New Shun 1730

Apart from this, the most unreliable option is to dig rivers in advance, build embankments, artificially divert rivers, and immigrate in advance.

But the prince listened to his father's wishes. If he did this, wouldn't he be repeating Liu Yu's old reform path in Songsu?

Before anything happened, immigration, labor levy, river construction, and forced relocation had begun. By then, wouldn’t all the grievances fall on the court?

If Liu Yu did not reform in Songsu, hundreds of thousands of people would die every year, and no one would be responsible.

However, he carried out reforms and forced relocation of people. The innocent souls who died of malaria and malaria in Nanyang every year would also fall on Liu Yu's head.

If the Yellow River really bursts and millions of people drown, and the remaining people are given relief, then the imperial court will be benevolent and righteous, similar to the benevolence of the three generations of Sage Yu.

But if the Yellow River did not burst, and there was no threat of flooding from the Yellow River in Shandong, but it began to forcibly relocate people and build river embankments and channels in advance, wouldn't the imperial court be like the cruelty of the First Emperor when he built the Great Wall and Sui Yang opened the canal?

Moreover, this involves a large-scale migration of millions of people. If it is really done, it will definitely be a top-notch project for Dashun.

Returning to the Western Regions and going to Southeast Asia are simply child's play compared to this.

Changing the course of the Yellow River is definitely a big deal for the traditional dynasties of the world.

The matter is definitely as big as subjugating the country, Huang Chao, Li Zicheng and the like.

In fact, the fact that the prince dared to think so also proved the prince's naivety.

Of course humans can conquer nature and transform it. But it has to be matched with productivity.

Stone Age Bronze Age, conquer the impact plains.

In the Iron Age, conquer the swamps and mountains.

After the reform of Dashun, we will make do with Hongze Lake and Huaihe River.

So, can the Yellow River be restrained?

able.

But obviously, not now.

Because I don’t have the ability.

It is not only technical, but also requires the organizational power of a modern country to complete.

Those people from the Dashunshi School are a little lost. After the Huaihe River was opened to the sea, some people thought that the Yellow River could be diverted artificially.

This is normal.

Judging from the momentum of this greatest technological advancement since the use of fire, people from the Practical School believe that I can use mathematics to predict the return of comets, try to measure the distance between the earth and the sun, and try to replace human power with machinery... …It doesn’t seem to be difficult to circumnavigate the Yellow River, right?

In this era, Dashun’s enlightened optimism is like this. It is different from the optimism of theistic existence of Leibniz of the European Enlightenment.

Although, it can all be called optimism.

However, optimism can. In fact, it can't be played.

Changes at the social level have not been achieved, and organizational control capabilities are weak.

At this level, the entire lower reaches of the Huaihe River would already need to be mobilized by the whole country - under the conditions of almost the same productivity level and technology in later generations, it would be a matter of prefecture-level cities - but now it is quite a task to use the power of the whole country. After more than two years of government fiscal surplus, the Huaihe River was slightly restored.

Forget it about the Yellow River.

In theory, can it be done?

In theory, yes, even stupid methods can.

Survey and map in advance to prepare a fifteen-kilometer-wide no-man's land.

On both sides of this reserved no-man's land, a set of backup Yellow River embankments will be built from Kaifeng and other frequent breaches all the way to the Bohai Sea.

Not only people, but all the rivers along the way have made way for this embankment.

How big a project is this?

It is more than 1,000 kilometers and 15 kilometers wide. When calculating the marginal impact area, there is approximately 30,000 square kilometers of no-man's land created artificially.

There are four Yellow River embankments with no Yellow River at all.

Because it cannot be too wide, a narrower river channel must be built in advance to facilitate the water of the Yellow River to wash away. Otherwise, the 15-kilometer-wide river will be silted up very quickly.

This is not the end.

Once the Yellow River bursts, even if water is introduced into this uninhabited land, it will take at least ten years for the Yellow River to stabilize.

Because in the past ten years, the Yellow River will slowly rely on water flow to carve out a river channel for itself.

Before the Yellow River is completely stable, a large amount of money needs to be invested every year to maintain the Yellow River.

You can spend money to repair the Huaihe River.

To repair the Yellow River, corvee labor had to be collected, which could not be afforded by money alone, because the imperial court could not afford to support a group of workers who were separated from agricultural production and specifically responsible for the Yellow River channel, and to support them for decades.

The seemingly simplest thing here is the planned area of ​​30,000 square kilometers of uninhabited land.

With the same area of ​​30,000 square kilometers, it seemed not difficult for Liu Yu to start it in Yanhu District in northern Jiangsu.

But if these 30,000 square kilometers are built in Henan and Shandong, it is really... difficult to reach the sky.

This is still the simplest of all the questions here.

The 30,000 square kilometers in Henan and Shandong are completely different from the 30,000 square kilometers in Northern Jiangsu that was almost turned into hell before.

During the Ming Dynasty, standing on the city wall of Yancheng, you could directly see the coming and going of the sea. That's Subei.

As for people in Shandong, Henan... Dashun, even the concept of eight hundred miles of water in Liangshan can only be understood from Shi Naian, who experienced the early Ming Dynasty.

Which of the counties, cities, prefectures and states that may be affected along the way does not have a population of hundreds of thousands or hundreds of thousands?

Caozhou, Yuncheng, Heze, Dongping, Wenshang, Pingyin, Yiping, Feicheng, Qihe, Licheng, Jiyang, Qidong, Putai, Lijin, Jining, Dongchang, Wuding... less than 1500 years old Historically, I would feel embarrassed here.

