The Revolt of the Three Feudatories: All-in at the start in Beijing

Chapter 281 Wu Ancheng's Heartbreaking Journey

Hearing the sound, Liu Mu was quite curious, so he took a few more steps and came to the edge of the mine to look down.

At the bottom of the pit, a foreman was seen grabbing a short man by the collar, holding a whip in his hand, and cursing under his breath.

The short man wore a tattered blouse whose original color was no longer discernible, and he wasn't even wearing straw sandals; his bare feet were on the gravel, and his ankles were shackled. While dodging the whip, he kept shouting, "Baka! I am a noble warrior! How can you make me mine!"

The foreman clearly didn't understand Japanese, nor did he want to. He lashed the man's shoulder with a whip. "What the hell! In this Xishan mine, even if you were a former member of the Eight Banners, you'd still have to work here until you die!"

After the overseer finished speaking, he lashed out with the whip again.

After observing for a while, Liu Mu turned to Ouyang Jing and asked, "How many Japanese pirates are here?"

Ouyang Jing was very familiar with these numbers and answered immediately: "Your Majesty, a total of more than 12,000 Japanese slaves were captured from Tsushima Island and distributed to mines throughout the country. Only 3,000 were distributed to Xishan. However, these 3,000 people have only been here for less than two months, and now less than 1,000 remain."

"More than two thousand people died in less than two months?"

"The mine collapsed once, killing many people. Some of the survivors died from exhaustion, some from diarrhea caused by the change in environment, and some were beaten to death by the overseers for disobeying orders."

Ouyang Jing's tone was very calm, as if he were reporting a loss in the warehouse.

"Your Majesty, rest assured, these Japanese slaves are quite hardworking, but their bodies are too fragile and they can't withstand much exertion. When General Xu's next batch of prisoners arrives, I will give you more."

Ouyang Jing didn't care about the lives of these Japanese slaves. He only knew that these people were free, which would save the Ministry of Works money, and that was good.

Liu Mu glanced down into the pit again, where several Japanese soldiers were pushing a cart of iron ore up from the bottom.

"Give the order to these overseers not to beat them to death. The longer they live, the more ore they can mine for the Han Dynasty. If they die, we have to transport another batch. It's too wasteful. Don't give food to spoiled people. Make sure the mine shafts are properly supported. If they collapse again, I'll have to send people to dig them all over again."

After Liu Mu finished speaking, he turned and walked towards the palace.

This wasn't because Liu Mu was kind-hearted; it was because people are really too fragile. If they continue like this, even the 20 million people on the Japanese islands won't be enough. You have to understand that the 5,000 Eight Banners and their families who were previously assigned here have long since turned to dust.

Before these Japanese slaves arrived, it was the black slaves sent by various countries who were holding the fort. Even so, the Ministry of Works still exploited them day and night. Even American capitalists in later generations would shed tears when they saw this.

……

Shuozhou, formerly known as Kazakhstan, is the land that Wu Ancheng bought for 300,000 taels of silver. Looking around, the sky is gray, the land is yellow, and there isn't a single piece of cultivated land.

It seems we really were fooled by the emperor!

However, since the money had already been spent, he had to make the trip. So, starting last spring, he led the Wu family, whom he had organized, from Yangzhou. However, the further west they went, the more desolate the place became. When they reached Shuozhou, there was no official road left.

Half of the fellow villagers and craftsmen who accompanied the group gave up halfway through the journey, preferring to pay the penalty for breach of contract rather than continue.

When they finally saw the boundary marker, it was a wooden sign that the clerk sent by Shuozhou Province had stuck in the ground, with the three characters "Shanyang County" written crookedly on it.

Looking at the desolate surroundings and the chill of the north wind, Wu Ancheng could only think, "Three hundred thousand taels for this?"

The land granted to him by Shuozhou was located on the southern slope of the Ural Mountains, several hundred miles away from Shuozhou City. The nearest Han Chinese settlement was a military fortress, where about a hundred garrison soldiers were stationed.

If you travel another two hundred miles to the west, you will reach the front line where the Han Dynasty and Tsarist Russia are locked in a standoff. It is said that both sides have built fortifications there, and neither side can push the other, resulting in a stalemate that has lasted for almost two years.

Wu Ancheng was of course unaware of these things. When he invested money in Nanjing, the map shown to him by the Ministry of Rites was drawn on silk. The small map was marked with the words "Shanyang County: fertile land, abundant water and grass, suitable for farming and animal husbandry".

Now it seems that none of the twelve characters are true.

Later, when he learned his exact location, the city was already halfway built. He spent an entire afternoon studying the map issued by Shuozhou Prefecture, and finally found Shanyang County in the westernmost corner of the map.

If Liu Mu were here, he would know that this is the city of Gay in the later Tsarist Russia, which belongs to the Orsk region.

Despite the complaints, the city still had to be built. Without it, the whole family would freeze to death in the winter. So Wu Ancheng spent money to hire several official craftsmen from Shuozhou who knew how to build cities, and also invited Qi Yanzhao, the governor of Shuozhou, to recruit several hundred slaves who could carry heavy loads. Together with the craftsmen he hired and the tenants who volunteered to come along, they began to ram the earth next to the wooden sign.

The city wall was made of loess mixed with lime, and it was built up inch by inch, following the style of the city walls in the Central Plains. The work was carried out from spring to autumn, and it was considered completed when it reached a height of two zhang (approximately 6.6 meters).

The entire city is oriented west to west, with each side measuring just over a mile in length. It can barely fit a dozen rows of houses, an ancestral hall, a granary, and a small drill ground. Above each of the western city gates, there is a blue stone plaque inscribed with the two characters "Shanyang".

Just a few days after the city wall was completed, Wu Ancheng was planning to clear some wasteland outside the city to plant some winter wheat to alleviate the economic pressure when the servants on the city gate tower started beating gongs and drums and shouting that the cavalry was coming.

When Wu Ancheng climbed onto the city wall, he discovered that the approaching force was not Han cavalry. However, Wu Ancheng was inexperienced, and if it weren't for his eldest son's knowledgeable explanation that it was Rakshasa cavalry, he would have almost opened the gate.

The horses ridden by those cavalrymen were generally taller and stronger than those of the Han Dynasty. The riders wore chainmail, mirrored armor on their chests, and scimitars and muskets at their waists.

However, behind these cavalrymen followed a large, dark mass of infantrymen. They were of all races, dressed in all sorts of tattered clothes, and carried a motley collection of weapons, from scimitars to spears to sharpened wooden sticks.

Moreover, everyone had the same look of fear on their faces, clearly indicating that they had been captured and used as cannon fodder in the siege.

"I told you I'd been fooled by the imperial court; all they promised was a plaque—nothing was true!"

Wu Ancheng pulled his head back from the edge of the battlements, sweat rolling down his face. After grumbling for a moment, he looked at his son, who was wearing fish-scale armor and a Western-style helmet.

"Xiong'er, three hundred thousand taels of silver to buy a low-ranking county marquis position, plus the money spent on gathering fellow villagers, acquiring resources, and building the city along the way, has already exhausted the Wu family's savings accumulated over a century. Do you know how much that is?"

"If these demons break in today, it doesn't matter if I, Wu Ancheng, weigh over a hundred pounds, am left here, but your mother, your sister, and your third concubine are all in the city, and our Wu family's savings of over a hundred years will be reduced to ashes!"

"Simplifying things is a terrible thing!"