New Shun 1730

After all these years of struggle, the emperor gradually understood some things according to his logic.

The many wars before were generally for saving money.

And the wars that the overseas expansionists want to wage now are generally for making money.

The logic of war seems to have changed.

Even if it can be understood in this way, the emperor is not in a hurry to start a war.

Dashun now has a Privy Council and an overall national strategy.

It is no longer a headless fly. It is obvious that it wants to fight but it has to wait for the opportunity.

Wait for another opportunity like when it went to Nanyang and Europe started fighting.

For this reason, the emperor specially wrote a reply to the people in Nanyang. The overall meaning is one sentence: Don't go alone.

Be patient with wrangling, crack down on smuggling, only ask for direct responsibility, and don't go to the British East India Company even if you know that it is the British East India Company that is instructing it.

At the same time, tell them that the tariff issues in Muha and Jeddah should be solved by themselves, and they should find the relationships left by the Dutch to bribe. The court will not send a large delegation to Turkey at this time.

The purpose, of course, could not be stated explicitly, and it was even more impossible to tell those who were not in the decision-making circle directly. It was to prevent the visit to Roma from surprising the Rakshasa and thus surrendering to the British.

After finally approving the memorials on issues such as Nanyang, trade, Sino-Turkish relations, Sino-British relations, colonial management, and smuggling, the emperor picked up another very special memorial.

You can call it a memorial.

You can call it an academic discussion paper.

In short, it was the lunar distance method of longitude measurement that Liu Yu had been thinking about. After George Anson took his Centurion and the navigation clock to the Lingdingyang for several years, he finally made a breakthrough.

Euler, a foreign academician of the Dashun Academy of Sciences, gave an approximate formula for the lunar orbit.

But he also painfully said that the three-body problem was not understood at all. After giving this approximate formula, he decided not to touch this problem again in his life. It was a pure waste of time... Save this little energy and study something else.

That is, the approximate formula for the calculation of the lunar orbit is available.

After the death of Newton, the "university clique", Flamsteed's northern hemisphere star catalog was finally retrieved and published.

Dashun's close cooperation with France, as well as its comprehensive cooperation with the Dutch comprador group and its operations in the Cape of Good Hope, also completed the southern hemisphere star catalog.

Three major prerequisite technologies: the approximate formula for the special solution of the three-body problem to the moon, the northern hemisphere star catalog, and the southern hemisphere star catalog are all available.

Theoretically, any ship of Dashun can confidently say "I know where I am" anywhere on the earth as long as there are stars and the moon in the sky!

In other words, the vast oceans of the earth will no longer have islands and continents outside the map.

The earth, or the world, is so big, how many lands and islands there are, that it can be determined.

The rest is just a matter of time.

Just keep sailing, keep mapping longitude and latitude, and draw maps.

However, there is good news for this method.

There is also bad news.

The good news is:

Dashun can't make a navigation clock, and it's okay.

Every ship does not need a navigation clock to get longitude and latitude.

From today on, the central axis of the Forbidden City has a chance to become the prime meridian of the world. Although it is just a chance, it is at least a chance.

The bad news is:

The navigation clock is no longer needed, but every ship must be equipped with a first mate who understands calculus, can quickly calculate equations, has undergone rigorous mathematical training, and must be able to do fast equation group operations.

Depending on the mathematical level of this first mate, the time to calculate longitude varies from two hours to twelve hours.

Without the mathematical ability of elementary and advanced mathematics, you can't be a qualified captain.

Is there a way to solve this problem?

Yes.

Recruit a group of "brain laborers" with high mathematical level.

Really brain laborers.

They need to be responsible for compiling the star and moon distance tables for the second year of Weixin through huge mathematical calculations in the first year of Weixin.

Then, the people on the ship no longer need to calculate in real time, they just need to look up the table like the group of artillerymen.

Not everyone who can use trigonometric tables can use mathematics to calculate the chord of each angle.

Similarly, everyone who can use star tables does not have to use mathematics to calculate those complicated data.

And this "mental labor" solution also has good news and bad news.

The good news is that Dashun's current mathematics level and the ability of local students are fully capable of it.

The bad news is that these students who can do such calculations must be at the level of admission to the Academy of Sciences.

Therefore, Dashun's new education, especially the mathematics department, needs to expand enrollment.

Not only should enrollment be expanded, but the establishment of the Imperial Observatory should also be expanded - if this matter is handed over to the Imperial Observatory, of course, this matter should be handed over to the Imperial Observatory no matter how you look at it.

The Imperial Observatory should expand its establishment by about 400 people, and these people need to be recalculated every year, so they cannot be laid off.

This is also the reason why this memorial was forwarded to the emperor and required the emperor's judgment.

As for material rewards, the Academy of Sciences has its own funds, which earn profits by investing in companies in Songjiang Prefecture to pay for the material rewards of the Academy of Sciences' achievements.

However, directly increasing the number of staff who eat fiscal food and expanding the enrollment of the Academy of Sciences requires going through the court process and getting approval from the court.

This is really not a trivial matter.

It involves the central axis of the Forbidden City, the movement of stars, and the movement of the sun and the moon. This is not something that can be done with money. It is a political issue as serious as a wealthy merchant wearing a dragon robe.

To put it simply, if a group of idiots think that the current economic center and shipping center are in Songjiang Prefecture, and it seems more convenient to set the prime meridian directly at the zero degree, they will kill all nine clans.

However, as long as the political significance of things related to political symbols is considered, the political significance itself is the most meaningless.

For example, writing a sentence "Long live the emperor" on a memorial is almost equivalent to nonsense. It has nothing to do with the matter to be discussed in the memorial, and it seems to be pure nonsense.

