The Zhoushan exercise made Zhao Kuo show off his nationalism in front of his own people. He focused on rescuing several "hostages" sentenced to Lingchi by the Qing Dynasty. Of course, they did not mention that they were smuggled. He used the wonderful writing of Confucian scum such as the help of the country to advocate that he was the reincarnation of Emperor Hongwu, who resisted the oppression of the Qing Dynasty, saved his Han compatriots;

In front of the politicians of the great powers, he beautifully put on a pose: See who can solve the trouble caused by the Manchu silly x? How long did you use diplomacy? It’s still Zhao Kuo! Of course, this is because he is a rebel, and there is no need for negotiation, and the Manchu Qing Dynasty will not talk to him. In the essence of the smuggling trade that did trample on the essence of the Qing Dynasty's laws, the great powers still need to take some international law as a cover. Zhao Kuo doesn’t need it at all. He runs naked and kills the Manchu Qing Dynasty. He is both shameless and has this strength.

In front of foreign merchants, they used their actions to show their strength and determination to protect trade. "Look, I am so competent, and I have not wasted the naval military expenses you donated."

So amid the cheers and firecrackers from Haijing, Zhao Kuo was proudly nesting in the Governor's Office to read the comments of newspapers from various countries on this incident. He looked at it himself, and several Chinese and foreign officials next to him even read it. He laughed when he was proud and smacked his lips when he was secretly happy.

Because warships from various countries watched the battle of Zhao Kuo coming to the door to get steel pipes to draw the Qing Dynasty, comments were everywhere.

The French were obviously resentful to the British-built warships and the large number of British sailors on it. French newspapers mocked the Song Dynasty's navy's ship-controlling skills in a variety of ways, saying that it was exactly the same as the drunkard's walking posture. If the Qing soldiers were not too incompetent and the artillery was too bad, this time it might have turned into suicide bombardment.

The British looked down on the French artillery and gunners on the ship, saying: Considering that the Song Dynasty robbery team had just been renamed as the navy recently, facing the Avenger, a behemoth that had never been seen on the mainland, it was not easy to do this for the first time voyage and combat, and they also brought a transport fleet; mainly because the artillery level was too poor, and it was not that artillery could kill opponents at all. The Song Dynasty mainly relied on the momentum of artillery to scare away the Qing defenders in Tucheng.

The Americans disdained both. They were still slaughtering slaves and were very racist. They said directly: navigation and shelling are both technical jobs, while yellow people are obviously not suitable for technical jobs, and mining or farming are still suitable.

But Zhao Kuo looked down on this, he snorted and shouted, "Don't worry, the Navy hasn't spent much money anyway!"

Only when it was first established, the high salary of hiring Davidson, the bare-pole general and the ship, paid a sum of money, and then provided the cheapest resources on the mainland - manpower and soldiers. Later, they gave them the Fujian Xiaodao Uprisingers who almost disbanded on the spot, as rattan soldiers for the battle of boat-catching and landing.

The latter two were not expensive at all, and as the thief team competently eliminated pirates, the merchants began to donate arms and artillery to them. Later, they even donated two larger warships!

Merchants never do business at a loss. This money is actually just transferring part of the losses from the Qing Dynasty blackmail and pirate robbery to them. Disguised protection fees and mercenaries - to put it bluntly, the army of Western countries now also belongs to public resources, and taxes are commissions to transfer taxes to military expenses.

It is precisely because of the rampant pirates in the seas of China and the shamelessness of the Manqing Navy that the rising star of the Song Dynasty was equivalent to snatching food from the tiger's mouth and he brought up his own team and strength.

So Zhao Kuo didn't care about the current level of the navy. No matter how good it was, he could beat the Qing Dynasty and the pirates. This was enough to be qualified to collect protection fees, and he didn't spend money, so how good it was to pick up a stick for free! What else can I complain about?!

But rare, the Americans praised the combat literacy of the first Little Knife Legion who snatched the beach.

