C1811 The root cause of famine (1/2)

It was a small village. A group of poor women and children without clothes to cover their bodies. There was also a pot of disgusting monkey meat soup. The whole village was filled with a strange feeling.

There was no food, no rice, no fruits, no livestock, not even the fishes that were the most abundant in Nan Yang. Other than the monkey broth that no one dared to eat, Wang Chen and the others gained nothing.

Logically speaking, if there were no benefits, he should just hurry up and leave. Time was extremely important, but when Wang Chen saw the little girl who could speak Chinese, for some reason, he suddenly felt a surge of sympathy. He wanted to hear the story the little miss was about to tell.

The Chinese soldiers never thought that the entire Brunei Area was out of food. After half a year of war, all of the food in the northern part of Belait had been used up.

The army had taken the last grain of rice, a bunch of bananas, some dried fish and livestock from every village. At this moment, the local people could only starve to death in their homes, and even the monkey just now was not caught from the forest, but was the little girl's pet.

Wang Chen listened as he recalled the information he had learnt in the Southern Ocean, and gradually, a huge economic framework surfaced in the depths of his mind. It was as if he had comprehended something, something that was even deeper than the surface of war.

The Borneo was a very large island, filled with rich and abundant natural resources. There were spices, rubber trees, forest resources, gold, and even countless sea products … There will be oil resources in the future.

The lives of the people here were much better than that of the people of Great Qing. Normally, they would not be hungry, but the rivers and seas were full of fresh food, and there were bananas, coconuts, and various fruits on the trees.

A few tribes would cultivate some farmland and eat some rice, but strangely, none of the tribes would cultivate too much rice. They still placed the guarantee of survival in the most primitive form of harvesting.

Catching fish and hunting was the most primitive way of life for humans. Although it was easy to watch the sky while eating, it was very difficult to ensure their safety. Normally, these tribesmen would live a leisurely life. They would only spend a small amount of time collecting food, and the rest of their time would be spent in entertainment and even in a lazy manner.

This was one of the reasons that the Nanyang Chinese did not like hiring natives. It was too lazy, because the fishing and hunting civilization would definitely bring out many lazy people, and they would also work hard when they were hungry. As long as they were not hungry, they would immediately become extremely lazy.

If such a way of life was compared with the diligent Chinese, these natives would undoubtedly be happy. For a people like the Chinese, who had come out of farming, they would have to work most of the year, because farming was one of the more important attributes compared to hunting and gathering, and that was storage.

Living like these indigenous monkeys usually seemed very leisurely, but once they encountered an unexpected event, their resistance would be very weak. For example, war.

In truth, the Brunei and the Earth Kings were only trying to take advantage of the chaos in this war. If it weren't for the military invasion by Sha Russia, they wouldn't have taken the initiative to attack the Chinese reclamation area even if they were beaten to death.

Originally, these kings only wanted to end the war within half a month. They thought that the Chinese armed forces had been completely wiped out by the Russian army. Now, the wealth of the Chinese was like a coconut that had fallen from a tree.

But he never expected that the Nanyang Chinese would have already been twisted into a rope, the tragedy of the Belait straight away shook the entire Nanyang Chinese, millions of Chinese started to pool their resources to support this war.

The earthen kings' dog-mouth slammed into a large rock. Apart from the initial few days where they had taken advantage of the situation, they had even lost every battle that followed. This had dragged the war on for half a year.