February 27, Ryukyu, Shuri Castle.

In 1426, Shuri unified the three mountains according to Shi Shangbashi, and after establishing the Ryukyu Kingdom, he dug dragon pools, built gardens, and made Shuri Castle the royal city. The second Sho Dynasty also used this as its capital, and its king Shojin once made great contributions to Shuri Castle.

It was expanded and its layout was based on the Forbidden City of the Ming Dynasty. In 1609, the Japanese Satsuma clan invaded and Shuri Castle was plundered.

Located in the southeast of Shuri Castle, the section of the city wall of Jiseimon is a double-layered city wall with a width of more than five meters, and a large number of strips of stone are used as the foundation, which is very strong. The old Satsuma Domain resident in Ryukyu, Yoshio Ueda, led more than 200 remnants of the city wall.

The army, with its back against the city wall, used several strong official warehouses as its final stronghold to carry out the final stubborn resistance.

Yoshio Ueda originally thought that with the solid defense facilities of Shuri Outer Port and Shuri Imperial Castle, he could hold on for at least half a year and inflict a large number of casualties on the Qi army.

However, to his despair, the Qi army captured Shuri Outer Harbor in just two days and wiped out more than 500 defenders. Subsequently, the Qi army spent more than ten days after encircling Shuri City.

, dragged several powerful cannons to the foot of Shuri Castle, and then began to violently bombard the city wall.

After three consecutive days of bombardment, cracks and partial collapse of a section of Shuri East Castle wall uncontrollably appeared, which gave the Satsuma army defending the city a deep sense of powerlessness. The Qi army did not attack the city at all.

, relying on its own powerful artillery to bombard the city wall from a distance, and sometimes occasionally firing a few rounds of explosive shells, killing a large number of Satsuma troops on the top of the city.

On February 24, the eastern section of Shuri Castle was bombarded with a gap of more than 30 meters. After several rounds of artillery bombardment, the death squads of the Loyalty Army, as the vanguard of the army, shouted loudly, raised their long swords and headed towards the city.

He rushed in through the gap. Later, the Ming troops from Zheng Sen's tribe and Gu Rong's tribe also followed and rushed into the city.

The Satsuma army of less than 2,000 people put up a desperate resistance, relying on every house and government office to engage in a brutal street battle with the coalition forces that invaded the city.

After paying hundreds of casualties, the coalition forces were a little annoyed by the Satsuma Army's crazy counterattack. With the acquiescence of the Qi Army commander, the coalition soldiers no longer fought with the Satsuma Army street by street and house by house, and began to set fires everywhere in the city, trying to

Force the Satsuma soldiers out of the house where they were hiding and then annihilate them.

A few days later, the once prosperous Shuri Imperial Castle suffered another disaster. It was like a hell. Almost all the houses in the city were ablaze with fires. Countless innocent Ryukyu people died. Allied soldiers attacked with muskets, swords, shields and grenades.

The soldiers formed a combination and began to clear out the exposed Satsuma troops in the city point by point.

By February 26, most of the Satsuma army was annihilated in the city, leaving only about 200 remnant troops near the Jisei Gate in the southeast of the city. They relied on the strong city walls and official warehouses as cover to carry out a final stubborn resistance.

Faced with the madness of the Satsuma Army, the coalition forces did not want to uselessly persuade them to surrender. They drove hundreds of Ryukyu civilians and kept throwing firewood branches to the place where the Satsuma Army was stationed, trying to smoke them out of the stronghold with fireworks and finally annihilate them.

.

Seeing this, more than 50 Satsuma soldiers rushed out from the stronghold and tried to drive away the Ryukyu people who were throwing firewood. However, they fell to the ground under the fire of the Qi army's muskets, which had taken time to prepare.

When attacking the Satsuma Army, what surprised the coalition forces was that the firearms they possessed were very rare, almost non-existent, and could not even match the firearms equipment rate of Guangnan Kingdom's army.

Some Japanese officers accompanying the army explained that many military officials learned that after the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate, in addition to promulgating the strict "Sword Hunting Order", another prohibition was also issued, that is, a strict ban on firearms. Except for a few shogunate officials and close samurai,

No one else in the country was allowed to own guns, let alone produce them, causing the muskets and artillery that once played a key role in the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate to gradually disappear.

After the raging fire burned for a day and a night, the coalition officers and soldiers tentatively broke into the Jisei Gate, only to find that the remaining more than a hundred Satsuma soldiers had committed suicide, and no one was left alive.

After clearing the Satsuma army on Ryukyu Island, the coalition forces gathered again and took more than thirty ships to attack Kagoshima and go straight to the Satsuma clan's home base.

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March 12, 1658, Kagoshima, Kyushu, Japan.

Japan's feudal society, which has lasted for thousands of years, has complex stratification, and everyone's status is inherited from the previous generation. During the Tokugawa shogunate period, this system was consolidated and the daily behavior of each class was stipulated.

