Chapter 328 China's Back Garden

Customs!

Border and sea borders!

Liu Bei was awakened by Kong Ming and was a little excited.

It is easy to open up new borders, but does our Ji Han have to be the first to open up new sea borders?

However, Liu Bei soon calmed down.

They are not as good as later generations in studying science, which is almost magical.

The reality before them is that the prosperous Guanzhong has been destroyed, the powerful people in Hexi have also become independent, the Central Plains is in the hands of Cao thieves, and the prosperous Jingzhou is no longer what it used to be.

And now the plan, from sugar mills and iron mills to shipbuilding and going to sea, needs people everywhere.

And at this time... after being awakened by Kong Ming, Liu Bei looked towards the South China Sea on the map, and then he found that this map was different.

In the direction of the South China Sea, you can see the handwriting of charcoal pencils. This handwriting imitates the offensive arrows of later generations, starting from the Yangzhou estuary, passing Yizhou, to Zhuya, and then advancing by land and sea, directly into a plain in the Indochina Peninsula, and then going down, heavily marking a strait.

It was simple and clear, and from Liu Bei's own intuition, the feasibility was not low.

Therefore, Liu Bei couldn't help but sigh:

"If I am lucky in this life..."

Then he stopped talking, thinking that this request was too greedy.

In fact, as long as he could defeat Cao, he would be worthy of Liu's ancestors when he went to Taishan Mansion. Why ask for anything else?

He believed that he was not Han Wu, and he did not have the ambition to establish a foundation for hundreds of generations in one generation.

It would be good to use it as a goal for the later generations of the Ji Han, and he must not waste people's money and money for his own empty reputation.

In this regard, the Gaozong of the Tang Dynasty really set too many examples.

On the Korean Peninsula, he wasted national strength, fought for more than ten years, and wasted dozens of years, but was defeated by the powerful enemy of Silla.

Although Silla was eventually made a vassal, it was hard to say that it was a success no matter how you looked at the grand plan at the beginning.

So Liu Bei's mentality became more and more peaceful.

【If we know that from the Tang Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty, the sea voyages were all around the South China Sea, then it is natural to have a question:

Why didn't we discover Australia, which is so close?

After all, from the map, if you go south along the southeast peninsula, you can enter the Java Sea with land on both sides, and then go east to Australia.

But the textbook records that it was the British who discovered Australia in 1700 and announced that Australia was the territory of Great Britain in the name of their queen.

It is a pity that we are so close, but in the end this new land belongs to someone else.

Therefore, some people even joked that if Zheng He had not turned into the Strait of Malacca when he sailed to the West, Australia might have belonged to the Ming Dynasty.

But, I have to say but again.

But in fact, before Zheng He, there was a very powerful traveler in the Yuan Dynasty named Wang Dayuan.

He made two long trips at sea in his life, and he went to sea for a total of eight years. He wrote down his experiences in "A Brief Account of the Island Barbarians", recording his experiences along the way.

Later, a Ming Dynasty man named Ma Huan read this book and sailed with Zheng He to the West, and matched what he saw with what was recorded in the book.

According to the "Records of the Island Barbarians" compiled so far, after Wang Dayuan finished his journey in 1342, his footprints were as follows:

Most of Wang Dayuan's records are consistent with the present, such as crossing Arabia, crossing the Red Sea, crossing the Mediterranean, returning to Africa after arriving in Morocco, etc. The geographical experiences he recorded are almost the same as now, and it can be basically confirmed that he is a particularly troublesome old man.

The only two controversial places are his records of the trip before going to Arabia.

According to the records, Wang Dayuan first went to Gulidimen (East Timor), praising the silver, ironware and cloth here, but the chiefs here liked to sleep naked, and the women were very promiscuous. Wang Dayuan said that he could not accept it and hurriedly left here.

Then he continued to set off to the south, arrived at a place called Milizhi, and then turned southeast to Manali.

If you follow the map and follow this direction, you will find that this is Australia, right?

As a traveler, Wang Dayuan also recorded the appearance of the port, saying that there are thousands of nan trees, oysters like mountains, thin soil and barren fields, and uneven climate.

He also described the local sights in detail:

"Men and women braid their hair and tie it with a belt, with gold hairpins on their arms. They wear short silk shirts in five colors and tie them with a single skirt made of Pengkala cloth."

These are consistent with Darwin Port in Australia, because Australia has a particularly strange and barren climate due to its geographical relationship, and the local indigenous people are all black and have the habit of braiding their hair.

But then Wang Dayuan's record made scholars scratch their heads: the local camels are nine feet tall, and the natives use them to carry loads.

Australia did not have camels at that time, so it is still a mystery whether Wang Dayuan discovered Australia to this day.

But there is another guess that may be closer to the truth: Wang Dayuan was not the captain, he always took merchant ships, and he had a strong desire to record. It is very likely that he wrote down what his fellow shipmates said but did not see.

Because the place "Mi Li Zhi" recorded in the book, according to Professor Han Zhenhua, means "sea cucumber land" in Malay, and according to Wang Dayuan's route, he went to the present Melville Island, which is rich in sea cucumbers.

But in fact, even if it is confirmed, Wang Dayuan is not the first person to discover Australia, because there are nearly one million aborigines.

It's just that these aborigines have become dead souls under the knife of the British.

Before Wang Dayuan went to sea, Chinese sailors who set out from Quanzhou brought back the name of Juedao, and this Juedao was undoubtedly Australia in terms of location and climate.

According to the sailors, Juedao has two meanings. One is that after reaching this island to the east, it is all ocean and the land is cut off.

The other is that its local climate is weird, not suitable for farming and full of poisons, which is a real Jedi.

From today's perspective, it is normal for the ancients to dislike this place. After all, modern people say that there are thousands of poisons in the world, and Australia alone accounts for half of them.

Malaria, summer heat, Taipan snakes, and saltwater crocodiles are all things that the ancients avoided, so it is no wonder that they rarely set foot in Australia.

After all, even if our ancestor was a scholar, he would not have thought that this land would be one of the most important mineral deposits in the world today, with 47.5 billion tons of iron ore reserves accounting for more than a quarter of the entire earth.

Moreover, if the development of China's navigation was not so torturous, this land would definitely be the back garden of Asia, and why would the Angolans come to massacre the indigenous people? 】

Kong Ming tried very hard to control his expression, but he failed in the end.

He scratched his ears and exchanged an unbelievable look with Pang Tong:

"How much?"

"More than 40 billion...tons?"

And the more intuitive one is the proportion. Pang Tong murmured:

"The world's iron ore accounts for one stone, and Australia accounts for nearly three buckets?"

Kong Ming's expression has adjusted, and he shook his head:

"What Australia? This is a deserted island, the back garden of China."

End liao, wrap up tomorrow