Not only the Americans, but all observers of the great powers praised the performance of the Little Knife Legion, believing that this army was quick to react, fiercely fighting, high morale and very high-level.

Several American journalists even advocated the battle performance of the Knife Legion: "This group of Chinese soldiers wore blue uniforms made of coarse cloth, with two Knife marks on their arms. When transporting on the ship, many people wore straw sandals, even barefoots, and heavy Chinese-style knives on their backs. Although the muskets they carried were the most sophisticated, they were not unified. British, French, American, and weapons from all countries were available. Just from the appearance, it was hard to see that this group of people was not a mob, but a group of yellow-skinned warriors.

When they joined the battle, they cursed and looked indifferent, but they could jump out of the boat as fast as a cheetah and attacked the shore with bullets and artillery fearlessly.

They did not use the common Western-style shooting and advancement methods, but instead spread out scattered squads to attack the enemy. They had good shooting skills and could kill Qing soldiers like mooses in the distance. I said this because we can clearly see that Qing soldiers fell one by one before them.

When they approach the enemy's position, they will pull out the big sword behind them, or use bayonets, shouting and striking violently to attack the enemy's position. The Qing soldiers had no choice but to escape.

And all this is not done with organization and order, but is entirely based on everyone's personal heroism and excellent combat skills.

If the battlefield is not in a vast land, I suspect that our army will have to pay a high price to deal with them.

They remind me of hunters from the southern states of my hometown. They are naturally disgusted with order and military discipline. They are always marching in a row, but they can scatter and hide in the grass and shoot at the enemy and prey. They are all outstanding and brave warriors."

"After working on it for a long time, this Little Knife Legion is similar to the American Southern Army." Zhao Kuo was stunned when he saw this and shouted: "No! This is obviously unorganized and undisciplined! What happened to Davidson and Luo Qianjie?" Then he tilted his head again and sighed: "Why do I care about so much? The Little Knife Legion kills pirates and suppresses bandits. That's all."

Read another article, but it was written by a British man named Weston. In the paragraph involving the Knife Legion, it obviously had "colored" eyes: "... As for the Knife Legion that claimed to have captured the county town, God, these cruel guys committed crimes again! They robbed and burned all the occupied Dinghai County. The only thing they were glad that this time, the poor could survive in addition to the rich, but this could not cover up their crimes. I have seen this group of thugs attacking the enemy who had lost their resistance more than once, without any judgment. They determined their military achievements with the enemy's head and called on the consuls of various countries to ask the Emperor of Song to control the law enforcement efforts of these people and treat the people in the occupied areas with a more gentle attitude..."

"Damn, what army has become a thug?" Zhao Kuo cursed: "I clearly emphasize faith and military discipline. I am better than my sons than my sons. I have not become the emperor of the world yet, so I have to pretend to be shameless! This British bastard slandered me! Do you understand this and talk about the people's hearts!"

After thinking about it, I suddenly realized that this Little Knife Legion is not his direct unit at all. It is worse than the stepmothers like the Sun and Moon Legion, and is completely a wild child. This is why I developed the current legion spirit.

"I c, I unconsciously created a Hunan Army." Zhao Kuo shook his head depressedly.

The characteristic of the Hunan Army is that it is capable of fighting and has high organization, but it is extremely bad for civilian military discipline and does everything he wants to burn, kill, loot and loot. Zeng Guofan always turns a blind eye, but they are different from the Xiaodao Legion.

Apart from this attack on Zhoushan, the Little Knife Legion had never had a "civilian" in the ordinary sense.

This wild child army, the enemy has always been pirates with their blood hatred.

The famous Chinese pirates are cunning and cruel. They are a group of gangsters who cut off their prey to pieces. The meat tickets smile and cut off their ears and noses to bring money to their families. If you do too much of this kind, everyone will be cruel; even more so for the enemy, because of the characteristics of water war, especially the ancient style of ship-to-ship catching ships with no way out on the ocean. Whoever loses will be allowed to be fished by the other party, so both sides will be more fierce than land wars, and even more so for pirates. As long as they lose the ship and are captured, they will be killed in battle or beheaded on land. The outcome will be the same.