Specific content. The head of the family must post a sign of his class at the door of his home, as well as the necessary explanations about his hereditary status. His clothing, the food he can buy, and the house he can legally live in are all regulated based on his hereditary status.

There are four hereditary classes below the royal family and court nobles. According to the order, they are: warriors (warriors), farmers, workers and merchants. Ranked behind are the untouchables. Among the untouchables, they are the largest and most well-known.

"Duoduo" refers to those who engage in filth

People in dirty industries. They are the "untouchable people" in Japan. To be more precise, they are not even regarded as people because even the roads through their villages are not counted as mileage, just like this land

It's as if its inhabitants don't even exist.

However, this group of people who were extremely poor and excluded from the formal social structure were suddenly recruited by the feudal lord on this day. Under the leadership of samurai, they came to the vicinity of Kagoshima Castle with bamboo spears.

In addition to untouchables like them, countless warriors and farmers were also quickly armed, and began to conduct high-intensity military training with only one meal of gruel in the morning and a rice ball at noon.

From the first sight, it seems that the entire Kagoshima area has become a sea of ​​soldiers. As for whether the feudal lord summoned so many troops to resist the shogun, or whether he was competing with other daimyo over territory or interests, all untouchables did not consider it at all.

Too much. For them, it is such a pleasant thing to have a free meal of gruel and a rice ball every day.

As Japan's second largest feudal lord, the Shimazu clan (the largest feudal clan is Kaga Domain) with a total of 728,000 koku, in addition to holding Satsuma Kingdom, Osumi Kingdom and Hyuga Kingdom, occupying the southern territory of Kyushu, dominating the southwest of Japan.

area.

Before the Battle of Sekigahara broke out, Shimazu Yoshihiro, the 17th generation head of the Shimazu clan, originally accepted Tokugawa Ieyasu's request for reinforcements and planned to lead an army of about 1,500 people to help Tokugawa Ieyasu's retainer Torii Motochu to defend Fushimi Castle.

, but whether it was due to insufficient information transmission at the time or other reasons, Torii Motoda did not receive the relevant news and refused Shimazu Yoshihiro's request to enter the city to assist in the defense, which made Shimazu Yoshihiro angry and joined the Western Army.

The battle of Sekigahara was decided after only one day. When the defeat of the Western Army was a foregone conclusion, in the face of the collapse of many friendly forces, Shimazu Yoshihiro successfully broke through the encirclement and returned to Satsuma safely, retaining his

Genki. After the war, the Shimazu family

Tokugawa Ieyasu adopted a posture of military subservience, that is, on the one hand, he strengthened the armed forces within the territory to consolidate the national border, and on the other hand, through diplomatic means such as Konoe Nobuin, Ii Naomasa, Yamaguchi Naotomo, etc., he hoped to obtain Tokugawa Ieyasu.

understanding.

Considering that the Shimadzu clan is located in a remote area in the southwest, it is inconvenient to send out a large army for conquest. In addition, the Satsuma clan still maintains a strong military strength (the strength is estimated to be more than 10,000). Therefore, after some threats of force, Tokugawa Ieyasu had to pinch

nose and

The Shimadzu clan reached a settlement. As punishment, the leader Shimazu Yoshihiro had to live in seclusion. He was succeeded by his second son Shimazu Tadatsune, who became the 18th generation head of the Shimazu clan. After his succession, Shimazu Tadashiro officially founded the Satsuma Domain, which was

The first feudal lord of Satsuma Domain.

As the second generation lord of the Satsuma Domain, Shimazu Mitsuhisa's tenure coincided with the completion of the Tokugawa Shogunate's isolation policy, which severely affected overseas trade, which was the main source of finance for the Satsuma Domain, and the debts within the domain began to increase. Shimazu

Zhonghengshi's debt of 20,000 taels of silver suddenly expanded to 350,000 taels of silver, and the feudal government was in embarrassment for a while.

Therefore, in order to ease finances, Shimazu Mitsuhisa began to appoint his elder Shimazu Hisumichi in Nagano (now Nagano, Satsuma-cho, Satsuma-gun, Kagoshima Prefecture) and other places in the 17th year of Kanei (1640), hoping to

The financial pressure was relieved through open source. However, the mining of Jinshan in Satsuma Domain only lasted for two years before it was obstructed and suppressed by the shogunate, and the work was finally forced to stop in the 20th year of Kanei (1643).

As a result, the Shimazu clan began to increase their exploitation of Ryukyu, and through this place, they conducted so-called "tribute trade" with the Ming Dynasty, which somewhat improved the domain's finances.

More than ten years ago, the Qi people occupied several small islands in the southern part of Ryukyu and built them as transfer points for immigrant supplies. Considering that those remote islands had no output and Qi had a strong maritime force, Satsuma

The feudal lord then acquiesced to the Qi people's influence on several small islands in the southern part of Ryukyu.

Later, as the Qi State continued to transfer a large number of various industrial products from their distant Han continent during the process of immigration, the Satsuma Domain started a smuggling trade with the Qi State, and conquered the Qi State in Ryukyu.

