Chapter 142: Collecting and Cutting
Su Ze thought for a while and said, "Eunuch Hu, can I arrange for a few students to come to your place to help?" "
Help? Learn weaving and dyeing?"
Su Ze nodded and said, "I want some students from the Wei Institute to come to your place to help." The children should also learn some crafts."
Eunuch Hu said nonchalantly: "What's the difficulty? Even if Mr. Su sends people over, the miscellaneous family will not hide their secrets and teach them all!"
Su Ze talked with Eunuch Hu about the method of extracting dyes. , both of them felt that they still had more to say, and made an appointment to talk about it next time.
It was not safe to travel at night with a child like Lin Liangjun, so Su Ze stayed in the mine prison for another night before sending Lin Liangjun back to the guardhouse the next day.
These days, Lin Cainiang has taken on the work of the family temple.
Like my old grandpa, Ninth Auntie gets tired easily as she gets older. Lin Cainiang has already learned the rituals of temple celebrations. Now, except for large-scale ceremonies such as sacrificing sacrifices at the ancestral hall and other large-scale ceremonies, Lin Cainiang is competent.
But what is strange is that since Su Ze came to Changning Guard, the guard has become increasingly wealthy, and after winning several battles, fewer and fewer guards come to the family temple.
Aunt Ninth was not surprised by this. The more difficult the life was, the more people came to the family temple.
Now that the health center is getting better, who can come to the family temple to pray?
Children from every family are taking advantage of the good weather to sun salt on the beach. As long as there is clear sky, the beach is full of people.
Lin Liangjun, the little carrot head, has become the general contractor of the salt drying business. He gives marked shells to the children participating in the salt drying to calculate their contribution to the salt drying. After handing over the salt, he will follow the instructions Shell cents.
Even these shells have become the currency among the children of Changningwei.
The scale of the textile workshop managed by Mr. Lu is getting bigger and bigger. Not only the widows in the nursing home, but also some old women also participate in the weaving workshop.
Mrs. Lu suggested that Su Ze place another loom in an abandoned barn and let nearby women work in the barn. Su Ze also asked craftsmen from the shipyard to make a few more looms.
Su Ze soon discovered that Lin Xianyang’s sister-in-law was indeed very handy. Although she did not understand mechanical principles, she was self-taught without a teacher and was able to repair most of the faults in the loom. Su Ze could only sigh that this is the wisdom of the working people. ah.
Cotton from Beishan Village has begun to be supplied to Changningwei. Since the Jianxi River was dredged, Su Ze has planned several new irrigation facilities for Beishan Village and added dozens of acres of paddy fields for the Chen family.
Su Ze also improved the irrigation method. Cotton does not need a lot of water in all growth cycles. Su Ze re-planned Beishan Village and designed a movable sluice gate, which only opened the gate for irrigation when water was most needed, while also providing Beishan Village saves irrigation water.
After Beishan Chen defeated the mining thieves in Changning Guard, he was even more firmly tied to Changning Guard's chariot.
These days, nothing is more important than feeling safe.
Sun Dianshi's Zhuangzi also sent people to ask Su Ze to help them organize the water conservancy settings. Su Ze looked at the water conservancy skill level 4, 380/400 experience points, and decided to go to Sun Dianshi's farm to gain experience after returning from the county.
The crew of the New World has been quarantined. Except for some crew members with bad deeds who were left on the island by Su Ze, the rest of the crew can go ashore and live under the supervision of the residents of the guard station.
Su Ze has promised to let them leave as long as the Japanese rebellion is over and the sea area is no longer blocked.
Such a promise has made most of the crew settle down. Those who go out to sea these days to fight are, at best, adventurers, and at worst, those who cannot survive on land.
Malacca is not their hometown. Anyway, they can have enough to eat in Changningwei, and no one is clamoring to go home.
Lin Mojun became interested in maneuvering the Manila galleon. She hired several crew members who knew Chinese and asked them for tips on how to maneuver the Spanish galleon.
The engraving craftsman Yao Chun went to the county seat, while his wife and children stayed in Changningwei.
Since Yao Chun left, Xiong Wu has been free again.
This guy didn't know how he got together with Father Pierre. One of them spoke French and the other spoke Chinese. They could still communicate and even quarrel and debate with gestures with their hands. This surprised everyone in Changning Guard, but as long as He wasn't promoting that theory in Changning Wei, and Su Ze didn't bother to care about him.
Captain Alfonso also understood that the New World would not come back. After careful consideration, he decided to start writing, imitating his idol Marco Polo, and recording his experiences in the East. In that case, he would be sued for bankruptcy by the shipowner. Maybe you can enjoy your retirement by publishing travel notes.
After having this idea, Captain Alfonso wandered around Changning Guard with his sailing diary all day long.
He also fell in love with charcoal pens, which he thought were easier to write with. Captain Alfonso chatted with people at the guard station when he had nothing to do. He found that the name that appeared most often in his notebook was Su Ze.
