In the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, in mid-May. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

Every year in May of the lunar calendar, it is almost the season of summer grain harvest in various parts of the Ming Dynasty, the summer tax and autumn grain are assigned in the Ming season, the summer tax is not more than August, and the autumn grain is not more than February next year, but the Ming Dynasty is still a famine everywhere this year, it is the Huzhou Mansion in the south of the Yangtze River, the same locust plague is great, the people cut the bark and sawdust mixed chaff to eat, or dig the white mud in the mountains for food, called Guanyin powder.

In Wu County, Suzhou Prefecture, the price of rice is as high as 323 yuan per stone of silver, and 222 yuan of wheat stone, and the urban and rural houses are dumped in mid-air, and the dead bodies are pillowed.

From the year of Longqing, until the end of Chongzhen, the inflow of silver from overseas is as high as hundreds of millions of taels, but the south of the Yangtze River, but often famine, this is a strange phenomenon, the main reason is that there is a "Suzhou and Hangzhou ripe, the world is full" reputation of Suzhou and Hangzhou, the crops in the field, replaced by raw silk, raw cotton and other things.

There was a Ming person who wrote: "In Suzhou, there were still few people who were at the end of the past, and now there are three times as many people who go to agriculture and change their careers to become businessmen." In the past, there were no wanderers, but now they go to the farm and take advantage of the food. In the words of about 10 people, 6 or 7 points have gone to farming. ”

The temptation of commerce has made the local people change to cash crops and rely on the sale of raw silk, cotton yarn, cotton cloth, etc. to buy grain.

During the period of Zhu Yuanzhang, the price of a stone of rice was two coins and five cents of silver, two hundred and fifty dollars of copper money, and it rose to five coins in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, and this price was maintained for about a hundred years, until the end of Wanli before it rose to seven coins, before the first year of the Apocalypse, the price of rice in the Ming Dynasty, unless it encountered a major disaster, never exceeded one or two per stone.

From the twelfth year of Chongzhen, Suzhou and Hangzhou. The price of rice has been hovering between two and three taels, and according to the price of rice in ancient times, if one tael of silver can buy two or three stone rice. It is a peaceful year, one or two silver to buy a stone of rice, for a normal year, slightly nervous. If a stone of rice exceeds a tael of silver, there will always be a famine.

Therefore, this rice price is for the people of Jiangnan. It is also unbearable, in a few years, a large number of people starved to death, many luxury houses were sold at low prices and no one cared about, and the more prosperous the business in the Jiangnan area, the more depressed the market became. It's extremely weird.

In Xuanfu Town, the summer grain began to be harvested, and the whole town of Xuanfu Town, the original official saw that there were about 47,000 hectares of Etun fields, but. Excluding the newly reclaimed Xintunpu land after arriving in the town, under the name of Wang Dou, there are about 2 million hundreds of thousands of acres of land, except for more than 400,000 acres of land in Baoanzhou, and most of the rest are camp fields.

Of course, despite all kinds of measures, the tun people cultivated the camp fields, and the enthusiasm was obviously not as good as dividing the fields to the households, and the hundreds of thousands of disaster victims brought back from the 12th year of Chongzhen also lived inside and outside the East Road for many years, and they had a great sense of identity with the shogunate, so from this year onwards, these camp fields will be all given to the tun people of the old tun fort, and they have all become Han Chinese.

Now the situation is for Wang Dou, there is no threat outside the Saiwai, or there are few threats, and he is too lazy to compete with the officials and gentry in the town for a little bit of land, so his plan is to attract Xuanda, or Shanxi landless military households, or homeless people, etc., in the Saiwai Shacheng, Xinghe, Yinning, Dongyangliu, Haliutuhe and other places, reclamation and fortification.

This piece of land, including Guyuan County, Kangbao County, Zhangbei County, Xinghe County and other areas in later generations, has six or seven million acres of arable land, grassland and woodland, also has seven or one million acres, and is rich in coal, lead, iron and other minerals, and the operable space is very huge.

Not to mention, beyond these places, to the north, to the west, there is also a vast and boundless territory, for Wang Dou, the land can be described as endless, and it is not a problem at all.

His plan was to attract 50 to 1 million displaced people within a few years, and in these places, intensively open tunpu and set up camps.

By means of horse farming, crops such as wheat, wheat, flax, sugar beet, and cotton were widely planted, and then livestock farms were set up to raise chickens, ducks, horses, cattle, mules, and sheep, and then grain and meat were used as raw materials to form a series of handicrafts and industries.

"Agriculture, the foundation of the world, gold and jade, hunger and cold, are not as good as grain and silk and linen...... The husband is cold in clothes, not to be warm. Hunger is for food, not for willingness. Hungry and cold, regardless of shame. Human affection, if you don't eat for a day, you will be hungry, and if you don't make clothes all year round, you will be cold......"

At the shogunate meeting, Wang Dou emphasized the importance of agriculture and mulberry, prosperous commerce, could not save the Ming Dynasty, no matter how developed the business in the south of the Yangtze River was, once the agriculture in the north collapsed, it still dragged the whole country into the wave of destruction.

In addition, there is no agricultural revolution, and there can be no industrial revolution, so for Wang Dou, in the next few years, the focus will be on the development of agriculture and animal husbandry.

In order to produce more grain, with the three Jin merchants, Wang Dou will also encourage Xuanda merchants to go out of foreign merchants, after the opening of China and France, Shangtun has been prosperous, especially Shanxi merchants, in the nine sides of the vigorous tuntian, the people of the time have said that the frontier army warehouse before Hongzhi is full, and the salary is sufficient, the main reason is the prosperity of Shangtun.