This is a completely different 20,000 to 30,000 square kilometers from Liu Yu's 20,000 to 30,000 square kilometers in northern Jiangsu.

Henan and Shandong have already been fully cultivated. These 30,000 square kilometers can be considered to be almost all cultivated land - because it is impossible to dig into the mountains to dig rivers, it must be on the plains. There are actually still plains in Henan and Shandong Not a place for farming?

It can be considered to be approximately 45 million acres of cultivated land.

The total number of people affected along the way is approximately four to five million, or even more.

This does not include those who need to do corvee labor or work, but only those who need to migrate.

It’s not that you don’t need to move if you don’t live in the river, but if the land is there, you have to move it, because it’s hard to say whether the Dashun of this year, or the entire world market, can accommodate one million industrial people. People who don’t have land can only arrange land for them.

Dashun has never needed the sheep-eating-human land-enclosure movement to create cheap urban labor. For now, without land-enclosure, the number of disaster victims, refugees, and tenant farmers will be a headache every day.

This is still the simplest, most feasible and easiest thing to solve among a series of problems in the Yellow River.

The rest, relocating people, building embankments, surveying and mapping, opening rivers, demolishing embankments, and relocating existing rivers... all of them are more difficult than this.

What do you think about this matter?

If the emperor is really determined, in order to completely control the floods in North China, in order to prevent millions of people from being affected by the disaster, even if it is said that subjectively to continue his rule, he must do this. Those who have political ideas and a clear program and are addicted to the absolute rebellion of the feudal dynasty may put off the idea of ​​making some big news for a few years.

Because the Yellow River floods are not something that ends in a "swish" year.

Rather, if it is ignored and allowed to break out, it will be a continuous disaster for at least about ten years.

flood.

Swinging back and forth without a fixed channel.

Salinization after flooding.

There will inevitably be a large-scale locust plague after the flood - the locust plague is an inevitable follow-up.

riot.

uprising.

Resist.

Don't die of hunger in peace.

Corruption.

corvée.

Break to the south.

Horizontal spread caused by ocean tide intrusion.

Refugees.

A plague following the death of large numbers of people.

Spread of disease from corpses in floods.

South-to-north inundation caused by rising altitude and sedimentation.

The people and officials of Shandong, who had not been psychologically prepared to deal with Huang for six hundred years, were at a loss.

Wait, wait, it will take at least seven or eight years, at least five or six years, before the Yellow River can stabilize its course and take a fixed route into the sea.

At least it was a catastrophe of tens of millions of people, killing six to seven million people.

By focusing on distorted productivity-only progress, you can have investment options in other directions.

Set your goal on true benevolence, justice and moral governance. No matter how difficult it is, you should try to do it.

With the goal of serving the nation or serving our compatriots, of course we have to do this.

As for the more ambitious ideal, it goes without saying.

However, the prince did not think in this direction at this time, nor did he think in the twisted direction of productivity.

He just felt that his father would not be satisfied if he expressed this idea.

Because from the perspective of feudal imperial power, being Bian Que is the right choice; being Bian Que's eldest brother and second brother are both wrong choices.

Moreover, choosing to do this means that there is a high possibility of failure, and it is not guaranteed to succeed.

If you don’t do it, you won’t fail.

However, he has not yet answered the question that the emperor asked him now.

The prince felt that the few options that could be answered were not suitable, or the emperor would not be willing to listen, or some of them sounded like they were deliberately digging holes to lure.

Now suppose you know that the Yellow River will burst but do not take care of it, then whose responsibility will it be if something goes wrong in the future?

After thinking for a long time, the prince finally said: "My son is stupid and I really don't know how to deal with this matter. Please give me some advice."

The emperor sighed quietly in his heart, and the slight disappointment and dissatisfaction he felt just now was finally suppressed.

At the beginning, he trained the prince in the style of a "ruling monarch".

At that time, the emperor felt that by conquering the Rakshasa in the north and recovering the Western Regions in the west, the world would be at peace in the future. It is nothing more than continuing to carry out the reform of the Southwest, and these conservative monarchs are enough.

Many troubles could be solved before his death, leaving his son a perfect and prosperous life.

However, even the emperor himself did not know that in the past 20 years, so many new things had come one after another; Dashun's strategic focus changed again and again; in the end, he had to consider the idea of ​​internal and external division.

In the end, it was discovered that Dashun had been kidnapped by the times and had to take the initiative to move forward, otherwise something big would happen.

In the past more than a thousand years, in the prosperous times, there was no problem for the Lord Shoucheng to be the successor.

Because the changes are not that big and the foundation is strong enough, as long as you don't risk your life and create a situation like a wooden fortress, generally speaking, there will be no problem.

But now, it is difficult to maintain the two words.

In the past, Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty asked his courtiers: Which is more difficult for an emperor to start a business or to maintain it?

But now, how can we maintain success? Every step must be pioneered. Even if you want to be a defensive king, in the current situation of Dashun, you have to do a few big things to gain prestige in order to be able to defend it.

Seeing that the prince was forced by him and didn't know how to answer for a while, the emperor also understood that there were some ideas that the prince was unlikely to say out loud even if he thought of them in his heart.

So he said: "My son, remember this. This matter can be the responsibility of the minister of water conservancy and river engineering, or the responsibility of the emperor, or the responsibility of someone else, or it can be the responsibility of no one."

"But no matter which one is chosen, the choice should be in the hands of the emperor. And the emperor should not change his orders every day."

"Either don't do it, or do it to the end."