But if someone writes a sentence "The emperor does not live long" on a memorial, although the emperor's long live is nonsense, this sentence "Not long live" is a big deal.

At the moment when the emperor received the memorial, he did not need to consider the central axis, the sun, the moon, and the stars. The significance of these things in consideration is infinitely close to zero.

What he had to consider was the significance of expanding enrollment, expanding the staff, and compiling a navigation calendar for his rule.

This significance was still very huge.

For example, the Confucian crisis caused by the opening up of Dashun, the meridian issue, was very meaningful.

Dashun could later take this issue to participate in conferences of countries around the world, and then determine that the meridian of the capital was the prime meridian of the world, thereby achieving a huge spiritual victory for the concept of "China" as the world, rather than the concept of the country.

Ensure the concept of China in the world.

Confucian scholars would be very happy, at least they would not oppose the development of astronomy and mathematics.

People in later generations could not imagine how much the scholars in this prosperous era would collapse and oppose if they got a world map of the Greenwich meridian in later generations and saw that China's longitude was not zero, not the "longitude center" of the world.

Being beaten up and forced to accept it is another matter. If that really happened, these are all trivial matters and don't need to be cared about.

However, now we are in the "steamroller" era, thinking that we can rule the world.

Self-confidence is different from the extremely conservative false self-confidence under the passive impact of modernization.

Whether the meridian is in the capital, Greenwich or Paris, is a very serious political issue at this time when Dashun actively opens up and actively changes the concept of the world.

The emperor really thinks that this approximate formula of the movement of the moon has come at the right time.

He approved the matter with great pleasure, believing that this matter should be handled quickly, and it is not the treasury that pays for it, but the household government.

Hurry up and expand the recruitment, hurry up and increase the establishment, and make this lunar distance star chart navigation calendar as soon as possible.

Of course, if it is only for this reason that the emperor is so happy, it may mean that Dashun’s way forward will end here.

The subtle influence of the previous twenty years seems to be meaningless, and the emperor is still a standard Confucian monarch.

In fact, it is not.

There is another more important reason for the emperor’s happiness, which has nothing to do with the future fight against India.

It is irrelevant. Without this lunar distance table, Dashun would have no problem going to India. It could have gone there with a broken bathtub from Ceylon.

The emperor was considering the issue of gold and silver mines on the southern hemisphere continent.

For example, the sense of crisis in the memorials from Tianjin Prefecture and Nanyang that were just approved. As the head of Dashun's top-down reforms in recent years, the emperor naturally understood it better than those who spontaneously felt the sense of crisis.

The emperor also discussed this matter with people in the core decision-making circle of the reformists, saying that if a war with Europe were to be launched in the future, what would happen if Dashun's overseas trade was affected?

Overseas trade was affected. Now the emperor has understood that this is directly related to a series of issues such as Dashun's money and silver exchange coins, copper coin value, silver price, and the livelihood of workshop workers.

With the huge amount of silver flowing in every year, Dashun's silver price has not depreciated, and even has appreciated slightly relative to copper coins.

Liu Yu could not understand this chaotic, multi-parameter monetary system. Of course, the emperor could not understand it either.

But everyone knows that once overseas trade is cut off, there will definitely be a big impact.

The solution Liu Yu gave was to issue money.

Relying on the state to issue money, carry out construction, and boost production to get through that period.

If you win, you just need to hold on for a while.

If you lose, you may have to build an internal cycle east of the Cape of Good Hope, including India.

You can't just issue paper money. Dashun has always been afraid of the previous dynasty and the Yuan Dynasty issuing paper money.

So, where did the country issue money to issue money, carry out construction, and boost production to get through that period?

Naturally, it has to be found on the continent in the southern hemisphere.

Since there are large gold and silver mines in South America; there are large gold and silver mines in Africa... there is no reason why the large island in the southern hemisphere does not have them.

To find a stable route to develop the large island in the southern hemisphere at this time, it is very necessary to use the lunar distance method star table that can calculate the longitude.

When Liu Yu fooled the British East India Company, he used this reason to exchange the navigation clock technology for Dashun's export license.

Liu Yu considered relying on gold mines to attract capital, and mining requires an agricultural foundation, thus promoting a wave of Dashun immigration to the southern hemisphere.

This also hit the heart of the emperor. The difference is that Liu Yu considered that the people would have enough to eat there, and half of them would die on the way, rather than guarding two or three acres of land at home; the emperor considered that the people would go there to avoid rebellion at home, solve the contradiction between people and land, and dig gold and silver at the same time to boost the court's income.

Spain can build a global empire by digging gold. Dashun can dig gold to get through the period of overseas trade interruption. Maybe it will always be okay.

Through the repair of the Huaihe River and the development of well salt by Shaanxi capital that made a fortune through the Northwest War, the emperor also understood the role of the court's financial regulation.

After all, even the Qing Dynasty Qian Xiaosi understood that paying soldiers is actually promoting the development of industry and commerce. The so-called "soldiers have more money, then the general merchandise can be circulated, and merchants can get natural benefits. Giving favors to soldiers is not without benefit to merchants."

Dashun has been carrying out reforms for more than 20 years. If they don't even understand this principle, it's really not the case.

Understanding this point, now that there is a lunar distance French star chart, Dashun is actually no longer worried about being involved in imperialist colonial wars and going to war with Britain.

Continue to develop industry and commerce, prepare to go to the southern continent to dig gold, save money, once the war is launched, trade will be greatly impacted, and the state will invest in construction and military expansion to get through it.

The emperor felt that by doing so, there would be no crisis of workers losing their jobs and causing unrest, and that the reform could be continued, including the reform of the entire Jiangsu Province and the salt administration, which could be deepened unwaveringly.