Captain Alfonso was even more curious about Su Ze, a language genius. When he heard that Su Ze could also repair and supervise water conservancy facilities, and saw the Jianxi River that Su Ze had managed, Alfonso was extremely surprised.
Is this a scholar from the Ming Dynasty? Alfonso heard that Su Ze could also write plays, but it was a pity that his Chinese proficiency was limited to oral English and he could not understand Chinese characters and could not appreciate Su Ze's masterpieces.
Alfonso sighed again, were all the scholars in the Ming Dynasty so good? This Su Ze is simply the Leonardo da Vinci of the Ming Dynasty. How could such a person be the lowest-level scholar in the Ming Dynasty?
Now Alfonso began to believe what Marco Polo said, maybe the capital of the Ming Dynasty was really a city paved with gold!
Su Ze didn't know that his reputation in Alfonso's heart had risen from respect to reverence.
In mid-August, it was time for Su Ze to go to the city to study.
But this time the road to the county seat was very busy, with people pushing carts everywhere.
When he arrived at the city gate, Su Ze met Lin Qingyuan, an official in the household, and then he remembered that August was the day when summer grain was collected in the Ming Dynasty.
The grain collected by the Ming Dynasty was divided into two seasons, namely summer grain collection in August and autumn grain collection in October.
Before Zhang Juzheng's "One Whip Law", agricultural taxes were mainly collected in kind, that is, agricultural taxes were collected in kind. In Fujian, wheat was harvested during summer grains and rice was harvested during autumn grains.
Changning Guard is the military guard of the military camp, so there is no need to collect summer grain from the county government. Instead, part of the summer grain collected by the county government must be sent to Changning Guard, so the farmers in Changning Guard are busy in the fields these days, but Su Ze doesn't know The collection of summer grain.
Taxation has been the top priority for evaluating local officials since ancient times. Although the southeastern region is under the threat of Japanese rebellion, as long as the court does not issue an exemption, summer grain collection cannot stop.
As soon as he met Lin Qingyuan, he expressed his bitterness.
"Ms. Su, I don't know why I'm so unlucky. I drew lots and got the chance to go to the village in the south of the city to collect taxes."
The land around Nanping County has the densest water network in the south, so the fields are naturally the best.
There is a saying in Nanping County that the south is rich and the east is rich, while the north is poor and the west is cheap. The owners of the land in the south were either rich or noble, so Lin Qingyuan looked distressed.
Su Ze understood what he was thinking, and he wanted Su Ze to go to the county government to complain.
However, Su Ze was not prepared to get involved in the issue of food requisition, which was a bottomless problem in the Ming Dynasty.
But to understand the contradictions among the people in Nanping County today, Su Ze still asked: "It is so difficult for several villages over there to harvest grain?" "
Not only is it difficult to collect, last year's autumn grain was not collected all!"
Su Ze saw The tea shop next to the city gate took Lin Qingyuan to the tea shop to talk in detail.
The tea doctor at the tea shop brought some cool tea, and when he saw the soap-colored uniforms of the official Lin Qingyuan, he hid far away outside.
Lin Qingyuan smiled bitterly and said: "The people are afraid of us like tigers. I don't know that there are times when we are not as good as dogs." Lin Qingyuan expressed his bitterness: "Outside of
Yuan Cai in the south of the city, his family's Zhuangzi has the most land, and his family's grain is also the most difficult to collect. ."
Su Ze held tea and listened quietly, and Lin Qingyuan said:
"Cai Yuanwai was appointed to the official position by a foreign minister from the Sixth Department of Nanzhili, and his family had the most food debt."
Many people think that the Ming Dynasty gave preferential treatment to scholars and exempted them from taxes in their names. Land tax, in fact, this is wrong.
What officials with meritorious status can enjoy exemptions from are the chores, not taxes. There were two main burdens on the people of the Ming Dynasty. One was land-based taxes, and the other was labor based on population.
Taxation is easy to understand. It means that the land produces food and is taxed in proportion.
Menial labor is based on the obligation of population sharing, and people are sent to work for the government for free according to the proportion of population.
These tasks include building city walls, repairing water conservancy projects, transporting food, carrying sedan chairs for officials, etc.
Even working as a yamen servant for the government is actually a kind of handyman.
In the Ming Dynasty, the number of handymen was very heavy, and many people transferred their household registrations to the names of scholars with meritorious titles in order to be exempted from the chores.
As long as the land is registered with the government, land tax is inevitable.
But land tax is indispensable, but it is hard to say whether it can be levied.
For example, this Cai Yuanwai once served as a member of the Household Department of Nanzhili Province and had many official friends. The yamen could not even enter the door of his house, let alone collect land taxes.
Many Zhuangzi in the south of the city saw that Cai Yuanwai did not pay the land tax, so they followed suit and resisted the tax. As a result, the tax collectors who went to the south of the city to collect taxes were unable to complete their tasks.