Goods are resold along the coast of Kyushu and Honshu

The best-selling products and huge profits made the Satsuma Domain very profitable, earning tens of thousands of taels of silver every year. In less than ten years, not only had all the debts within the domain been paid off, but they also accumulated hundreds of thousands of taels of silver.

, allowing the Satsuma Domain to further grow in strength.

However, as Qi's ambitions for Ryukyu grew stronger, cracks began to appear in the close business partnership between the two parties. When the Satsuma clan's elders in Ryukyu sent word that the Qi people had transferred the prince of Ryukyu to the southern region of Ryukyu,

It also occupied two strongholds in the area, showing faint signs of wanting to control the Ryukyu royal family.

As a daimyo lord with noble qualities, Shimazu Mitsuhisa felt that his dignity and status had been rudely provoked. Ryukyu was obtained with the blood of his fathers and countless loyal and brave warriors, and it further demonstrated the Shimazu family's martial arts.

A sign of long-lasting luck. Now, a fan thousands of miles away

The small country intends to use despicable means to take away Ryukyu. Once such consequences occur, the Shimazu clan of the Satsuma domain will become a joke to all Japanese daimyo. Even this move will make the Tokugawa clan in Edo City secretly

It's so cool, haha, someone finally came to weaken the Shimadzu family's strength.

What's even more irritating is that this group of Qi people who have no principles of integrity actually colluded with the Choshu Domain Mori clan in order to gain more business interests, established business ties, and attempted to lay out a smuggling business network that would radiate to the Honshu region.

.This move will greatly weaken the smuggling channels that the Satsuma Domain has worked hard to establish for more than ten years, and will seem to gradually exclude the Shimadzu family.

It is unbearable!

The people of Qi must be punished to make them realize that the dignity and interests of the Shimazu family do not tolerate any blasphemy and infringement.

Last September, the Satsuma clan, which had been planning for a long time, dispatched more than 6,000 troops to Ryukyu. They first eliminated the commercial and political forces deployed by the Qi people in Shuri Outer Port and Shuri Royal Castle in Ryukyu, and then attacked Hanxing Island where they were entrenched.

Hexinghedao. However, the war was proceeding extremely unevenly.

Shun, except for capturing an inconspicuous island and capturing more than a thousand immigrants from the Ming Dynasty, they were unable to capture Hanxing Island and Xinghe Island, and even a small fortress in the northwest of Ryukyu could not be conquered.

However, the Satsuma army lost more than a thousand people one after another, which made Shimazu Mitsuhisa very dissatisfied.

When the Qi warships began to return to Ryukyu waters one after another, Shimazu Mitsuhisa's elder Yoshio Ueda, who was stationed in Ryukyu, withdrew more than 2,000 troops to Kagoshima and ordered him to lead the remaining troops to defend Ryukyu and inflict heavy damage on the Qi army.

To prevent them from crossing the sea to attack Kagoshima.

However, in December last year, sporadic Qi warships appeared along the coast of Kagoshima. Any ships they intercepted and encountered, including fishing boats and merchant ships belonging to the Satsuma Domain, were sunk or captured. As for the Ming Kingdom, other

The daimyo, as well as the Dutch merchant ships and Qi warships will be driven back or persuaded to leave.

On Shodan Day (January 1, 1658), when the Shimazu clan of the Satsuma domain was holding a New Year prayer event, five Qi warships suddenly broke into Kagoshima Bay and bombarded the port.

Although several Kagoshima forts launched a tenacious counterattack, there was a certain gap between the number and quality of artillery and the Qi naval guns at sea. After two hours of shelling, although the three Qi naval guns

The battleships were all damaged to varying degrees, but most of the more than ten artillery pieces that the Satsuma Domain had accumulated for decades to deploy were destroyed, and more than 100 personnel were killed or injured.

Under the gaze of all Kagoshima soldiers and civilians, the Qi warships that completed the bombardment mission turned around and sailed out of the harbor. Immediately afterwards, the Qi warships successively bombarded several towns and cities near Kagoshima until

In the evening, we just set sail and sailed away.

Since Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched the Kyushu Campaign in 1587, and the Shimazu clan surrendered to Hideyoshi and established the Satsuma Domain during the Tokugawa Shogunate, Kagoshima has never been invaded by a foreign enemy in the past seventy years. Today, on Shodan Day,

Under the gaze of countless soldiers and civilians in the domain, warships from the Qi Kingdom brazenly attacked the Kagoshima port, completely humiliating and provoking the Shimazu clan.

Immediately, Shimazu Mitsuhisa ordered a large number of people in the domain to be recruited into the army. He wanted to form an army of ten thousand people to go on an expedition to Ryukyu. In addition to washing away the shame, he also wanted to use this to demonstrate the prosperity of the Satsuma domain's martial arts and make the daimyo and Tokugawa who were laughing at the joke.

I don't dare to have any wrong thoughts.
To be continued...