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

Chapter 237 Great Ming Shunfeng Express

In the third year of the Chongzhen reign, the total amount of summer tax and autumn grain tax, measured in shi (a unit of dry measure), was 29.43 million shi.

Among them, Suzhou Prefecture received 2,809,000 shi, Songjiang Prefecture received 1,209,000 shi, Jiaxing Prefecture received 1,307,000 shi, and Yizhou Prefecture received 552,000 shi.

The Jiangnan region, with only 6% of the country's arable land, paid nearly 20% of the nation's taxes. This is the direct reason why people in Jiangnan often complained about the injustice of the imperial court and the heavy taxes imposed on the region.

However, these complainers concealed a crucial detail: over 60% of the farmland in Jiangnan was government-owned land, and in some areas, such as Songjiang Prefecture, this proportion reached a terrifying 85% or more!
These official fields were acquired by Zhu Yuanzhang. Zhu Yuanzhang was petty and vindictive. Back then, Jiangnan was Zhang Shicheng's territory. After defeating Zhang Shicheng, Zhu Yuanzhang confiscated the land of local powerful landlords and common people and used it as official fields.

Official land does not require a fixed tax rate because the land rent and land tax have been combined, so the tax revenue per mu of official land can be up to three shi, with the total tax rate approaching 90%.

Therefore, the public lands that Zhu Youjian established were not something he came up with on a whim, but rather something that followed a set pattern. However, there were subtle but essential differences between his public lands and official lands.

Official land belongs to the government, which can be the imperial court or a local government. Therefore, local finances often run out. For example, during the Jiajing period when fighting against Japanese pirates, when a sum of money for military expenses needed to be raised urgently, the government would pawn the land, saying that it was only for renting out the right to use it. However, after renting it out for a while, it could not be taken back.

Or perhaps it's a case of collusion between officials and merchants, where prefects and magistrates deliberately choose a time of natural disasters or man-made calamities to sell these fields at low prices and then secretly collect kickbacks.

The most typical example is Xu Jie, the Grand Secretary of the Ming Dynasty. He and his family seized 80,000 mu of official land. But this was not the worst thing. The worst thing was that after he took the lead, other officials at all levels followed suit and began to try every means to steal official land!
Even under Hai Rui's relentless pressure, the Xu family only reluctantly returned 20,000 mu of government-owned land, and that land was the lowest grade among them.

From the Hongwu era to the present, the amount of official land in the country has been reduced by about half. A large amount of official land has been secretly converted into private land, resulting in a significant loss of national assets and taxes.

Legally speaking, government-owned land is also subject to restrictions on private sale, but local officials have been tempted to circumvent these restrictions, with some even more audacious enough to directly tamper with data and alter the land's ownership.

Sometimes this is how Zhu Youjian's despair came about. Whenever he thought of a seemingly good idea and believed that he had brought wisdom to future generations, he would always find in old documents that his predecessors had already done it.

However, even the best policies cannot withstand the erosion of time, and even the most stringent laws can be exploited to find loopholes. Moreover, some people should chuckle when you talk about the law.

Public land is a level higher in status than the original official land. It does not belong to the government or the emperor, but to the abstract concept of the entire country. Its buying and selling is completely locked, regardless of whether it is private or not. No one is allowed to buy or sell this land.

At present, the system is in its early stages of establishment, and the results are quite encouraging. The pilot program is located right under the capital, making supervision relatively convenient. But who knows if it will be sold off by some spendthrift sons in a few decades? Judging by his own experience, Zhu Youjian himself didn't really listen to the ancestral teachings of his father, Zhu Yuanzhang.

In fact, there are reasons why conservatives are averse to reform. There is a reason why things remain unchanged, and change often becomes an excuse to exploit loopholes. No one knows whether reform will succeed, and it is unclear whether the reformers are truly working for the prosperity of the country or seeking personal gain, using reform as a tool to fight for power and suppress dissent.

Taicang in Suzhou stores autumn grains from the Jiangnan region and is known as "the most abundant granary in the world". Liujiagang, near Taicang, is the starting point for Zheng He's seven voyages to the Western Ocean, and the grain transported by sea during the Yuan Dynasty was also shipped out from here.

In mid-December, as the year drew to a close, the north was frozen solid, with snow covering thousands of miles, including the Grand Canal. The drought of the third and fourth years of the Chongzhen reign had eased somewhat, but the snowstorms showed signs of worsening, with the Liaonan region, still struggling to establish itself, facing the most difficult situation.

