A Good Landlord in the Tang Dynasty: Starting from the Village Chief

Chapter 74 Returning home in glory
Not long after,

When Li Yi came to Sanqiao in the western suburbs of Chang'an again, he was shocked.

The shantytowns for disaster victims here are bigger, there are more disaster victims, and they are dirtier and more chaotic.

They were half-dressed, unkempt, with dull eyes, like the walking dead.

The grandeur and majesty of Chang'an, the bustle of the east and west cities, and the tranquility of suburban countryside such as Yusuchuan and Fanchuan form a sharp contrast with this place.

The roadside is full of lonely old people and disabled people lying on the ground begging.
This is a scene of the end of the world.

The children with their upper bodies naked were all very thin, with arms and legs as thin as bamboo poles and protruding ribs.

Liu Heizi seemed accustomed to all this, and even felt like returning home in glory. "Whenever there's a major disaster, there's always famine, followed by refugees. Guanzhong is still relatively good. My hometown is in Nanyang. Since the Sui Dynasty, it's been even worse. Soldiers are like bandits, thieves are everywhere, soldiers are like combs, bandits are like rakes..."

"Is there no one in charge?"

"Who cares? Take Sanqiao for example. It's only fifteen miles away from Chang'an. Do you think the nobles in Chang'an don't know that there are so many refugees here? There are also a large number of refugees gathered at Baqiao and Changlepo. It's not that they don't know, but they can't take care of them all.

If you look closely, aren't there fewer young and strong people among the disaster victims? Most of them are the elderly and weak, and there are even fewer young women?"

Li Yi looked around and found that it was indeed the case.

"Young and strong men were chosen by the imperial court to transport grain, build cities, pave roads, and even construct palaces and temporary residences, or build ships and forge weapons and armor. Those chosen would be given a share of food to settle down, and they would be able to eat their fill in the future and earn a salary. Without these young and strong men, the disaster victims would not be able to cause trouble.

The food and wages for these victims who were taken away were very low, but it was not a way to make a living, was it?
Every time the government came to recruit people, you had to fight for a chance.

The remaining young and strong men would be recruited by nearby nobles and powerful families, either as long-term or short-term laborers, in any case, they would be able to find a job to make a living."

Liu Heizi had stayed here for a while before, but he grew up eating at many people's homes, so he was more adaptable to this kind of life of fleeing famine. He took the initiative to go to the countryside to find work from the landlords, and he didn't mind doing odd jobs. He wanted to make a living first, and then find a stable long-term job.

Later, he found a long-term job as a farmhand in Guo Erlang's house.

"Where's the young woman?"

"Young women are not as capable as young men, but there are still some poor families who come to pick them. They can exchange a woman for a bride for three or five dou of millet. There are even some women whose husbands have died and who have no family left, and who have children to support them. At this time, as long as there is a man willing to take her, they will follow her.

Of course, there are also brothels, or wealthy families, who will take advantage of the famine to buy people at this time. The prices are very cheap, and they will choose those who are young and beautiful.

A good and loving person has since become a lowly person, even becoming a prostitute."

"Some disaster victims have relatively intact families, but because they are desperate and have no daughters to sell, they pawn their wives."

"Pawning your wife?" Li Yi only knew how to pawn things, houses, and land, so how could he pawn his wife?
"It's like renting. You find a middleman to sign a contract, and then you agree on a price for one, three, or five years, and then you pawn your wife to the other man. Usually, it's poor bachelors who can't afford a new wife, so they pawn a cheap wife to live with for two or three years. They all hope to have children with their wife and leave behind descendants to carry on the family line."

Li Yi was truly eye-opening.

Pawning a wife is different from pawning property. Whether it's at a temple pawn shop or a powerful family's longevity storehouse, pawning property is essentially a mortgage loan. When the loan is due, the owner must redeem it and pay interest. If the loan is not redeemed by the due date, the property will be forfeited and left to others to dispose of.

"If you pawn your wife, any children she bears will belong to the pawner. When the wife returns to her original husband's home, she doesn't need a ransom, and she doesn't have to pay back the money she pawned herself."

To put it bluntly, it's renting.
Poor people have to pay rent when they rent land.

