Chapter 175: The Tide of Displaced People

If we say that the large-scale encirclement and suppression of locusts in Hebei shows the strong administrative efficiency and mobilization ability that will erupt after the officials are included in the bureaucratic system.

Then the situation faced by Shandong is that all prefectures and counties are completely out of control.

It's not that Wang Yu's ability is not as good as Ma Wensheng.

But in Hebei Province in the hands of Ma Wensheng, there are too many predecessors who have laid the foundation for Ma Wensheng, not to mention anything else, just talking about the folk heritage is much stronger.

Hebei has not been affected by disasters for 20 years.

I dare not say that every family has surplus food to survive the year, but most families have food savings.

Most of the people have food in stock, which is good news for the imperial court's disaster relief. Because they have more time to mobilize.

The effects of the May harvest will not be felt until at least a few months later.

But Shandong is different.

Let's be honest. Zhu Qizhen let the Yellow River divert to Shandong, which was really a decision to save Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu provinces, and harm Shandong Province.

The Yellow River disturbed Shandong's water system. Let the Shandong water system be in a period of adjustment for a long time, and various situations will occur.

Therefore, Shandong has problems at both ends in three days, which can be described as extremely difficult and difficult.

The people's families are very thin.

Before the wheat harvest, their families had already consumed seventy-seven-eighty-eight.

The lack of green and yellow is to describe the situation in March and April.

At this time, the people were almost exhausted in food, and they wanted to eat wild vegetables, but the wild vegetables had not yet grown, and they always had to wait for the wheat harvest hungry.

Today, most of Shandong has been eaten by locusts and turned into a white field.

The people were in despair.

It is simply impossible to wait for the harvest, and they naturally have to take action to keep them alive.

Nothing else, just fleeing the famine.

A large number of people abandoned their hometowns, carrying two children, a man and a woman, in a daze, heading north or south.

Whether you go to Hebei or Huaibei, it is better than at home.

Of course, no one knows what the outcome of this road to escape will be.

Many people leave and never come back.

I don't know where I died.

But if you go out, you can die. If you don't go out, you will definitely die. This may seem like a choice, but there is no choice.

As a result, it has brought great pressure to the whole of Shandong.

After Wang Yu arrived in Jinan, he immediately decided to give up disaster relief, and he didn't even think about reducing the losses of the locust plague.

It's not that he doesn't want to do what Ma Wensheng did, it's just that he can't do it at all.

What he can do is to put as much food as possible so that the people can survive.

Even then, it's not an easy thing to do.

When the people form a tide of displacement, it is not easy to distribute enough food to everyone.

Wang Yu's first order was to order all prefectures and counties to immediately release grain; after all, the time for paying the summer tax last year was before May this year, and some counties had already paid it, while some counties had not.

Therefore, some prefectures and counties still have some grain in their hands.

But compared to this locust plague, it is a drop in the bucket.

Wang Yu naturally couldn't count on the grain of the prefecture and county, all he had to count on was the relief grain of the imperial court.

Today, there are three channels for transporting relief grain to Shandong. The first channel is grain from Beijing, and most of this grain goes through the road.

The road from Beijing to Xuzhou has been built. is also that the situation in Hebei is not too serious, Ma Wensheng can be regarded as carrying forward his style, and the first disaster relief grain is not to go to Hebei but to Shandong.

The second way is from the south along the canal. This road is a bit slow, but it has the advantage that some of the warehouses on the canal have grain.

The grain was transported along the canal to Beijing, and it was naturally transferred layer by layer. There are warehouses along the way. Now, in an emergency, Wang Yu naturally took a series of warehouses from the canal and put grain along the canal and the gallop in the northwest of Shandong.

In this way, it will effectively block the tide of displaced people from Shandong.

At the very least, Wang Yu confined these displaced people to the interior of Shandong Province, and did not have too serious an impact.

The third way is to ship grain from Denglai to Lu. This route can be regarded as an auxiliary.

Wang Yu tried his best, but he only limited the flow of displaced people in Shandong to Shandong.