The Jurchen's crushing defeat triggered a chain reaction. In order to make up for the losses of the war, they intensified their exploitation of their own people. Hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese in Liaodong could not bear this oppression and chose to flee south. At the same time, people from Korea also fled to southern Liaodong, where they were oppressed even more.
All of this was originally part of Yuan Keli's plan. The people who submitted to the central government could provide a large amount of manpower for Liaonan, where farmland was severely abandoned, and could also recruit soldiers locally to supplement the army.

The agricultural-war system, which was self-sufficient, was originally a perfect strategy, but before the self-circulation of southern Liaoning was formed, it was already operating at an excessive capacity.

In the third year of Chongzhen's reign, the imperial court had already supplied Liaonan with one million shi of grain, but it was still far from enough. Now, the population of the four prefectures in Liaonan was about to exceed one million, which was truly terrifying!
This population of one million is a huge burden on the imperial court, but it also means that if the situation in southern Liaoning can be stabilized, the imperial court will have more than one million people in eastern Liaoning, enough to generate a terrifying force of 100,000 troops.

When the time comes, launching a pincer attack with the Guan Ning Army in western Liaoning, forming a combined force of 200,000 to attack Liaodong, recover Liaodong, destroy the Jurchens, and wipe them out, will no longer be a distant dream!

However, Zhu Youjian always paid close attention to the amount of grain stored in the capital. Whenever the amount of grain stored in the capital was less than ten million shi, he would feel cold in his hands and feet, shortness of breath, palpitations, and insomnia.

Furthermore, from an economic perspective, transporting grain from the capital to Liaodong by land was an extremely foolish decision. Moreover, Liaonan and Liaoxi were not connected on land at the time, and the hundreds of miles of land between the Sancha River and the Daling River were still occupied by the Jurchens. Thus, Zhu Youjian recalled the old story of his father.

In the early years of the Hongwu reign, the situation in Liaodong was probably even more severe than it is now. However, the Ming army was too powerful at that time. The coastal route, which is now the area where the Guan Jinning defense line is located, had not yet been formed. To get to Liaodong by land, one had to cross the southern Mongolian region, cross the Yanshan Mountains, and take the Lulong Road that Cao Cao took when he attacked the Wuhuan and wrote the famous poem "Watching the Sea".

Zhu Yuanzhang's recapture of Liaodong began in southern Liaoning. He landed directly from Shandong by sea via the Liaodong Sea Route. However, Shandong was not a good grain-producing area. In the early days of his establishment, the Liaodong Military Command was extremely poor and had to rely on the support of other provinces for everything. At that time, Liaodong's military rations were directly transferred from Jiangnan, thousands of miles away.

In fact, there are differences between sea routes. For the same destination, the capacity and speed of different routes can differ by more than ten times! During the exploration period, people were used to sailing along the coastline, which made it less likely to get lost and made it easier to resupply.

The sea areas along the coast are usually yellowish in color due to the large amount of silt brought by the rivers along the coast and the relatively shallow depth, hence the name Yellow Sea.

Because of the shallow waters, ships navigating the Yellow Sea are typically flat-bottomed and cannot have a deep draft, which greatly affects their carrying capacity. Sailing along the sandbars, moving with the tide and being stranded at low tide, is naturally inefficient.

The bigger problem is that my country's eastern coast is affected by cold currents all year round. This cold current along the Chinese coast never stops flowing from north to south, so transporting grain from the south to the north has to go against the current.

In winter, when the north wind howls, it becomes even more difficult. Even if a hard-sailed sailboat has the ability to cut through the wind, its speed is still very slow!
With the Lunar New Year approaching, the waters of Liujiagang are already crowded with moored boats loaded with grain, ready to set sail. Their goal is to complete a round trip from the Yangtze River estuary to southern Liaoning or Zhigu Port within a month, and strive to return to Jiangnan before the Lantern Festival next year.

History spirals, and the Ming Dynasty seems to have fallen into a washing machine, almost spiraling into the sewer. Due to the implementation of the maritime ban policy, the Ming Dynasty's naval power and navigation technology have experienced a major setback.

Even Zheng Zhilong's grain transport team only traveled along the primary coastal routes, making a maximum of two or three round trips per year, transporting two million shi of grain annually, which was even less than the grain transport by the Grand Canal!

This grain transport team was not from Zheng Zhilong's family, but a huge fleet composed of the Dengzhou-Laizhou Navy, the Zhejiang Navy, the Fujian Navy, the Guangdong Navy, and Zheng Zhilong's nominal Dongfan Navy.