So they all fought against the government army with no chance of life. The situation was unfavorable and they could only blow up the gunpowder cabin and die together.

The Manqing Navy was afraid of being beaten, but the Song Dynasty robbery team was different.

This army backbone is either a bounty hunter of foreigners or a Taiping Army that came down from the land fire just now. The combat effectiveness may not be stronger than that of pirates, but the courage is never inferior to that of the opponent. In addition, the backing is a warlord like Zhao Kuo. Once the face is broken, no one of the two strong men will be convinced. They will immediately fight to the death on the ocean.

Both sides have to be defeated and are afraid of their opponents, and they are trying to fight to the death.

There is no such thing as prisoners of war in this kind of battle, only life and death - pirates will not catch a prisoner of the Song Dynasty as a meat ticket like they would catch a soldier in the Qing Dynasty. The Song Dynasty's navy also does not need to capture prisoners at all, as long as the head-supplication - the saying does not exist when both sides are evenly matched.

At this time, the Little Knife Legion was sent to the thief team to act as an army role in the navy.

To put it bluntly, it is the master who competes with pirate meat and knife.

Originally, if it weren't for the Little Knife Legion, but instead of the Taiping Army, there would probably be no such ruthless Little Knife Legion that was later.

Just because the Knife Legion is a wild child.

They were not the Taiping Army, but the failed Fujian uprising rescued by the Taiping Army, and they were the dwarfs who were living under the roof.

Not only did there be no factional support in the army—Zhao Kuo’s officers were all Gui, Hunan, and Guangdong, and there were no Fujian people at all, and 6,000 brothers were disbanded on the spot. A group of Fujianese were in Guangdong, a strange place where they were unfamiliar. If they did not receive military pay, Zhao Kuo would not give severance payments—you have to thank him for your life. What can they do? Be a sailor? Go to Nanyang again to be a coolie?

Therefore, although the 500 people left under Zhao Kuo's command were small, they were all selected from the Xiaodao Uprising Army at a ratio of 14:1. They were all strong and brave men with no mention of their physical fitness.

Once you join the navy, you have no chance or qualification to be lazy and sloppy: Davidson is an old mercenary, and he just wants to do things with money and won't tell you about the Qing civilization; Luo Qianjie is young, but Zhao Kuo's subordinates are just loyal and a cold little one-eyed dragon who is serious about military discipline every day and kills his own people without blinking.

If one of these Fujianese people does not fight hard, they will be kicked out of the army and get out of the army or go to justice on the spot. They don’t even have any place to reason, because in Fujian dialect, these foreigners and the Taiping Army do not understand very well.

In this case, these strangers can only do the same in New York like the later Beijingers in New York. In order to survive, they have to do it, let alone brushing plates, and carrying the corpse. Of course, they are doing this desperately.

But soon, they found that the job was very expensive.

Because Zhao Kuo "only gives policies but not funds", the small anti-thief team started by escorting the opium ships to the "Song Royal Transportation Company" to make some money. However, if the anti-thief team makes money by themselves, Zhao Kuo doesn't want it (he didn't expect to have money), so he let Davidson deal with it himself. Davidson had a big hat of admiral on his head, but he was just a mercenary leader thinking: all spoils are divided by their own military achievements.

Soon, the Knife Legion and the Anti-Thief Team fell in love with forcibly landing in plagiarized pirate ships or pirate nests on islands: pirates have been working for decades, and some are money, and the sea in the Far East is also full of onepieces of pirate bosses. They landed in blood, killed all the pirates, and took away the pirates' savings.

Of course, in this process, severe torture is indispensable. When the pirates fall into the hands of the thief team, the only luxury is to die soon.

Later, with the promulgation of the pirate decree, the pirates began to attack pirate dens and villages along the coast, kill all the pirates and their families, and take away everything they could take away.