To pawn a wife, one must pay a sum of money, and the benefits are the right to use the wife during the contract period and the ownership of any children born.

"Compared to selling your wife outright, pawning your wife is only a temporary pawning, and you can take her back when the term expires."

I’ve heard before that Thais rent their wives to foreign tourists, but I never thought that the Tang Dynasty already had this practice.

These women are so miserable.
"Won't the government provide relief to the remaining elderly and weak?"

"Yes, they do give out porridge, but to be honest, they only give out porridge once a day, and that porridge is basically just rice soup, with not a few grains of rice in it. It's just barely enough to keep people alive. Look at those disaster victims, they're all skin and bones."

This is the suburbs of Beijing, and the situation of these disaster victims is relatively good. After all, the government comes to recruit people for work, the nobles and powerful people also come to recruit cheap workers, and there are also those who buy men and rent wives, and take the opportunity to recruit skilled craftsmen, or let the refugees give up their citizenship and become their tenants.

The opportunities are better than anywhere else.

In many places where war and famine are still severe, countless people have starved to death, and there are even worse scenes.

"Many nobles in the capital would also come to the outside of the city to distribute porridge, but it was just a drop in the bucket." Liu Heizi actually said an idiom.

Li Yi sighed, fortunately Li Shimin fought back in desperation at Changwu last time and won a comeback. Otherwise, if Xue Ju's army was allowed to attack Guanzhong, who knows how many new refugees and starving people would be created.

"Ah Lang, you can also pick some refugees here and bring them back to Luojiabao to form your entourage. It would be best if they have wives, children, and elders."

The village chief Wang had said this to Li Yi last time.
Selecting some refugees here to serve as foot soldiers actually means asking these refugees to abandon their registered residence and become fugitives, hiding themselves under the name of the landlords and serving as foot soldiers and tenants.

These people can be called vagrants. They are no longer registered citizens of the Tang Dynasty, and are no longer good citizens.

Although they are not slaves yet, their status as soldiers is no longer good.

The soldiers were dependent on powerful landlords and had no household registration. Although they no longer had to pay taxes to the court and serve in the army, they had to pay rent to the landlords.
Long ago in the Han Dynasty, the Buqu were the private armed forces of the nobles and powerful, roughly similar to the servants of the officers in the Ming Dynasty. By the Wei and Jin Dynasties, they had become pariahs.

During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, buqu were a type of family-based army, a blend of farming and warfare, somewhat like soldiers and farmers. Once a legitimate citizen renounced their landownership and became a vassal of a landlord, they effectively became private property, with no freedom at all. Without their master's permission, they were forbidden from leaving their area of activity, or they would be charged with desertion. Even their marriages had to be arranged by their master.

Liu Heizi is asking Li Yi to poach people from the imperial court.
Turning the court's registered civilians into their own private soldiers caused the country to lose its tax-paying and military-serving population. This kind of thing was forbidden in all dynasties, but the nobles and powerful people always did it secretly. However, when there was a change of dynasty, natural disasters, wars, or famine, the nobles and powerful people would do it openly.

The court was too busy to care about this and just turned a blind eye.

Just like the refugees who flocked to Chang'an from all directions, there were more than tens of thousands of them, and the imperial court was unable to provide relief to them, so it tacitly allowed the nobles and powerful people to divide these refugees.

The young and strong ones are chosen first.
After picking and choosing, the only ones left were the disabled, the elderly and the weak. The nobles came to distribute porridge, and in fact they were taking the opportunity to pick people.

"First I'll find you a bride,"

"What kind of woman do you want to choose?"

Liu Heizi, who is only 25 years old this year but looks like he is over 35, chuckled and was a little shy. "I want to find a strong woman, preferably with a big butt. They say that a big butt can give birth to a son."

"anything else?"

"She needs to be taller and have a bigger chest so she can have enough milk to raise a baby."

"What about age? How old are you looking for?"

"Over 20, they should be. Older people know everything and can be caring."

"Over twenty? Then they must have been married, right?"

"It's okay if she's been married before. It's okay if the girl you like has a baby."