After all, sometimes the harm caused by the tide of displaced people is even more serious than the locust plague, and it is difficult for many people to imagine what kind of power the people who want to survive to explode in despair.

What Wang Yu did, on the whole, was just a passing grade.

But what Yuan Jie did was to fail.

Again, it's not a question of ability.

These people can be elected by the cabinet, and they are all capable ministers, at least within the standard. Yuan Jie's ability is worse than Wang Yu, Ma Wensheng, and Ye Sheng.

It's just that Ma Wensheng is so brilliant because of Hebei's good foundation.

Wang Yu's passing grade is because of the convenient transportation, canals and galloping roads. Moreover, the topography of Shandong as a whole is also semi-closed, and with the canal in Luxi, there is a possibility of blockade.

But what is Henan?

In the world, it extends in all directions.

The people are deliberately in exile, and no matter how they blockade it, they can't block it.

Yuan Jie encountered such a problem.

Shandong's biggest problem is locusts, while Henan's biggest problem is drought.

The drought is so severe that it has reached the point of no harvest. Although the situation is slightly different from Shandong, it is not much different.

But another problem that Yuan Jie encountered was that when receiving relief grain, Henan had to rank behind Shandong.

There is no way around it.

After all, the bulk of the grain and grass in the imperial court is from Jingcang. From Jingcang to Henan, it is necessary to pass through Shandong first, but the situation in Shandong is like this, Wang Yu naturally will not allow grain trucks to pass by from Shandong.

He must be responsible for the people of Shandong.

watched the people starve to death, but watched a cartload of grain pass through within a stone's throw and be transported to Henan.

Even if Wang Yu himself has a sense of the overall situation, where do those people who are on the verge of life and death have a sense of the overall situation? There have even been cases of robbery of horse-drawn carriages.

It can only be said that people are in a hurry and dare to do anything.

Therefore, Yuan Jie could only get grain through two channels, one channel was to transport it from the canal to the Huai River, and from the Huai River to the southern prefecture and county.

It's just that the grain on the canal has to be shared by Shandong, and the drought in Henan is also light and heavy.

The prefectures and counties in the Huaihe River basin are naturally relatively light. The real heavy is the northern Henan region, where the locust plague is here. There is also the western Henan region, which is full of droughts.

Yuan Jie couldn't care about anything else at the moment, so he naturally opened the Luoyang warehouse to release grain, you must know that the Luoyang warehouse is military food at this moment.

The disaster situation in the north of Henan has been alleviated.

But that's just the relief.

To solve it completely, it is necessary to rely on the relief food of the Beijing Division.

The problem here can be alleviated a little, but for the southwest region, there is no way at all.

Another channel is to transport grain from the Jianghan area to the north for relief.

Compared with the grain stored in Luoyang warehouse, the grain in Jianghan can be said to be endless. It also gives a lot of hope to the victims.

Perhaps in the hearts of Ming officials, there are provincial boundaries, but in the hearts of a large number of victims, there are no provincial boundaries. Therefore, these people could not wait for food in Nanyang, so they went south in large numbers.

As a result, the situation a few years ago reappeared, and the displaced people from the Central Plains existed in large numbers in the Xianghan area. In terms of population, Henan was originally a wide township, but the population has increased dramatically in recent years and has become a narrow township, but the vast area of the lake is still vast and sparsely populated.

It became a fact that a large number of people went south.

A few years ago, Xiang Zhong quelled the rebellion of the displaced people, and at that time, a large number of displaced people went south from Henan. Now it's just another repetition.

When Yuan Jie arrived in Nanyang, there was nothing he could do. He can only go to the court to plead guilty. It is also recommended that the Henan refugees be resettled in Xiangyang, Yunyang and other places.

Attached locally, there is no need to move back.

It's not that Yuan Jie is evading responsibility, but he feels that many places in Henan are already a little overwhelmed. Moreover, the land abandoned by these people has been divided by many people.

If people come back, it will be troublesome.

And the frequent occurrence of such things also shows that it cannot be stopped. Just go with the flow, otherwise there will be a next time, a next time.