Chapter 238 Helongmen (Additional update)
On Shazhou Island, Su Ze quickly took over the Xu family’s mansion on the island.
Xu Yuan's entire army was wiped out, and Su Ze encountered no obstacles when he landed on the island. He quickly found the remaining Japanese pirates hiding on the island, killed them, and piled their heads in front of the Daxing Temple.
Su Ze touched the Jinxian crown captured from Xu Yuan's head, looked at Xu Da's tablet in the temple, sighed softly, and enshrined the Jinxian crown in front of the memorial tablet again.
Su Ze deployed fortifications on Shazhou Island, set up maritime patrol routes, and asked Xu Shixing in Jingjiang to escort grain and grass to the island, and thus settled on Shazhou Island.
At the same time, Fang Wanghai in Huguan was in a very happy mood.
The first batch of banknotes and customs silver sent by the Wang family were all put into the warehouse. This time, what the Wang family put into the warehouse was high-quality silk. If sold in the market, it would be worth two to three thousand taels of silver.
The banknote tariff imposed by Huguan last year was only 5,000 taels of silver.
In other words, with just this amount, I received half of last year's banknotes.
Fang Wanghai was not idle during this period. During the chaos in the southeast, he set up two new banknotes in Wujiang and Jiaxing to control the canal shipping from Suzhou to Hangzhou.
In fact, Fang Wanghai has long wanted to set up more banknote checkpoints along the route, but there was great resistance to setting up banknote checkpoints, and the previous banknote checkpoints office did not have enough funds.
Now Fang Wanghai holds thousands of taels of silver in his hands, and Zhejiang, south of Zhili, is in the midst of Japanese chaos. The establishment of these two new banknotes has not encountered much resistance.
The more new banknote checkpoints there are, the higher the cost of detours will naturally be for merchants. Moreover, the whole of Jiangsu and Zhejiang is now in chaos, so going through the government banknote checkpoints will actually give you a sense of security.
In addition to the quota of garrisoned officers at Chaoguan itself, Fang Wanghai followed Su Ze's suggestion and set up patrol teams near Chaoguan in various places. These were well-informed people recruited from the local area. They did not seek to fight against Japanese pirates, but only Please deliver the message quickly.
With such a canal information network, any merchant ship that pays taxes obediently can obtain information about Japanese disturbances along the canal and avoid dangerous sections.
In addition, if you want to pass through the Yangtze River Channel, you can also get the protection of Su Ze's Anti-Japanese and Anti-Smuggling Corps.
Although the war in Jiangbei was fierce, the commercial shipping in Jiangnan was not interrupted.
Silk from the south of the Yangtze River needs to be transported to the coast of Zhejiang, or put on merchant ships for long voyages in Guangzhou, Fujian, and exchanged for silver, so strange scenes appear in the southeast.
With the Yangtze River as the boundary, the war in Jiangbei was extremely cruel. The Japanese pirates continued to attack Yangzhou for a long time and began to wreak havoc in the Jiangbei area, harassing Taizhou, Huai'an, Yancheng and other places. The entire Jiangbei was in flames.
But south of the Yangtze River, there is a lively scene. Cotton from Songjiang Prefecture, silk from Suzhou Prefecture, and merchant ships from all over southern Jiangsu are constantly transporting goods to the south.
Large households like Sunan were afraid of Japanese pirates going south, so they emptied the warehouses and exchanged them for silver as soon as possible.
On the other hand, because of the news of the Japanese rebellion, foreign smugglers along the coast are afraid that Jiangnan will be hit by the disaster, which will affect the silk production this year and next.
The purchasing price of silk and cotton cloth in the south has risen sharply, and these large households must take advantage of the high price to sell as soon as possible.
These businessmen suddenly discovered that obediently paying customs duties on banknotes seemed to be a more cost-effective deal.
Not to mention that Chaoguan was a checkpoint for the imperial court, and ordinary gangsters did not dare to attack it. It was a good place to stop boats and rest.
That information is also very important for businessmen to avoid dangerous road sections and avoid the risk of being robbed.
Moreover, canal water transportation itself is the fastest navigation route. As long as you pay the customs duty once, it can flow smoothly. Efficiency is especially important in this time of war and chaos.
Fang Wanghai was pleasantly surprised to find that the big households in southern Jiangsu were becoming willing to pay taxes, and their monthly tax revenue was rising steadily this month.
With the money, Fang Wanghai set up more outposts along the way to provide clean water and food supplies, strengthening the speed of message transmission along the entire canal.
Fang Wanghai also followed Su Ze's suggestion and hired people from nearby farmers to pull fibers in the gentle sections of the canal, which was also included in the entire tax payment service.