Li Yi laughed out loud. Liu Heizi was quite open-minded. Perhaps this was the helpless choice of the poor people. As the saying goes, when you are hungry, you will not choose the food; when you are poor, you will not choose the wife; when you are in a hurry, you will not choose the road.

When ordinary people marry, they definitely want to marry someone who is strong so that they can work. It doesn’t matter whether she is pretty or not. They will not like someone with a thin waist and small legs. Why would they marry someone who will fall down at the slightest gust of wind?
As for the fact that women who have given birth to children do not feel ashamed, it is because having given birth to a child means that they can give birth again. In addition, in ancient times, women often faced greater risks when giving birth to their first child, but the risk of giving birth again after having given birth was much smaller.

It's all based on practical considerations.

"Lao Hei, it really doesn't matter whether you're married or not, but it's best to pick one who doesn't have children." You can never raise other people's children well. It takes one in a million to treat your adoptive father as your biological father. The regent Dorgon didn't end up well when he went to find Xiaozhuang.

The three of them walked into the disaster camp.
There were haphazardly built straw huts everywhere, sewage flowing on the ground, feces and urine everywhere, and flies flying everywhere.

The smell in the hot summer was so bad that Li Yi had to cover his mouth and nose all the time.

All three of them were wearing new clothes.

As soon as he came in, he immediately attracted countless pairs of eyes, and those eyes were obviously unfriendly.

Fortunately, Liu Heizi is tall and strong, and Li Yi also has a sheathed sword hanging on his waist today.

"I stayed here for a while half a year ago. There's a whole area of disaster victims from Nanyang and Xiangyang. My hometown is Nanyang. I'll go and see where it is. It would be even better if I could find a woman from my hometown."

Nanyang belongs to Dengzhou.

"Nanyang is a vast plain, but unfortunately it lacks water. Nine out of ten years there are droughts, and famine is common. At the end of the Daye period, the people were living in dire straits. It is now occupied by Zhu Can, a native of Bozhou. Although he was formerly the assistant historian of Chengfu County, he is a cannibal. His men are known as the Kedahan Bandits, and wherever they pass, they leave no inhabitants."

This Zhu Can called himself King Garuda. In the 11th year of Daye, he gathered people in his hometown of Bozhou to rebel. The number of people reached over 100,000. He led his troops across the Huai River, slaughtered people in Jingling and Mianyang, and then turned to plunder Shannan, looting, burning and killing everywhere.

The most despicable thing about this man is that he is a real bandit. He has no base and wanders around burning, killing and looting. Every time he captures a county, he moves away before eating up all the food. When he leaves, he burns all the money, food and supplies that he cannot take with him.

He didn't care about agricultural production at all. Just like locusts, wherever he passed, famine occurred and countless people starved to death.

When he could not capture the city and seize supplies, he ate women and children as military rations.

In his early years, he had submitted to Li Mi and was named the Grand Administrator of Yangzhou and Duke of Deng. However, this year, he recruited 200,000 soldiers in western Hubei, marched north and captured Nanyang, then proclaimed himself the Emperor of Chu and changed the reign title to Changda, and no longer paid attention to Li Mi.

"In May of this year, the imperial court sent Ma Yuangui as the pacification envoy to Shannan to defeat Zhu Can in Guanjun County. Earlier this month, Xuanzhou Governor Zhou Chao engaged in battle and defeated him again. However, Zhu Can roamed everywhere, and they were unable to annihilate him. Instead, the people of Shannan and Huaixi were left with even greater misery."

When Li Yi heard that Zhu Can's army used women and children as military rations, he had already determined that this was a beast. This kind of person was definitely not a hero in troubled times, but a pure locust and livestock.

Liu Heizi came to the place where he lived half a year ago.

There were still many disaster victims from Shannan here, but after looking around, he found that there was no one he knew.

The disaster victims here have changed several times.

Liu Heizi, who thought he would be able to return home in glory, was very disappointed.

A group of disaster victims from Nanyang, upon hearing that this sturdy man in brand new clothes was also from Nanyang Nanxiang, all came up to him very politely.

When they heard that Liu Heizi had settled down in Yusuku River outside Beijing, had fields, houses and food, and wanted to find a woman to marry, they immediately rushed to introduce him to a new wife.

(End of this chapter)