Zheng Chongjian had a certain understanding of the artillery of the Guandi Army through previous records of war, but when he was roaring with dense shells, he was still frightened and frightened.

A personal soldier pressed his shoulder regardless of concern. As soon as he pressed him behind the earthen wall, a "whizzing" sound of breaking through the air came from above his head, followed by a dense loud noise and scream.

The first round of artillery bombardment of the Guandi Army was just a test shot. Without adjustment, the accuracy deviation was very large. Some shells fell in front of the camp, some hit the earth wall, and some crossed the earth wall and smashed into the camp, smashing some unlucky people to pieces.

After the sound of breaking through the air, Zheng Chongjian quickly stood up and looked around, and saw a few bloody corpses and several wailing wounded soldiers on the ground not far away.

"Hurry, fire the cannon, hurry!" He couldn't help but shout.

There are five cannons purchased by Zheng Zhilong and Folang Jimen in Jiaoziya Camp last year. The range is three miles away and they are loaded in advance. However, the Guandi Army had already measured the distance and angle. The pre-loaded cannons opened fire immediately as soon as they entered the artillery position and were fixed. The Ming army's artillery was still measuring the distance and adjusting.

After fiddling with each other for a long time, the Ming army's artillery finally launched the first round of artillery bombings, but the only five shells were outrageously accurate. Moreover, the Guandi army's artillery positions were all covered with sandbag protection, so those few shells did not pose a threat at all.

After a brief adjustment, the second round of artillery attacks of the Guandi Army arrived soon, targeting the Ming army's artillery.

The Ming army built an earthen wall on the mountain, and the artillery was hidden behind the earthen wall. Even the powerful and extremely accurate General Tianwei cannon could not destroy the opponent in a short time.

However, some of the thirty shells occasionally hit the fence of Jiaozi Cliff, and even hit some unlucky Ming army, which still caused great damage to the Ming army.

When the two sides fired artillery, the Guandi army in the rear was not idle. Some were busy setting up camps and preparing for a long-term confrontation, some were busy digging soil to load sandbags, preparing to use sandbags to continue building other artillery positions, and some were dispersed into teams ranging from dozens to hundreds of people. They crossed the mountains and walked around Jiaozi Cliff to sweep the small Ming army near Jiaozi Cliff to Taiyuan, and cut off the connection between Jiaozi Cliff and Taiyuan.

On the day when Qin Chuan led his army to attack Jiaoziya, Li Dingliang ordered his eight thousand Wudang camp troops to divide into two groups, leaving Ningwu Pass, entering the Shuozhou Plain, sweeping all the Ming army's sentry forts along the way, forcing the Ming army into Shuozhou City, and the other route was from Hongchi Fort east of Ningwu Pass. Because of the few troops, there were few firearms and few firearms, he did not attack the Ming army built in a steep place, but bypassing the Ming army that swept away many small paths.

Qinchuan’s purpose is to allow hungry people to enter their own governance. If hungry people have no supplies, they can also come in on mountain paths. They just need to send people to set up porridge sheds to help them to avoid starving or exhausting a large number of hungry people in the mountains.

Almost at the same time, Luo Ba, Ren Liang and Feng Yilong also led their troops to attack from all directions. They did not attack the toughest, but only cleared the blockade of each path, opening up the passages in the Taiyuan Basin, Linfen Basin, Pingyang Prefecture, Yan'an Prefecture, Qingyang Prefecture and other places.

While the army attacked from all sides, the Ministry of Revenue also recruited civilians from all over the country to repair or widen mountain paths, eliminate obstacles, set up porridge sheds and plague isolation areas along the way, preparing to welcome hungry people.

Nowadays, except for the prosperous areas along the southeast coast, other areas of the Ming Dynasty have experienced severe cold and severe droughts year after year. From Shanxi and Shaanxi to Zhili in the north, to Henan, Huguang and Shandong, there are hungry people who are wandering and begging due to natural disasters and man-made disasters. In the past two years, the reputation of Qinchuan has spread all over the country. When hungry people from all over the country heard that there was food here, they flocked to northwest Shanxi to seek survival.