Fang Wanghai picked up the canal navigation map, and his ambitions were spread all over Zhejiang, and he further controlled the entire southern end of the Grand Canal. But Fang Wanghai soon discovered that he did not have enough talents on hand.
The banknote tax law is simple to say. The principle is just tax deduction, which is not very complicated.
But in fact, when this work was rolled out, the workload of calculating banknote customs duties increased rapidly, and ordinary officials were no longer capable of such complicated work.
Fang Wanghai also knows that the reason why banknote tariffs can force businessmen to pay taxes is based on the propaganda of "one tax payment and smooth process". If taxes are repeated on the road, then businessmen will definitely try their best to evade taxes.
It is not difficult to set up a card to collect taxes, but the most important thing is that the tax must be understood, the merchants who collect it are convinced, and the local government that collects it can share the benefits from the tax on banknotes.
As the number of banknotes changed from one to three, and possibly more in the future, Fang Wanghai already felt that he was unable to do what he wanted.
After all, no matter how good the law is, it needs people to implement it, and people will have selfish motives.
Fang Wanghai was already overwhelmed just by checking the account books sent by the three bank customs offices, not to mention that the bank customs office also had to summarize the tax deduction documents received by local governments. Seeing these small mountains of account books, Fang Wanghai wanted to collapsed.
When encountering a problem, Fang Wanghai naturally thought of writing a letter to his future son-in-law. He told Su Ze about the difficulty at hand and asked Su Ze to help him find a solution.
By the time Su Ze received a letter from his future father-in-law, he had already brought Xisha Island under his control.
With Jingjiang Island as a logistics base and Shadao and Xishadao as frontline outposts, Su Ze also went out during this period to help villages along the Yangtze River defeat several Japanese pirate attacks.
These villages spread from Taixing County to near Tongzhou. Su Ze used beacon towers as signals to establish a set of anti-Japanese outposts along the coast.
Once a large group of Japanese pirates appeared, the beacon towers along the coast would light beacon fires, and nearby people would evacuate the villages.
When Su Ze on the island receives the signal, he will send a fleet ashore to provide support.
Relying on this beacon system, Su Ze launched five attacks in late May, killing hundreds of Japanese pirates and frightening the Japanese pirates along the Yangtze River.
On June 1, when Su Ze received a letter from Fang Wanghai, he was inspecting the camp in Gushan, Jingjiang.
Handing the letter in his hand to Li Zhi, Su Ze said to Li Zhi and Xu Guo who were following him to inspect the military camp:
"Uncle Fang Shi is in trouble. He wants me to find some people who are proficient in accounting books for him to calculate the accounts handed in these days. Tax on banknotes."
Hearing that the accounts were to be audited, Li Zhi quickly took two steps back. These days he was responsible for the logistics of the Shanghai Anti-Japanese and Anti-Smuggling Corps, and he almost vomited when he looked at the account books.
If you want to blame it, you have to blame Su Ze for not using the traditional four-pillar accounting method and using the complicated gantry accounting method.
The ordinary four-pillar accounting method has been used since the Tang and Song Dynasties. The so-called "four pillars" refer to old management (equivalent to "previous period balance"), new revenue (equivalent to "current period income"), and dismissal (equivalent to "current period income"). There are four parts: "period expenditure") and actual (equivalent to "current period balance").
The "four-pillar settlement method" means that when auditing accounts, balancing the four pillars means that there is no problem with the ledger. It is a common accounting method in the Ming Dynasty government.
But Su Ze asked Li Zhi to use an accounting method that he had never seen before for the account books of the Shanghai Anti-Japanese Anti-Smuggling Corps.
This method is called the "gantry accounting method". This accounting method is more complicated. One income needs to be recorded twice in the account, which are reflected in the two forms of "revenue and expenditure" and "debt deposit". When checking the accounts, It is necessary to reconcile the "revenue and expenditure balance" and "assets and liabilities", which is also called "closing the gantry". Once false accounts are recorded, the gantry will not be closed, and the problem can be discovered.
Su Ze looked at Li Zhi and said with a smile: "When we were preparing for the establishment of the bank customs, I suggested to Uncle Fang that all the ledgers used be the 'Longmen Account'." "You two already know the algorithm of the Longmen? How do you check the accounts
? There is no need for me to say more. I would also like to ask Mr. Zhuo Wu and Brother Wei Zhen to go to Suzhou and help Uncle Fang Shi reunite with Longmen."
Li Zhi looked at Su Ze depressedly, sighed and said, "Ever since I met Ru Lin, I have never been here again. There is no time for leisure."
Xu Guo also nodded, Su Ze can exploit people better than the workshop owners of those big weaving workshops!
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(end of this chapter)