These are all blood hatreds. If the pirates can let Manqing Shui Master go, then when they see the blue-bottom cross flag, their faces are either pale or their eyes are red.

Hate is relative.

While the bags were bulging, the Little Knife Team did not need the naval leaders to say that they would train every day and upgrade their equipment with commissions. They had long thrown away the rattan rust knife that Zhao Kuofa took out from somewhere, and went to the Western arms dealer to buy the best weapons and the best ammunition, but they were fighting their own lives.

They are actually the first army to be fully fired in Haisong. Except for cannons, they don’t buy everything themselves.

Everyone has their own nature, marksmanship, and swordsmanship. Those who fail have died long ago at the hands of pirates. The combat style is personal heroism, and the cohesion of Fujian fellow villagers in a foreign land, and their combat power is extremely strong.

But this group of pirates known as "pirates" are accustomed to mercenaries. Because of the particularity of the enemy, they have to rob property wherever they occupy. This time, the targeted destruction of the yamen gates and other cities has been expanded to looting in the entire county.

However, neither Davidson nor Luo Qianjie thought there was anything wrong with this - their Navy and Xiaodao Army have always done this, and no one cares that this time they are targeting not pirate bases, but Manchukuo coastal defense bases.

Of course, although they are similar to the fact that they work hard to make a fortune, they are different from the Hunan Army's organization of nepotism. The group organized by nepotism has risen as a whole, but you cannot surpass the leader, that is rebellion, because the highest leader of the Hunan Army is Zeng Guofan, and his subordinates cannot be promoted to him. However, Xiaodao Legion is an emperor. Although it is essentially a warlord, in name only can you give any title or official position. Therefore, in addition to the relationship between fellow villagers, Xiaodao Legion also has the honor of the legion. As a soil for improving organizational strength, this is not nepotism but a public instrument.

Because the controlled sea area is getting bigger and bigger, while Zhao Kuo's naval ships increase, it is also easy to expand the Knife Legion to 1,000 people.

"A army can fight. They are not an army that conquered cities and lands. I will not shell Ningbo and shell Shanghai every day. Besides, it doesn't cost money. I will take care of it if I pick it up for nothing." Zhao Kuo snorted coldly. This "small peasant thought" also set a tone for the military spirit of the "Song Ocean Army Army" that made the Far East coast countries scared in the future, so that the emperor has never been able to get rid of the hats of "imperialist lackey" and "imperialism".

With the navy that he supported himself and the Little Knife Legion he picked up, Zhao Kuo quickly defeated the scattered pirate forces and the Manqing Naval Division with the lowest combat power on the continent, and mastered the East China and the South China Sea of ​​the Far East. This period of time when Haisong started his business is also called the "Dirty Iron Age".

Because of the legality of maritime trade and the protection of any commodity (including opium), driven by the Qing Dynasty's policy of closing the country, Haisong quickly became a distribution base for marine trade goods in the Far East.

The goods from various countries arrived at Haisong and sent to all parts of the Qing Dynasty, especially opium. Haisong became a veritable maritime smuggling base. By protecting this business and acting as a distributor of the Qing Dynasty, as well as violent monopoly on domestic opium and the establishment of an international opium trust, the price of opium was increased and the cost of bribery and corruption that was originally required by the Qing Dynasty. Haisong gathered his first pot of gold.

This first pot of gold, carrying the blood of the Qing people, became the stepping stone for Hai Song to make his fortune.

Because later generations believed that opium was a drug and was completely banned, this bloody fact could not be easily erased by Chinese historians, but most experts just said lightly: "Given the cognitive level at that time, the people of Yuan Haisong can only say that they are sorry..."

Or maybe the Warriors were blunt: "Whose original accumulation does not contain blood? With the achievements of the Sea Emperor, it can be completely negligible. Isn't Hai Song the first country in the world to legislate to ban opium?!"