Along the way, countless hungry people starved to death on the way. People who arrived in northwestern Shanxi thought they could finally survive, but unexpectedly, the imperial army completely blocked northwestern Shanxi, and even the dangerous mountain roads for collecting mountain goods were blocked.

A large number of desperate hungry people starved to death on the edge of Luliang Mountain and fell to the intersection of the prosperous plains in central and southern Shanxi and the barren northwestern Shanxi.

The hungry people who were unwilling to accept their fate continued to move forward and bravely moved towards northwest Shanxi. What came towards them was the ruthless massacre of the imperial army. A very small number of hungry people who broke through the blockade and entered the mountains ended up starving to death or freezing to death in the mountains or died in the mouths of beasts.

Qin Chuan walked around Jiaoziya camp and patrolled the Taiyuan along a mountain path. Along the way, he saw dozens of corpses half hidden in the snow, or incompletely eaten by wild animals.

There are men who are extremely empty in their eyes as if they are haggard and their eyes are pecked away by crows, and there are babies who are still sleeping soundly in their mother's arms.

According to the information collected by Lao Huang, from the Xinzhou Basin to the south to the Fenzhou area, the bodies of hungry people had already piled up like mountains and were buried. There were also Gulou, south of Yongning Prefecture and many unknown corpses in the mountainous areas of Xixian area.

In the second half of last year alone, the hungry people arrived at the northwestern Shanxi edge in one million, but in the second half of the year, only less than 30,000 hungry people were received in the Qinchuan administration.

Most of the million hungry people were dead.

He starved to death, froze to death, and died under the sword of the Ming Dynasty.

Qin Chuan was in a heavy mood.

The world is not kind to treat all things as straw dogs, and the sages are not kind to treat the people as straw dogs.

He is not a saint and cannot regard the people as straw dogs. They are living lives.

When he came to this era, his mission was to save the lives of more people and build a country that was so strong that it could sweep the world.

The Guandi Army attacked from all directions caught the Ming army off guard. Except for the Taiyuan area that received an ultimatum three days in advance, the other Ming army strongholds that blocked the path could not stop the Guandi Army's raid.

On the third day of the full-scale attack, except for the Ming army camps where all the important roads were built in dangerous places, the other small roads and forts had been wiped out and killed more than 600 Ming troops and captured more than 1,800 prisoners.

The Guandi Army began to enter the Xinzhou Basin, Taiyuan Basin and Linfen Basin, gathering and guiding the hungry people who were frightened by the war.

The hungry people flocked to northwestern Shanxi in the second half of last year were not dead, but the number was not large. It was extremely cold after winter, and few people could get here.

Fearing from the reputation of the Guandi Army, the Ming army of all walks of life only huddled in the camp and did not dare to come out. Occasionally, generals who were not afraid of death led their troops to attack and wanted to intercept a small group of Guandi Army in exchange for credit. They were soon defeated by the Guandi Army, which had extremely fast mobility and reaction.

There was a large number of Ming troops east of Yongning Prefecture. The Guandi army immediately pretended to retreat and led the other party deep into the room to seek help, hoping to join forces to defeat the Ming army, but the other party was very alert and chased after only a few miles and hurriedly withdrew back to the camp.

Jiaoziya Camp is a chicken in Qin Chuan's eyes, killing the chicken to scare the monkey.

He wanted to completely defeat or even wipe out the Ming army to warn Zhu Youjian.

If you dare to close the road again, one will kill one, and two will beat a pair.

...

In mid-February of the first year of Chongde in the Qing Dynasty, Huang Taiji issued an edict in Shengjing to formally establish the Eight Banners of Mongolia, Eight Banners of Han and Eight Banners of Chao.

At the same time, Huang Taiji also issued a hair shaving order and a clothing change order, requiring all three-foot-tall children and adult men on the Korean Peninsula, which have been included in the Qing Dynasty, to shave their hair and braids, and to make all officials on the Korean Peninsula dress, sacrificial activities and other activities must be followed by the Qing Dynasty system, and those who violate the order shall be beheaded.