This fleet reached an unprecedented size of 600 ships, prepared to transport 1.2 million shi of grain at once, of which 200,000 shi would be sent to Shandong as disaster relief grain, and 1 million shi would be sent to Liaonan. The Dengzhou-Laizhou and Fujian-Zhejiang navies had 300 ships that took 400,000 shi of grain from Taicang, Suzhou, and set sail. After opening the sea at Liujiagang, the fleet's initial sailing speed was not fast.

At the mouth of the Yangtze River lies the famous Wanli Changtan (Ten Thousand Miles Long Beach), a place filled with silt and treacherous shoals, where ships can only navigate with extreme caution, sailing during the day and resting at night.

Emerging from the long, winding beach, the sea and sky stretched out before them. The Fujian-Zhejiang fleet caught up with the Guangdong navy, which had been anchored and waiting for most of the day. However, they did not set off immediately because the main force, the Zheng family navy, had not yet arrived.

Another night passed, and Shen Shouyue spotted Zheng Zhilong's navy through the lens of his telescope. They had come all the way back from distant Champa!

The monsoons in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are opposite. Winter is the time when the Nanyang fleet returns to the Ming Dynasty. Usually, Zheng Zhilong and others would stay in Fujian or Dongfan for two or three months before transporting grain to the north of the Ming Dynasty when the south wind rises in early spring. However, this time the emperor was urging them to hurry, so they could only try to sail in winter.

When the five fleets met, none of them deployed the main force of their respective navies, and naturally, none of them were led by their respective commanders-in-chief. The Fujian fleet was led by Vice Admiral Shen Shouyue, Zheng Zhilong's fleet was still led by Zheng Cailai, and the Guangdong fleet was led by a Vice Admiral surnamed Huang. The relationship between these mid-level officers was actually very harmonious.

Zheng Cai had long harbored the intention to abandon the Zheng regime and join the Ming. While it's true that Cantonese people prey on Fujianese, Shen Shouyue wasn't a native of Fujian. Furthermore, the Shen family had married a daughter to the emperor, whose reputation for greed and lust was known throughout the land. Wouldn't he be eager to curry favor with them?
There were no direct conflicts of interest among these mid-level generals; any infighting was a matter for those above them and had little to do with them.

General Huang was not very disciplined and actually brought some fine wine on the ship, saying it was homemade and not very intoxicating. As a result, everyone drank two bowls and before they could even eat much food, they were all knocked out and unconscious by the sea breeze.

"Oh no, there's sleeping potion in this wine!" These were the last words Shen Shouyue uttered as he gripped the edge of the table.

"Damn it! He can't hold his liquor!" General Huang scratched his head in frustration.

"Oh dear, cousin, you're dead meat! You've gotten yourself into trouble again! Last time you were punished for getting drunk in the army camp and had to transport grain. If the governor finds out this time..."

"Shut up! If you don't tell, and I don't tell, how will that bastard Yuan Chonghuan know? You're not going to report me, are you?" General Huang clenched his fists so tightly they cracked.

"Cousin, you know me. I won't say anything to Governor Yuan, but I don't know how heartbroken my sister-in-law would be if she knew you were drinking again!"

"One tael of silver!" Huang, the military advisor, shoved a piece of silver into his cousin's hand with a "thud." The cousin weighed the silver in his hand, carefully stuffed it into his purse, and then instructed his men to send the military advisors back to their respective homes. If these people stayed on their ships for too long, things could get complicated!

Fortunately, the rice wine that Vice Admiral Huang drank was indeed homemade. It was intoxicating but did not cause headaches. After an hour or two, the naval commanders gradually woke up. They were still shaken and vowed that from now on, "no drinking before sailing, and no drinking before sailing!"
They didn't originally intend to disobey military discipline, but Lieutenant General Huang was just too enthusiastic, and the wine was damn fragrant. They fell for his trick without even realizing it! Fortunately, Lieutenant General Huang didn't have any bad intentions, otherwise he really would have wiped out all the fleet commanders!
After the fleet merged, Zheng Cai, who had the most experience in ocean voyages, was chosen as the navigator of the entire fleet. The ships made way for the Dongfan Navy, which then took the lead. They weighed anchor and began to cut through the wind.

They needed to drift out to sea, not in a straight line from south to north, so they didn't need to maneuver the fleet to constantly change direction in a zigzag pattern. When calculated, their speed was not much different from that of sailing with the wind.

As the fleet ventured deeper into the ocean and further from land, the yellowish seawater gradually became clear. In a single day and night, the fleet traveled a thousand miles and reached Qingshuiyang. By then, the fleet was more than two hundred miles from land, and the seawater had turned a deep blue.

The sea was calm and even eerily quiet at this time, completely different from their usual experience of sailing near the shore, and in stark contrast to the turbulent and unpredictable sea in summer.