"Is it the first thing the Qing Dynasty prohibited?" a retorted man whispered.

"You can't be the Sea Emperor, right? The Qing Dynasty banned many things, such as corruption, levying heavy taxes, accepting bribes and playing with laws, such as opium prostitutes. Except for words, what kind of rotten to the core can actually be banned?" Someone would immediately refute, saying: "The Sea Emperor is also very sad about opium, and all the industries he invested in will be added with the word "royal". Only the Haisong Yang Pharmaceutical Guild once did not have this two words! With the Sea Emperor's perspective that transcends the times, he is a saint who was once a year of 500 years!"

But he would not know that a hundred years ago, the time traveler Zhao Kuo was looking at the year-end profits of the opium monopoly industry and the Royal Transportation Company, and smiled shamelessly: "I am sad! Whether the flood is surging after death is not something that people like me can control. I have lived safely and steadily through this damn desert island!"

Moreover, Zhao Kuo is not completely surpassing the times, and he shamelessly hinders the development of the times.

After the opium trust succeeded in manipulating opium prices, the great merchants in Britain, France and the United States tasted the sweetness because the two major trade windows in the Far East: Haijing and Shanghai, which are not far apart, but this not far distance blocks the goods to Haijing, where the commodity trade is more developed. The big merchants in Shanghai are eager to know Haijing's trade information.

Driven by huge interests, they immediately wanted to use the top technology of the time: Telegraph!

Lay a submarine telegraph line from Haijing to Shanghai - so that the prices and information of various items such as raw opium tea can be obtained almost instantly from Haijing, the distribution center.

"What? Do you want to lay a telegram line? Now you have it?" Zhao Kuo widened his eyes in disbelief and shouted at the representatives of the businessmen.

But the business representatives were even more surprised. Even the British translator didn't know what the word telegram was. Zhao Kuo immediately slapped the table. He obviously understood what it was.

"Yes. And you don't need to invest in it. We raise funds and lay it out ourselves. Of course you can invest in shares. You can also use our telegram at will. You should know that this can easily let you understand the situation in Shanghai and facilitate your business and war."

Zhao Kuo calmed down his surprise of witnessing the miracle of the times, and began to think about the gains and losses of this matter in his mind: the telegram is good, but the other end is in Shanghai, and Shanghai is not my territory. If you know about my information here, you will soon know where there is opium? The Tea Chamber of Commerce will fuck me to distribute goods here? It is more convenient to go directly to Shanghai! I am just a rebel, surrounded by the Qing Dynasty on all sides. How can the distribution level of goods flow be compared to Shanghai? Even the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom used the Yangtze River to smuggle silk to Shanghai!

If there is a telegram between Haijing and Shanghai, damn, I will lose half of the foreigners here immediately!

Go to die in Shanghai!

Go to die by telegram!

Let's die with new technology!

Thinking of this, Zhao Kuo chuckled a few times and said, "This telegram is good. But Shanghai is the area where Qing Yao falls. If a telegram is laid here and there, our intelligence Qing Yao can clearly and immediately know it. This threatens our military security! It is absolutely not possible!" Then he rubbed his hands and said, "But if you want to set up a telegram pole in my Song Dynasty, I will definitely welcome you with both hands."

The foreigners were shocked, but they didn't expect that this very enlightened guy would deny this commercial facility so directly. Several people hurriedly wanted to convince the emperor: "Your Majesty, how could this involve military security? You can send someone to supervise us to send newspapers... We are all merchants..."

"Unless Shanghai is mine, it will definitely not work!" Zhao Kuo sneered: "Absolutely not work! Threat military security! Please come back with everyone!"

After hearing the complaints from Ma Dichen who was rejected in the newly completed luxury British Chamber of Commerce Hall (British Consulate), Sir Wenhan sneered and said, "My dear friend, do you understand why I am armed with the Qing Dynasty now?"

"What's the relationship between arming the Qing Dynasty and laying telegrams?" Ma Dichen asked in confusion.
To be continued...