty kilometers long - a mountain road covered with tropical rainforests, which is purely for death.

Therefore, in Xu Gang's view, the construction of the city wall of Xinhua Castle is completely useless. The continuous mountains and dense primeval forests around Xinhua Castle are the best barriers, and no one except those natives can know the roads in these dense forests. However, Shi Qinjie still insists on building a complete city wall in Xinhua Castle, the reason is that he will start a war with the natives in the south sooner or later. He heard that these natives have established a feudal dynasty. Then it is best to build the city wall, the only place where people on the east coast of Xinhua Castle, is the safest place to build the city wall.

However, Shi Qinjie was not a person who didn't understand the truth. Several forts at the entrance of New Huaxia Bay were extremely important. They were all relying on them to control the bay and resist the enemy outside the gate. Therefore, he also allocated three or four hundred Eight Banners slaves to him. Later, Xu Gang brought the 101st company to the south and stuffed him more than 400 Malay slaves. Under the command of the supervisor, the total of these eight hundred slaves were logged and cleared the ground at the three selected fortress addresses, and while starting to build the fort.

It took more than seven months to finally build more than twenty artillery positions one after another. Now, as long as the artillery is installed and the gunner is trained, Xinhuaxia Bay will no longer be a place where people can enter and exit without any cover. After the manpower and supplies are abundant in the future, the remaining artillery positions will be built. At the same time, the land defense fortress, military barracks and navigation lighthouses will be built one after another. In short, this is a long-term project.

The construction of houses in the city has not been lost. In addition to the warehouses, hospitals, governments, health centers, arsenals and other facilities that have been built before, several rows of neat rows of residential houses have also been built, with a total of about one hundred sets, divided into four residential areas by a cross-crossing Malu. Of course, these houses are far from enough for so many free residents in the city to live in. There are more than 500 free residents in the city, most of which are Irish men, and the population is more than 1,000. The houses now only meet less than one-third of the living needs. Most of them can only squeeze in damp wooden houses, waiting for the monthly quota for building materials to be released before going to "lottery". Those who shake the number can get 20,000 bricks, and then the person in charge of each residential area will organize the staff of the entire area to use their spare time to build houses for them.

The daily work of these Irish people is also extremely heavy. Over the past few days, they have either digging trenches, burying underground drainage pipes, processing timber in a wood processing plant, or building irrigation canals, and they have never been able to relax. Even when they are working hard to dig trenches, the newly assigned Malay wife is still responsible for picking up soil, which shows the hardships of the work.

The only motivation to support them to continue working is the land that the New China Colonial Government announced that it would be allocated to them. This land is located near the Coconut Tree Creek Reservoir, about 4,000 acres. According to regulations, each family can be divided into ten acres. All residents allocated to the land will be divided into four or six in the first two years with the government, and the remaining 5 or five in the next three years. After five consecutive years, the land will belong to the individual. In the future, only 20% of the land harvest will be paid every year.

This distribution system was uniformly formulated and implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture in the local and all overseas colonies. Although the first five years were equivalent to a large number of exploitation of these farmers assigned to the fields, these Irish people did not think so. They were all landless farmers in the country and attached great importance to the ownership of the land. When they heard that they could get a piece of cultivated land that belonged to them forever, they were suddenly excited and even the efficiency of working had been greatly improved. Moreover, the superiors also told them that

As long as they work hard to earn money, they can also buy up to no more than twenty acres of land from the government at a low price of five yuan per mu. This means that each family can have up to thirty acres of arable land, which is absolutely unimaginable in Ireland. Therefore, their support for the government is definitely from the heart at this time. As long as someone dares to challenge the rule of the East Coast people and challenge the desire of these Irish farmers for land, they dare to fight with these people.

The 4,000 acres of land were opened when the rainy season just ended in April. At that time, Shi Qinjie organized people to light a fire on the marked land, and directly burned the weeds, trees, shrubs and other things on it into ashes to fertilize the fields. After the burning was over, the land began to level, clear the small stones on it, dig drains, etc. After all, the farmers began to cultivate the land and sow seeds.

The brothers of the 101st Company of the Army were very powerful. The Bezimisalaka people from the south fought several times and returned victoriously. Not only did they capture more than 2,000 slaves back, they also brought back a large number of hump cattle for Xinhua Fort. These hump cattle played a huge role in plowing the land, and similarly, those slaves also played a huge role in building irrigation facilities.

The main sows in the fields are sweet potatoes and corn seeds. Four rows of sweet potato tubers and a row of corn seeds are sown per acre of land, and sweet potatoes and corn seeds are implemented. Both crops are deep-rooted crops, which can better absorb the fertility of deep soil and are very suitable for planting in areas with strong tropical leaching effects. Moreover, more importantly, these two crops are both high-yield crops. With the barren brick red soil in the New China region, if you don’t plant some high-yield crops, you can only drink the northwest wind.

In mid-April, Xinhuaburg organized these Irish farmers to sow seeds, and by early August it had grown and matured and could harvest. Since it was the first year of land reclamation, and the soil was relatively barren and no fertilizers and pesticides were applied, the harvest in the first season was relatively cold.

On average, only 120 kilograms of corn and 430 kilograms of sweet potatoes were harvested per mu, which was far from the initial expectation of 650-700 kilograms of grain per mu. However, these grains are abundant enough for the New China Colony, which is not very large. More than 4,000 acres of farmland have harvested a total of about 250 tons of corn and 900 tons of sweet potatoes. These grains are almost enough for everyone, including slaves, to eat for a year. Not to mention that the light and thermal conditions and water resources are abundant here, and the crop growth cycle is extremely fast. As soon as the last batch of crops was harvested, a new round of sowing began in mid-August. This batch of crops is expected to be harvested when the rainy season just started in early December and not to mention that the harvesting of more than 4,000 acres of farmland entered the rainy season fallow period.
Chapter completed!