The two brothers all worked together with the patriarch of the family and the old shopkeeper, and the grain industry of the Qing Dynasty could not be more familiar with it when they were cooked.

After thousands of years of agricultural development in the Central Plains, the potential of the land has long been exhausted, the desertification of the Guanzhong Plain has become more and more severe, the trend of drought in Shanxi has also intensified, the population of Zhili has grown and the output of farmland is no longer enough for the locals to eat, and the situation in Henan, the major provinces of the Central Plains, and Shandong is not optimistic.

The land of abundance in Sichuan is blessed by the blessings of the ancestral water conservancy system, and the people's life is quite passable, but due to the difficulty of the Shu Road, it is difficult for the grain of the Sichuan Plain to be integrated into the grain trade system of the Central Plains, and can only be digested locally.

Now the food lifeline of the Great Qing Kingdom is pinched in the Lianghu region and the Jiangnan region, and only these two areas can still have some grain production surplus.

But this surplus grain was so precious that the Manchurians would not feed the Han people, and through the Guò canal system, a large amount of grain was transported to the Gyeonggi region, and the huge group of bannermen lived like parasites on this grain and local taxes.

The two major grain trusts, Sihai Merchant and Mijia Grain Company, had long obeyed Xiao Letian's orders and conducted a survey of the grain industry in the Qing Dynasty, and the results were shocking.

In the event of a natural disaster or war in China, it will inevitably cause a very severe famine, and once it appears, it will sweep the whole country.

In front of ***, the Sichuan Tianfu Congress quickly closed the Shu Road and locked the grain in the basin, in fact, it doesn't matter if it is not locked, with the transportation system of the Qing Dynasty at that time, the grain could not be transported if it wanted to.

Sichuan, Hunan, Hubei, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and other places are relatively safe areas in the famine, and the vast and sparsely populated areas outside the border are still in the undeveloped stage, so there is no need to consider them for the time being. The rest is to rely on some narrow areas that can be covered by sea and river transportation, and you can also rely on imports to eat some high-priced grain.

The Manchu Qing Dynasty is such a small safe place, and all the remaining provinces and regions will have a super famine, and the number of people who starve to death will definitely be counted in the hundreds of millions.

The results of the investigation frightened everyone, and when Xiao Lotian closed the above sentence, he even walked in front of these investigators and bowed deeply to these humble businessmen.

"Thank you for your hard work and for uncovering the brutal truth...... Now the food ration problem of the Chinese is no longer something that the Qing Dynasty can solve, let alone those corrupt officials and businessmen of the Manchu Qing Dynasty who can save their lives!"

"Apart from you, there will be no hope for hundreds of millions of Chinese people! Only you, only you, the emerging Confucian businessmen of the Chinese nationality, and only those Chinese businessmen who still have justice and morality in their hearts, can save them......

"On behalf of hundreds of millions of people, I ask you to use all your strength to develop Nanyang and seize a qiē time to accumulate life-saving rations, in case that day really comes...... I just beg that there will be no tragedy of changing children and eating them! Even if you are accumulating virtue for your children and grandchildren, please work hard!"

Confucian merchants, Chinese businessmen, these two heavy names, pressed all the executives of the two grain trade trusts present to their knees, they had been working hard to develop the market in Nanyang, and now with the entrustment of the prime minister, how dare they not work hard.

Recalling the situation at that time, Tian Lin and Niu Jincai's eyes were ruddy, and after taking out a handkerchief and wiping their tears, their eyes returned to the thousands of acres of farmland in front of them.

On the horizon, puffs of black smoke are billowing up, that is the pioneer team is burning the wasteland, the Chinese have an unusual love for transforming the land, they have collected a lot of fierce fire oil from Brunei, that is, the oil familiar to Westerners, to make a variety of combustion tools.

In the pristine rainforest, the fierce fire oil that cannot be extinguished by these heavy rains has become a powerful tool for human territory.

The monkeys of South Asia will never understand why these Chinese are so diligent, they only sleep three and a half hours a day, and the rest of the time is all work, obviously the rice production in the fields is enough for them to eat for a hundred years, but they are still cultivating new land.

The flames burned off patches of land, and the Chinese workers immediately built further diversion ditches, leveled the land, and built fortified villages, often creating hundreds of hectares of rice fields out of thin air, often in a matter of months.

In Nanyang, rice does not need to be prepared diligently, and people don't even bother to remove the grass after planting, because the yield is really high in the sky when the rice is harvested three times a year.

During the harvest season, the merchants of the four seas and the rice grain store would rush out to exchange rolls and rolls of Ryukyu banknotes for truckloads of rice, and then gather in the merchant ships on the sea and rush to the far north.

At first, Tian Lin, Niu Jincai and others were still very skeptical, they didn't know if the land of Nanyang could support the entire people of the Qing Dynasty, but after they saw the harvest with their own eyes, everyone was relieved.

Tens of millions of years of siltation in tropical rainforests have filled the soil with humus fertility, and the volcanic eruptions that are common in the South Seas have provided fertile volcanic ash to the soil, and the rice here grows as long as it grows like crazy.

What's more, there will never be a drought here, there are rivers and streams everywhere, and the worry about farmland irrigation is definitely not that there is not enough water, but that there is too much water.

What happened in Borneo is just a microcosm of the many Chinese settlements in South Asia, and under Xiao Letian's protection, the tropical rainforests of the South Seas are shrinking at a rate far faster than the real history.

Maybe some people in the future will scold Xiao Letian for being an ecological destroyer, but now he can't care so much, as long as he can feed China's hundreds of millions of mouths, even if he burns all the forests in Nanyang, he will not hesitate.

Another benefit of the reclamation program is the increase in the number of immigrants, because there is enough food to eat, many of the country's destitute displaced people have been guided to live here, and there are now many large Chinese towns with a population of more than 10,000 in Nanyang.

Moreover, the armed forces of the Chinese themselves have gradually taken shape, for example, the more than 50 big men around Tian Lin and Niu Jincai are the armed forces formed by the Chinese themselves.

The latest Mauser rifles, never-before-seen Arabian warhorses in the South Seas, and a few melon grenades imported from the Ryukyus on their waists, these Chinese guards, armed to the teeth, have more than once crushed the harassment of the indigenous monkeys, and by the way, robbed them of a lot of land.

Niu Jincai looked at this rich land, and said with great emotion in his heart: "This is really a fat and oily treasure land, from now on, this is the territory of our Chinese people, whoever dares to rob it will play with whom!"

Tian Lin also gritted his teeth and said, "Yes, tomorrow I will talk to the village chiefs of each village, and in the future, the self-defense tax will be increased by 30 percent, and our guard will have to expand the army! They will not object, as long as they agree to increase the increase by 30 percent, our company will consider itself to be 3 and a half percent higher!"

"I heard that Tanggu will soon be able to produce five or six hundred tons of small warships, so let's buy a few more when the time comes...... If we can't beat the foreign devils, can't we beat those indigenous monkeys? This Borneo has to be our Chinese people?"

"Yes, yes, yes...... The big guys now have money in their hands, and they won't complain!"

Just as the two of them were excitedly looking forward to the future, suddenly the captain of the guard outside the carriage yelled, "Look at the shopkeeper...... Look at the sea! There is the shadow of the fleet, I rely on so many sails? It's all battleships......"