If you fail to complete the task, you will be reprimanded by the county boss, and you may even have to pay the back taxes out of your own pocket.
"Yuanwai Cai has so much land, how can he resist the tax?"
Lin Qingyuan has been arguing with the Cai family during this period, and said tiredly: "Yuanwai Cai said that his family has not grown food in these years and cannot produce food to pay taxes. ."
Is this also a valid reason?
Su Ze thought that if he rebelled, he would have to deal with these "village sages", so he asked:
"Then what has Yuan Cai been growing in recent years?"
"Woad is grown in several manors of the Cai family."
Woad. ? Isn’t woad just isatis root?
"Cai Yuanwai is a big weaver and dyer in Yanping Prefecture. Basically all the dyeing shops in the city belong to his family."
So it turns out that Cai Yuanwai is good at managing money. All he grows are cash crops.
Su Ze thought of the project he had done when he was a graduate student. During the Ming Dynasty, both the north and the south were short of food, but the reasons for the food shortage were different in the north and the south.
The land yield per mu in Guangzhou, Fujian is twice that of the northern region, and Changningwei widely cultivates Champa rice and other fine grain varieties.
The yield per mu is obviously double that of the Southern Song Dynasty, but Fujian is still short of food.
Even the military rations that the county government should allocate to Changning Guards and other guards every year are often short of a pound or two, and they are still in arrears from last year.
The reason for Fujian's food shortage is very simple. Because trade is developed, the benefits of growing cash crops are far greater than growing grains, so large households are more willing to "change rice to mulberry."
Now is not the worst time. When tobacco was introduced to China in the late Ming Dynasty, growing tobacco was hugely profitable. Big households in Fujian dug up grain and switched to growing tobacco leaves. As a result, Fujian had a high yield per mu, but could only rely on sweet potatoes to satisfy hunger.
Su Ze now understood the difficulty of collecting grain in Nanping County.
Large households do not grow food, but they have the connections and the strength to resist paying for it.
However, when assessing the indicator of grain collection, prefectures and counties are used as the unit. The results of Fang Zhifu and Baizhi County are closely related to whether enough grain can be collected.
If the big households don't pay, then the tax collectors will naturally have no choice but to exploit the small people.
Coupled with the corruption of tax collectors, the burden on the homesteaders became increasingly heavy.
By the end of the Ming Dynasty, coupled with the addition of handymen and various exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous taxes, the homesteaders went bankrupt one after another, forming an army of refugees.
However, the conflict has not reached this point yet, but the conflict over food requisition is already very serious.
Not to mention that there have been several incidents of Japanese pirates this year, the fields have not been taken care of properly, and the summer grain harvest has already failed.
Therefore, the county government issued a death order to the households, and they must get some food from the big households in the south of the city. Those poor people have no money to squeeze out!
It is difficult to be a county magistrate, but Bai Zhixian is also a strong magistrate with superb skills. Su Ze is ready to watch the magistrate's battle with the big family.
Su Ze had no acquaintances in the household, so he could only express his regrets to Lin Qingyuan.
Lin Qingyuan also knew that he was ill and sought medical treatment. He could only ask Su Ze to give Baizhi County a kind word and never remove him from his position as an official.
Su Ze entered the city and went directly to the editorial department of "Surprise".
There were many ragged children gathered in front of the editorial office, led by a short boy.
The child was wearing tattered clothes and looked neither humble nor arrogant. He bowed to Chen Chaoyuan, and the children surrounding the editorial office left with him.
"Brother Chen, what happened to those children just now?"
"Brother Su, let's come in and talk."
After entering, Chen Chaoyuan said, "Those were the newsboys from our "Surprise"."
"Newsboys?"
"Yes, According to Brother Su's wishes, we found these homeless newsboys in the city to sell newspapers, and we did sell a lot more newspapers."
Chen Chaoyuan sighed and said: "I thought this was a good deed, but I didn't expect to harm these children."
"The Bawang Society in the city is interested in the money from selling newspapers."
Su Ze quickly understood the connection. He didn't like the idea of making three cents of money by walking around the streets with a newspaper, but many people liked it.
The Bawang Society is a gang in Nanping County. They even resell free medicines from Huimin Pharmacy to make money, so naturally they will not let go of the profit of three cents from this newspaper.
"It's me who failed to be thorough," Su Ze said.
Chen Chaoyuan said: "These children have solved the problem of Bawang Club by themselves. The child I just talked to organized the newsboys and had several fierce conflicts with Bawang Club. Although these children are small, they have their own problems in the streets since they were young. They were so ruthless that they united as one to fight against the many, which made Bawang Society afraid to reach out."
Su Ze was quite surprised, he didn't expect these children to be able to do this.
"Then why are the children still looking for Brother Chen?"
Chen Chaoyuan sighed and said: "Everyone is innocent of the crime of harboring a jade. They drove away the Bawang Society, but they attracted the harvesters."
(End of this chapter)