Late Ming Dynasty: So what if Emperor Chongzhen was inactive?!

Chapter 199 Conquer the World, Then Farm

After the war, Zhu Youjian's tough stance began to soften, and the court began to try to transport grain to Shaanxi.

Desperately, after the imperial court's 100,000 shi of grain was delivered to Xi'an, less than 20,000 shi remained. All 20,000 shi were taken away by Hong Chengchou, and not a single grain ended up in the hands of the people.

Because the government troops were also starving and needed to hold the front line to intercept the southward-bound peasant army, if the army's food and money supply was not guaranteed first, they would rebel.

The drought continued to spread, affecting Guanzhong from northern Shaanxi. Major rivers in Guanzhong dried up, and even the once-paradise-like southern Shaanxi experienced drought. With rice unable to grow, the people of southern Shaanxi, who had cultivated rice for hundreds of years, had no choice but to try planting wheat and sweet potatoes, which were distributed by the government.

The yield of sweet potatoes in southern Shaanxi was astonishing, averaging seven or eight hundred catties per person. Hong Chengchou then exempted southern Shaanxi from taxes and collected sweet potatoes uniformly. He also set the value of sweet potatoes very low, almost based on the price of sweet potatoes in the south.

After looting along the way, the imperial court took 70% of the grain, leaving only 30% for the people, leaving the people in southern Shaanxi barely able to avoid starvation.

Xu Guangqi was very dissatisfied with Hong Chengchou's approach. He believed that Hong Chengchou's methods would greatly dampen the people's enthusiasm for planting sweet potatoes. In the end, the people of southern Shaanxi who planted sweet potatoes received less food than those who planted grains. How could they possibly trick them into planting sweet potatoes again next year?!

Faced with Xu Guangqi's accusations, Hong Chengchou outwardly admitted his mistake but refused to make any changes, and his official replies were extremely perfunctory.

Hong Chengchou believed that Xu Guangqi was merely trying to save face after his failed attempt to promote sweet potatoes, seeing the good yields in southern Shaanxi. He thought Xu Guangqi, sitting high in the court, was oblivious to the suffering of the common people. The imperial grain supply couldn't be delivered; if grain wasn't diverted from southern Shaanxi, were they really going to let the entire Guanzhong region starve?!

The drought continued to spread eastward, and Shanxi also began to experience drought. Shanxi is closer to the capital and is an important source of soldiers, so the imperial court had no reason not to provide disaster relief.

With a combination of production cuts and disaster relief measures, Shaanxi, Beizhili, and parts of Shanxi became liabilities for the imperial court. Summer tax revenue was reduced from 18 million taels of silver in the first year to 12 million taels, while the situation regarding grain collection was even worse, decreasing from 12 million shi last year to just over 6 million shi today, almost a 50% reduction.

This only included the taxes collected, not the taxes transported to the capital. Not only did these taxes need to be retained locally, but the transport of silver from the provinces to the capital also incurred significant losses due to fire. The good news was that after the execution of the Grand Canal Commissioner, the Grand Canal finally stopped being congested.

After the imperial court finished collecting summer taxes in July, the first batch of grain transported to Beijing arrived in early August. This was the new rice that Zhu Youjian and Tang Yu had mentioned.

In the north, rice is grown less and wheat and millet are more abundant. Wheat has a coarse texture and is generally used to feed livestock. The main rations for warhorses are barley and soybeans. Millet, also known as foxtail millet, has an unreliable texture and is only eaten by the poor. Eating too much bean rice can cause bloating. Only millet has a good taste and texture, so the emperor of the Ming Dynasty usually ate high-quality rice from the south.

Originally, Zhu Youjian had hoped to ease the burden on Shaanxi after the war, but the deteriorating finances dealt him another heavy blow. The joy of victory and the hopes for a revival vanished like a fleeting dream. Ultimately, the underlying tone of the late Ming Dynasty was one of despair. The course of Heaven is constant; it does not exist for Yao, nor does it perish for Jie.

The current drought has driven people to despair, but unfortunately, it is currently one of the milder periods of drought during the decade-long Great Drought of the Chongzhen Emperor's reign. We are in the initial stages of the drought, which is widespread but relatively mild. Well, by "mild," I mean that crops are dying of thirst, but all water sources haven't been cut off yet, and people haven't died directly from thirst. The main causes of death among the populace are hunger and unrest.

However, after getting through this year, there will be a two-year window of opportunity when the disaster is alleviated and people have hope. Then, God will slap them on the ground again, and even after hitting them, He will continue to beat them.

Since there was still some time, something had to be done, regardless of whether it was useful or not. Zhu Youjian truly did not want to waste this precious time on attrition with the Jurchens. In the battle of 1899, if the Jurchens hadn't come to challenge him, Zhu Youjian would not have wanted to fight that battle at all.

Even if they won, what difference would it make? It wouldn't change the fact that the border walls had fallen and the enemy had reached the capital. In the eyes of these wolves and tigers surrounding the Ming Dynasty, what they saw wasn't necessarily the Ming court's military might, but rather the Ming's weakness and vulnerability. Not everyone harbored the ambition to destroy the Ming Dynasty, but many foreign enemies did have the ambition to sneak into the Ming territory and plunder it while things were in chaos.

The Ming Dynasty was suffering from drought, while the northern part of the Ming Dynasty was hit by both drought and white disasters. In order to survive, they had no choice but to go south to find a glimmer of hope.

Aside from natural disasters, tribal conflicts on the grasslands also contribute to the instability of the Ming Dynasty's borders. The barbarians are driven out by the barbarians. In this killing game, no player can afford to be weak!

Faced with the disaster, Zhu Youjian didn't have many good solutions. All he could do was try to transport more grain from the south to grow more grain in the arid and barren land of the north.

However, amidst this drought, there is still a potential granary in the north, with fertile black soil and abundant water resources—the Liaoze, which has existed for two thousand years.

If you want to understand the severity of the great drought during the Chongzhen era, then the eight hundred li of Liaoze is a good reference point. This swamp in Liaodong has existed since the pre-Qin period. Because of the existence of this swamp, the Ming Dynasty built the border wall of Liaodong in a very ingenious V-shape to bypass it. That is to say, this swamp still existed until the early to mid-Ming Dynasty.

Until the great drought at the end of the Ming Dynasty, which evaporated all the water in this swamp, the vast expanse of the eight hundred li Liaoze was able to accommodate large-scale cavalry passage. The saying "beating roe deer with sticks and scooping fish with ladles" refers to this promised land of the Ming Dynasty.

In fact, not only Liaoze, but the entire Liaodong region was more suitable for farming than the northern part of the Ming Dynasty. Zhu Yijun lost Liaodong and wept bitterly, lamenting the loss of his vast Liaodong territory.

Besides Liaodong's important military and geographical location as part of the capital's defenses, it was also because as early as the Yongle period, the military settlements in Liaodong were enough to support the hundreds of thousands of troops there, enabling Liaodong to achieve self-sufficiency.

Liaodong was also an important grain-producing area, a place for raising soldiers and horses, and even an important mining area, providing a large portion of the mining tax revenue for the Wanli Emperor.

Zhu Youjian made up his mind that if the harvest was good, they would farm. When the drought was at its worst and they could not survive, they would go back to Liaodong and continue farming. If the Ming Dynasty could not farm anymore, they would go to Japan or Southeast Asia to farm!

(End of this chapter)