The construction of the new wharf on Suzhou Creek in Shanghai has led to the emergence of many new houses in the area outside the city walls of Shanghai County, near the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek.

These houses are either warehouses, or dwellings, or inns, restaurants, and teahouses, to meet the daily needs of the growing number of immigrants in Shanghai County.

Compared with the county town of Shanghai, which is closed regularly every day, the old and new dock areas outside the city are noisy day and night, and they are extremely lively. Beginning last year, Song Yingsheng, the newly appointed county magistrate, has set up a fire department, a patrol police station, a city hall, and a militia outside the city to manage street construction and public order work.

The county seat of Shanghai is the largest city outside the city of Songjiang Prefecture, and for more than 100 years, except for the rebellion of the Japanese in the Jiajing period, it has never encountered a military disaster. Therefore, the population of the county is nearly 100,000, and the wharf area near the Huangpu River outside the city is also scattered with tens of thousands of people.

However, with the completion of the new wharf on Suzhou Creek, merchants from Zhejiang, Nanzhili, Huguang and other places, plus the influx of landless farmers from the left and west of Shanghai. The population of the old and new wharf areas outside the county seat of Shanghai has nearly doubled, and the rapid growth of the population has not only put pressure on the social security of Shanghai County, but also caused hidden safety hazards due to various haphazard grass huts.

However, the biggest headache for Song Yingsheng is the rapid influx of population, which has caused great pressure on drinking water. Although Shanghai is surrounded by rivers, as a city downstream of rivers, the water source of these rivers cannot be used directly as drinking water.

Therefore, in the past, the people of Shanghai County, as long as they had the conditions, would dig a well water and use it as their daily water. Now that there is an influx of so many immigrants, the growth rate of this well has naturally not kept up so quickly.

Shanghai has a subtropical monsoon climate, which is much hotter than in the north, and if a plague breaks out among the stevedores in these docks, it will quickly spread.

Before Song Yingsheng went to Shanghai to take up his post, Chongzhen had already introduced his experience in urban management to him. Most of these urban management experiences are based on the experience of later generations. Of course, China already had more than 10,000 cities in the Spring and Autumn Period, so it also has its own traditional experience in urban management.

However, these experiences have not been systematically summarized according to scientific verification, so they cannot be used for urban construction planning and design. The knowledge that Chongzhen gave to Song Yingsheng was precipitated by experience after hundreds of years of knowledge explosion, so he could better prescribe the right medicine for the problems that arose during the expansion of the city.

After the Chinese New Year, Shanghai County was finally upgraded to Shanghai, not only completely independent from Songjiang Prefecture, but also received a grant from the imperial court to redeem a total of 30,000 acres of land from Shanghai County to Suzhou Creek.

To the north of the county seat of Shanghai, on both sides of the Suzhou Creek, in addition to the newly built Suzhou Creek wharf area, the rest of the place is a place of paddy fields and swamps, with streams crisscrossing it. In the summer, this place is overgrown with reeds and grasses, and it is dense and difficult to enter, and at a glance, the fields are full of mounds and tombs, which is obviously not a good place.

The paddy fields in the north of Shanghai County are not as fertile as the paddy fields of Qingpu and Huating, so one acre of high-quality paddy fields is up to 20,000 Wen, and the worse wasteland is about 10,000 Wen. Therefore, the average price of 30,000 mu of land is about 15,000 yuan per mu, and the total price is about 600,000 yuan.

In fact, most locals agree that this price is overestimated. Because when the imperial court expropriated the land for the new wharf last year, the estimated value was only 12,000 wen per mu.

When these people were talking about the imperial court being the head of a wronged case, the personnel sent by the inner government spent 400,000 yuan to purchase 21,000 mu of land in the west and south of Shanghai County.

At this time, the local landlord felt that something was wrong, and began to hold on to the land in his hand and no longer sell it. At the end of March, a land exchange was opened in the Chenghuang Temple in the county seat of Shanghai to trade land in the Shanghai area.

The gentry and the common people of Shanghai were stunned to find that their land could no longer be traded privately as before. Each piece of land must be registered and bought and sold in the exchange, otherwise the imperial court will not approve the change of land title.

At the same time, the newly appointed mayor of Shanghai, Song Yingsheng, announced that because of the promulgation of the new weights and measures, Shanghai will re-measure all the land in the territory, and the old land deeds will be replaced with new land title certificates within three years.

The nature of the land will be divided into three categories: agricultural land, industrial land and commercial land. The tax rate for agricultural land remains the same, but there is a 3% annual land tax for industrial land and 5% of the annual land premium for commercial land.

If the status of the land is changed, the landlord must apply to the Urban Planning Division of the City Hall, and there is no fee for the time being, but the change can only be made once a year. The high tax rates on industrial and commercial land surprised the local gentry, who felt that no one would change the nature of the land in order to pay more taxes.