Of course, now that it has declined, Wang Dou still decided to encourage the merchants to compete for financial resources, recruit people to cultivate the land, and the cultivated fields are mainly the meritorious fields that the soldiers will be rewarded for.

Since the beginning of the year, batches of officers and men of the Jingbian Army have successively exchanged their pastures and woodlands with meritorious service points, and the amount is still quite a lot, especially some high-ranking officers have exchanged more, and the total number of officers and men of the whole army has exceeded one million mu, but Wang Dou does not care, because the rewards are all land outside the Saiwai, so why not?

In the future, Zhangbei County will have 1.6 million mu of cultivated land, 1 million mu of forest land, and 1.6 million mu of grassland.

Even if there is not enough land nearby, it is a big deal to conquer Inner Mongolia and Outer Mongolia in later generations, or even Siberia, how many counties can be divided into these places?

Of course, it was impossible for Wang Dou to divide the cultivated and managed fields and pastures to the soldiers, they all circled a piece of soil, estimated how many high-quality fields, medium fields, inferior fields, high-quality pastures and woodlands could be reclaimed, and so on, so that they could manage them themselves and have the ownership for generations, similar to the Prussian Junkers.

Their "fiefdoms" may have a tax holiday for a certain period of time, after which a certain amount of the total amount of business needs to be paid, and in general, the more money and grain they receive from their operations, the more money and grain they receive.

Of course, after exchanging the land, some soldiers will inevitably have the idea of disarming and returning to the field, Wang Dou does not care, if for the sake of a few hundred acres of land, there will be a small wealth that is, peace, retirement and return to the hometown, these people's achievements, this is the end.

Wang Dou will not mind their departure, his army, the various systems have been very perfect, one officer has gone, there are ten waiting to be filled, one veteran has gone, there are twenty recruits waiting to be filled, they are gone, vacant seats, conducive to new people to join, up and down flow, more conducive to the replacement of new blood in the army, the maintenance of vitality.

Of course, as a compensation for the war for the country, after they are disarmed and returned to the field, they can rest assured in their own "fiefdom", to be a farmer, a manor owner, and a rich man, after all, Wang Dou promised all the soldiers, he is an ordinary soldier, after retiring, he can be a rich landlord and enjoy glory and wealth.

In general, after exchanging the land, most of the soldiers still stay in the army with peace of mind, and the people's hearts are not enough to swallow elephants, and with 100 acres of land, they want to have 1000 acres of land, and with 1000 acres of land, they want to have 10,000 acres of land.

I was even thinking, how wonderful it would be to wait for myself to really be unable to fight in the future, and then retire and own a county-sized land, and those places are all my own?

Of course, although the treatment of soldiers is good, but businessmen and ordinary people, there is no such good thing, they go to the outside of the Saiwai, within the safety of their influence, in fact, they are renting land, after all, it is not easy for them to get meritorious service.

Although they can also privately farm and operate pastures in some places outside the Saiwai, Wang Dou is difficult to stop, but the countless bandits and tribes on the grassland also make it difficult for them to survive.

They are not under the protection of the army, when they encounter something, they want to negotiate with the nearby Tunpu people to send troops, they need to pay a heavy "military fee", and they have to settle for the second, they rent the meritorious land of the soldiers, it becomes a win-win thing, similar to Lai's manor, the birth of Zheng's Agricultural Bank is based on this.

On May 20, Xuanfu Town, the residence of the general army.

"General, the reorganization of the army has already been completed, and the training is not bad, did you go out of the plug to cut and kill, or went out to burn the wasteland?"

In the conference hall, Gao Shiyin looked at Wang Dou, with bull's eyes open, eager to try, and full of interest.

In the planning of Wang Dou and the General Staff Division, the four major battalions of the Chinese army and the cavalry infantry were expanded into five armies, with about 50,000 people, and still under the names of Qinglong, Baihu, Xuanwu, and Suzaku, the people of each tunpu were selected as soldiers of the second battalion, and some of the soldiers of the loyal battalion were also selected to enter the Jingbian army after testing.

At present, a large part of the first-class battalions of each battalion are equipped with flintlock firearms, and each battalion also has one to test the use of firearms.

For the burning of famine, from the 14th year of orthodoxy, the Ming Dynasty has an order, so that every year in July, all towns on the nine sides must send officers and soldiers to the places where the captives haunt, three or five hundred miles away, set fire to the wind, burn weeds, and burn the famine in the name of Hu Ma.

In the past years, Xuanfu Town has also burned waste every year, but it is just getting closer and closer, from the fourteenth year of orthodoxy from the border wall three or five hundred miles, to the present thirty or fifty miles, most of the towns are like this.

Gao Shiyin is an idle person, and he is also interested in killing people and setting fires.

Looking at the huge map on the wall, the sand table in front of him, for a long time, Wang Dou said: "It's not just about burning the wasteland, it's time to ban the threat of border fortresses and capture Guihua City!" ”

He said: "But we have to wait, in August and September, when the autumn is crisp and the grass grows and the horses are fat, the army will be exhausted, go out and grab a handful, completely solve the various departments outside the Cypriot Fortress, and lay a good environmental foundation for the operation of our border plug." ”

He muttered: "I still have to discuss with Governor Zhu, it is best to play a concert and obtain the support of the imperial court." (To be continued.) )