Logically speaking, with the wind direction stable and the sea calm, they should be in a very safe situation. However, like a child going to kindergarten for the first time without their parents, a strong sense of unease involuntarily arose in the hearts of these "shore ducks".

Shen Shouyue had a family tradition of learning and looked down on Chen Jisheng, who came from a humble background. But when he actually had the opportunity to lead a fleet on his own, even if it was just a grain transport team, he could feel the immense psychological pressure that existed in his heart at all times as a fleet commander.

Naval battles are rarely a matter of "victory and defeat are common occurrences in war." Once defeated, the enemy will pursue and annihilate the entire fleet! Even though he was just transporting food and surrounded by their allies, he was still constantly worried about the future of the fleet.

Three more days and nights passed, and the fleet left the Qingshui Ocean and entered the Heishui Ocean. The Heishui Ocean was bottomless, and the seawater appeared bluish-gray in the sunlight, turning completely black on cloudy days. It was even more terrifying at night, when you couldn't see your hand in front of your face and couldn't distinguish between the sky and the sea.

This environment put even more pressure on the fleet's soldiers. However, once they entered the Blackwater Ocean, they no longer had to contend with the cold currents, as a warm current flowed beneath the Blackwater Ocean from south to northwest.

At this point, they were still halfway to Shandong and two-thirds of the way to Liaodong. However, in just three days, their fleet had traversed thousands of miles and arrived in Shandong. When the outline of land reappeared in the crew's eyes, cheers erupted spontaneously, spreading like a plague throughout the entire fleet.

"Ahead lies the Jin Island Mountain in Wendeng, Shandong!" The commander of the Dengzhou-Laizhou Navy's grain transport fleet exclaimed excitedly, pointing to the outline of the land ahead.

Their voyage was much faster than expected. They had thought they would be delayed because they had been tricked by the people from Guangdong, but they still managed to reach Shandong before New Year's Day.

Unlike his allies, returning to Shandong meant returning home for him. He didn't need to return south with the fleet and could take a leave of absence to go home for the Chinese New Year!
They traveled from Liujiagang in Suzhou to Dengzhou in Shandong in just ten days, and that was during the dead of winter when they were sailing against the wind, which made everyone feel a little unreal.

In the past, when sailing along the coast, it would take them two or three months to travel the same distance, and they would often run aground on reefs, encounter strong winds and huge waves, or be followed by unscrupulous pirates. It was definitely not as smooth and unobstructed as it is now.

Ten days of voyage resulted in negligible losses of supplies. Given the unusual circumstances, everyone was eager to complete the mission quickly and reunite with their families. Therefore, the Denglai fleet departed and returned to Penglai Water City to unload its cargo, while the remaining ships pressed on, beginning their journey along the Miaodao Islands, crossing the Dengliao Sea Route towards southern Liaoning.

Compared to the previous voyages of tens of thousands of miles, the entire Dengliao Sea Route was only 1,200 miles long, but this short distance caused the fleet a great deal of hardship.

Huang Shen, who had come from Guangdong, was unfamiliar with the cold, and his thin winter clothing caused him to contract typhoid fever. The Guangdong ship doctors had never treated typhoid fever before; in Guangdong, cinnamon was used for soups! The ship doctors from the other fleets were also surprised that anyone could get typhoid fever, as they had never treated it before!
The ocean is much warmer than the land; compared to the land, this little bit of cold is nothing! Typhoid fever? It's very simple: Ephedra and Cinnamon Twig Decoction. The Sage of Medicine taught us this step by step. Ephedra? No! Cinnamon Twig? No!
Sweating, yes, sweating, drinking alcohol can also induce sweating! In the absence of medical resources, the ship's doctor could only treat General Huang as a hopeless case and make him drink alcohol to induce sweating!
Huang Canjiang got drunk and his illness worsened, but fortunately, there were one or two reliable doctors among the large group of incompetent medical workers in the fleet.

The reliable ship's doctor stopped Huang Canjiang's wine and replaced it with hot porridge. He added some Liaodong specialties and dried ginger to the porridge. Huang Canjiang slurped up three liters of hot porridge, sweated profusely, and successfully brought down his fever. He was lucky to have survived by the skin of his teeth!

Halfway through their voyage, the fleet encountered a cold wave. Some of the ships were cracked by the cold, and the crew suffered frostbite. In addition, the fleet was blown backward by strong winds for more than a hundred miles. The Liaonan Peninsula withdrew its agreement to receive the grain and used a major retreat tactic against the Ming Dynasty's allied navy!
(End of this chapter)