For the promulgation of the new weights and measures, the gentry and common people of Shanghai County quickly accepted it calmly, after all, Shanghai itself is a city of cotton textile center, and commerce is relatively developed. The new weights and measures are more accurate and convenient to use than the old ones, and greatly reduce disputes in commercial trade.

But for the gentry in Shanghai, there was still resistance to re-measuring the land. However, if they do not accept the re-measurement of the land, they will not be able to replace the land title deed with a new one, and they will no longer be able to transfer the land.

Some of the more stubborn gentry decided to resist the new land survey, and they had no intention of selling their land, so they thought that they would not lose anything if they could not get a new land title deed.

However, some of the gentry who owned land in and around the county seat of Shanghai soon defected. Because after the opening of the land trading market, the land in and near the county seat of Shanghai began to rise slowly.

The gentry who had set up warehouses and inns on their own land outside the county town last year soon discovered that the warehouses and inns they had built were still too small to accommodate the merchants who had come to Shanghai from other places to set up their inns. In the past, Shanghai County, which would only flourish after autumn, began to flourish this spring.

Porcelain from Jingdezhen, rice, tea, cotton, bamboo and wood from Huguang, silk from Zhejiang, tea from Fujian and various brass and cast iron parts from Tianjin, new spinning machines, glassware and much more.

A year after the opening of the port in Shanghai, merchants from all over the Ming Dynasty seemed to suddenly react and wanted to set up a branch in Shanghai for sales.

The gentry, who had gathered together to oppose the re-measurement of the land, soon dispersed. They really didn't have time to discuss this matter, and while businessmen from all over the world gathered in Shanghai County, it also promoted the demand for urban construction in Shanghai. The local gentry who owned the land now had to consider whether it was better to rent the land or sell the land at a cost-effective price.

In April, merchant ships from Batavia, Banten and Manila appeared on the Huangpu River. These large ships of several hundred tons carried away all kinds of goods from the banks of the Yangtze River by more than 10 or even more than 20 small inland river boats.

The Dutch, the British, or the merchant ships of other countries made a beeline for Shanghai from the very beginning of the year, and they did not even stop at the ports off the coast of South China.

Last year, the news of the opening of ports in China, the East Asian empire, finally spread among the businessmen doing business in these Southeast Asian regions. The news that the Shanghai port, which has just opened, not only has a large supply of goods, but also has a lower price than Guangzhou and Macao, has also spread.

Therefore, when the monsoon of this year is just blowing, those merchants are already eager to set sail and set off, hoping to get a good start before everyone else.

Backed by the richest Jiangnan region in China, the port of Shanghai has an incomparable advantage over other regions. All kinds of raw materials produced in the inland provinces were transported to the Jiangnan region through the Yangtze River, and through the processing and production of handicraftsmen in the Taihu Lake area, various finished products were transported to Shanghai again.

It can be said that not long after the establishment of the Port of Shanghai, it has shown its potential to become the first port city in Asia. Due to the rapid development of industry and commerce in Shanghai, the land measurement announcement issued by Song Yingsheng was quickly marginalized from the discussion of the gentry and common people in Shanghai County.

Only the gentry whose land was located in Pudong were still trying to resist the land clearance. But the voices of these gentry soon became unmainstream among the Shanghai gentry. Just because it is separated by a Huangpu River, the price of one acre of land in Puxi is also three times the price of Pudong field.

Land transactions in the land trading market are calculated solely on the basis of the area on the land property. When the price of land continues to rise, it is an extra square meter, which is profitable for the landlord.

As a result, the landlords, who were supposed to resist the land clearance, soon appeared in support of the Qingzhang. Most of the land of these landlords was near Shanghai County, and they paid bribes to the officials of the Qing Dynasty to enclose the wasteland, public land, and even small fields of some ordinary people on the edge of their land.

The landlord, who had obtained the title deed, soon sold the land at a high price at the land exchange. As a result, many people suddenly realized that their land had become someone else's property without realizing it. This also made the land dispute lawsuits in Shanghai County begin to occur frequently in the second year of Chongzhen.

In order to reduce such lawsuits, Song Yingsheng had to add another clause that after the land clearance is completed, it must be publicized for 30 days, and the land title certificate can only be issued if there is no objection. This provision has greatly dampened the enthusiasm for land transactions and made many speculators very dissatisfied. But Song Yingsheng soon found an advantage, the emergence of these lawsuits made those people who resisted Qingzhang begin to change their attitudes and actively began to replace the old land deeds. They are afraid that their land will somehow become someone else's property.

As a result, it was originally just an old county town in Shanghai under the rule of Songjiang Mansion, and it began to stumble towards its own promising future.