The desert in Chile is inaccessible and is now a military exclusion zone for the Ming army.

The craftsmen of the Gunpowder Department of the Beiyang Ordnance Bureau of the Ming Dynasty landed in Chile by boat, crossing the barren coastal plateau and entering this devastated desert, as if entering another world.

A world with nothing, every Ming person who arrives here for the first time will ask, how can this place be so dry when it is so close to the coast of the Great Eastern Ocean?

The sparse number of local aborigines say that the last time it rained was in the fourth year of Longqing according to the Ming calendar, and there has not been a drop of rain here since.

If a person pours out the water in the kettle, the bottom of the kettle will leave more water stains than the rainfall of the year.

The desert is endless, even the cactus does not want to stay here for long, the top of the high mountain looks like it is covered with snow all the year round, the expedition team of the Beiyang Banner Army at first thought that they could get ice for drinking water on the mountain, and when they climbed up, they realized that the top of the mountain was not covered with snow but salt mines.

Even the most loyal and brave artisans will recoil at the first taste of its unique landscapes that have aridified and shattered the desert and earth, and even the most arrogant will doubt whether they will be able to withstand the test of heaven and earth.

Shao Tingda, the former commander-in-chief of the Governor's Office of the Eastern Army, has led his headquarters to open up in this desert for 27 months.

During the day, he and his troops walked from oasis to oasis to one oasis with a bird's gun as a staff and a cloak of single clothes, measuring the desert road with a step between their legs; At night, his troops, dressed in thick cotton jackets and cotton armor, huddled in stone huts built of special cotton tents and oases, waiting for another dawn.

It's not hard to find nitrate here, and in any place where you think you should get water out of the next well, you can lift the soil layer, and if you're lucky, you can dig two feet to reveal the layer of nitrate buried in the ground, and even if you're unlucky, the deepest one they only dig an eight-foot well.

It is a world made up of salt, earth, and nitrate.

The strength of the Governor's Office was constantly changing, and in the earliest days, Shao Tingda had more than 13,000 troops under his command, and in addition to garrisoning three important cities and ports, there was still a guard force that could be used as a field mobile force.

Later, they had no enemies here, and the natives were so busy surviving after the enslavement of the Spaniards that no one cared about fighting the Ming, on the contrary, they were extremely happy with the arrival of the Ming army, because they brought different food and more technology.

Unlike the Spaniards, the Ming army also cared about copper, gold, iron and silver, but compared to hardware, the most significant feature of the Ming army was that it brought the concept that the people took food as the sky, and they could not see that people could not eat enough.

But the aborigines still suspect that after the nightmarish enslavement of the Spaniards, they no longer want to believe that the priests with the scriptures forced them to live in houses that are easy to manage, forced them to breed animals for the Spaniards, and forced them to form teams for forced labor.

Now it seems that everything is the same, except that the bald monks have been replaced by county officials in black gauze hats, and they are also asked to live in houses, to raise animals, to cultivate the land, and to make them armor.

They were afraid of the Ming Dynasty's swords and guns, but they thought in their hearts that all this had not changed in the slightest, but the one riding on their heads had been replaced by someone who looked a little similar to themselves.

The Spanish monks who are still wandering in this land said that the Ming people are different from the natives, they are whiter than you and whiter than us, they are white.

But the Ming masters who live in Li Er City say that Xiyi farts, Lao Tzu is a yellow-skinned, black-haired, black-eyed Ming person, and they are pickled white people.

In the midst of suspicion, the natives saw that extensive farming and animal husbandry techniques had been greatly improved, and that the port, formerly called Santiago, now renamed Leer City by Shao Tingda, had built hundreds of fishing boats for coastal fishermen to go out to sea, and the city made elaborate clothes and shoes, and sold tougher fishing nets and boats that were faster and larger than canoes.

The Ming said that this would allow everyone to get more food and get rich quickly.

But three generations of natives who had not had personal property rights did not know what it meant to be rich, and when the Spaniards left, the whole land came to a standstill, and the superstructure collapsed, leaving the aborigines at the bottom who had lived to serve the West at a loss.

Shao Tingda can force them to enter the Chinese Literature Hall to learn writing and conversation, but he can't force them to correct the uneasiness and inferiority that are deeply imprinted in the depths of their souls.

It wasn't until a certain moment at this time that General Mang Hu suddenly recalled the true meaning of Chen Mu's words in the early years that any nation would become stupid and numb if it was enslaved for hundreds of years...... The indigenous people of Chile have not been enslaved for hundreds of years, they have only been like this for a few decades.

Even the Ming merchants in the city sold clothes and shoes, fishing nets and fishing boats, and the natives did not know how to buy them; If they know how to buy and want to buy, they will not have wealth.

So they hired proletarian people to build bridges and roads, and people would be curious about why the Ming army was so curious, there were roads in Chile, whether they were stepped on by the tribes in the past or repaired later, or the roads built by the Spaniards during their time, but the Ming army said that the road was not wide enough and not smooth enough, and more importantly, the people needed this salary.

"Roads are being built so that we can earn wages?"

"No, not only for you to earn money and have a good road, you can sell things in Lear City to other places, earn wealth to make your family live well, and you can also help more people who are not doing well."

"Caravans, sold elsewhere, like the Spanish merchants of the past?"

"Yes, earn wealth like Xiyi, but don't earn money like them to wear a ring with ten fingers, you have to find a way to be alone when you are poor, and you can't forget to help the world when you are rich."

"Then why do we call them Xiyi and Euroi, instead of Spaniards and Europeans? Because they're white? ”

"Hehe, in fact, Da Ming doesn't care what color others grow into, and he doesn't care if he is white or yellow, we don't care about the color because of the nobility, the color is noble because of our existence, Da Shuai said, we were born white and call ourselves yellow, just because the people of Daming are all descendants of Yan and Huang, the yellow characters in it."

"Personally, I don't want to belong to them in the same category, and so do they, who are not degraded by calling themselves white, and look at the suffering of the many tribes, who are degraded by their animal-like behavior, and who have been treated as human beings."

The Ming engineer who spoke put down the drawings and wiped the sweat on his forehead, looked at the road being built between the deserts of the mountains and mountains in the distance, and smiled on the shoulders of the young people beside him: "Wait for this road to be repaired, go and recruit your own caravan, if you are poor, you will be good alone, and if you are good, you will help the world, people are like this, and so are the ethnic groups and countries, we are the same, you can't be poor, do it well." ”