After shaving his head, he suddenly heard the sound of killing at the lower peninsula and howled everywhere.

The Li family of Korea was deeply influenced by Confucian culture in the Central Plains, and the idea of ​​"the body, hair and skin are not dared to be damaged by their parents" also penetrated into the bones of the Li Dynasty literati.

For a time, many literati rose up to resist the shaving order. Uprisings in various places under the banner of restoring the Li Dynasty continued, and the Korean Peninsula became boiling until the Qing Dynasty Jiannu waved his butcher knife and blood flowed into a river. The brief boiling quickly returned to calm.

Not long after, the results of the first demographic were also presented to Huang Taiji.

He obtained more than 2.6 million people from the Korean Peninsula, far lower than the initial estimate, because a large number of Korean troops and people died in the conquest and plunder of the Qing Dynasty. Secondly, the rebels in the Shaved Order and the Change of Costs, the uprisingers, etc. were also slaughtered.

In addition, a large number of Koreans fled to the Ming and Japan by boat. According to the investigation, before the Qing army entered the Jeolla Road and Gyeongsang Road, a large number of ships traveled back and forth between the Denrais and Jeolla Road in the Ming Dynasty, as well as between Kyushu and Gyeongsang Road in Japan. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Koreans escaped.

Nearly half of the more than 2.6 million people included were slaves. Huang Taiji ordered people to roughly identify and select strong and strong people to join the Korean army. The remaining ones were not incorporated into the Eight Banners, but were all given to the Eight Banners as robbers, and the Eight Banners were allocated by the Banners, and the owners of each banner were assigned by themselves in the banner.

The main labor force of the Qing Dynasty was coated. In the past, coated was composed of the original Liaodong Han people and Han people who entered the pass several times, with a total of less than 200,000 people. Now, there are suddenly more than one million coated clothes, which is enough to allow each household in the Eight Banners to get several, which can greatly increase the labor force and allow the Eight Banners to reclaim a large amount of farmland to increase grain output.

Apart from slavery, the population of the Eight Banners of the Dynasty still reached more than 1.4 million, seven times more than the full population.

The population of the Eight Banners of the Han Dynasty was not large. Originally, there were hundreds of thousands of Han people living in Liaodong. However, after Nurhaci controlled Liaodong, a large number of Han people and wealthy families were massacred, causing a large number of Han people to flee to Korea or cross the sea through Lushun to return to the Ming Dynasty, which led to a sharp decline in the number of Han people in Liaodong.

In the second year of Chongzhen, most of the Han people who returned to the pass twice in the seventh year of Chongzhen became Baoyi slaves. Naturally, these people could not be incorporated into the Eight Banners. The main population of the Eight Banners was composed of tens of thousands of Han people brought by the former Liaodong Han people and Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming. The total number was only 160,000, which was less than that of the Eight Banners.

The Eight Mongolian Banners include all the tribes in the south of the desert outside Chahar and Ordos, with a population of nearly 300,000.

The total population of the Eight Banners of Manchu, Eight Banners of Mongolia, Eight Banners of Han and Eight Banners of Chaos was 2.1 million. In addition to the Baoyi slaves, the Qing Dynasty had a population of 3.5 million.

A large population means that a large number of troops can be trained.

Almost all young and strong men in the Manchu Eight Banners were soldiers. They could recruit about 50,000 troops during wartime, and almost all the people in the Mongolian Eight Banners were soldiers, and they could recruit at least 70,000 troops. The Han Eight Banners had trained 20,000 troops, and 60,000 troops were organized to target the Eight Banners, with a total force of 200,000.

Huang Taiji naturally would not be satisfied with this. He planned to train another 10,000 Han Eight Banners this year to make the Han army's troops reach 30,000, and in addition, train another 40,000 Eight Banners to make the Korean army's troops reach 100,000.

By then, the total strength of the Qing Dynasty will reach 250,000.
Chapter completed!