Reclaiming Wasteland: Carefree Mountain Farmer

Chapter 166 The Emperor Seides in the Hall of Brightness

Bei Jiwu sat on the dragon throne in the Mingtang Hall, working with his hands resting on the desk, calculating this year's tax revenue.

The data in the newspapers was inaccurate; they were all estimates. The final statistics required calculating the totals from multiple regions, and in that era, calculations could only be done using abacuses and mental arithmetic, which made the data calculation very slow.

Beijiwu was calculating the salt tax on a draft paper.

"Workers' wages don't need to be taken care of. The price of one jin of salt is fixed at fifty qian, which is 0.05 liang."

"If ten million people equals one hundred million jin, then that's five million liang."

"The salt tax paid by Sang Yang'an and Yun Yong was 824 million copper and silver coins. It seems that the actual consumption was even greater. Salt can be used for preservation and to make pickled meat and vegetables. In the era before seasonings, people did eat a lot of salt, but it was unhealthy."

Beijiwu quickly ignored other people's health problems. In ancient times, the average lifespan was thirty-five to forty-five years. People would die from exhaustion before chronic diseases could even develop.

"There shouldn't be any problem with the salt tax, but there will be taxes on iron, tea, cloth, newspapers, horses, and shops."

The Arctic warriors were calculating one by one.

There is currently a severe shortage of economics professionals.

Both artisans and farmers have a general direction; just give them a goal and follow it, and there's no rush.

However, in terms of the economy, we currently rely entirely on supervision and self-discipline, lacking an effective statistical and integration agency, and even more so, a master economist who can set the overall direction and formulate reasonable policies based on the current complex situation.

If someone else is in charge of this, it's easy for subordinates to shirk their responsibilities.

Only when Beijiwu personally takes charge of this will his subordinates do their best.

"Oh shit……"

Beijiwu spent more than two hours solving calculation problems, and finished several sheets of draft paper.

"Damn it!" Beijiwu cursed again. "My sons should be in school by now. All they do is run around in their open-crotch pants all day. How can they not learn something to help with chores at home?"

Beiji Wu decided to send the children to school next year. Those who were bright would help the court, while those who weren't good at studying would go out to fight.

Those who are not satisfied can go back to their hometown to retire; Beitian Village will welcome them.

The accounting was incredibly troublesome, but after confirming that there were no problems with the major taxes, Beijiwu finished his tedious day of work.

Actual wealth is far greater than paper wealth, but gold and silver do not equal real strength.

Food is the most stable guarantee, but it's too troublesome to store. It can only be stored for three to five years at most, unlike gold and silver which can be stored for a long time.

While I was thinking about something, I suddenly heard what sounded like a car passing by.

Beijiwu stood up and looked outside. The eunuch had already walked in quickly.

"Your Majesty, it's raining outside."

Upon hearing this, Beijiwu casually said, "Rainy days are perfect for enjoying song and dance performances. Have someone prepare a performance, and we'll have dinner here."

"Yes!" The eunuch bowed and withdrew.

Beijiwu walked towards the rear hall.

The Mingtang is also the Ming Palace, and only a small part of it is used for holding court. Beiji Wu would occasionally sleep in his bedroom here.

This place was originally the main residence of the previous emperors. Beiji Wu didn't like climbing upstairs and spent most of his time resting in the Guanyin Hall, where the empress dowager and concubines temporarily stayed.

It started raining heavily outside. More than two thousand palace maids, musicians and eunuchs held umbrellas and lined up in two rows to climb the steps of the Mingtang and enter the Mingtang Palace where the emperor resided.

The sky was overcast and gloomy, and the heavy rain seemed to move like a car traveling from near to far, and from far to near.

Not far away, a magnificent palace, over a hundred meters tall, stands beneath the silent and solemn sky, facing the Ming Palace.

The torrential rain blocked out the bright light outside, and the burning candles and lanterns made the Yaochi Palace where Beijiwu was located shine with golden splendor once again.

But that couldn't dispel the gloom of a rainy day.

Bored, Beijiwu leaned back in his soft chair and quietly watched the dancers' performance.

I was initially not in a good mood, but I soon saw the dancers coming out.

The dancers were all dressed in hazy, white silk clothes. When they raised their hands, the outline of their waists could be vaguely seen under the light.

One after another, slender-waisted beauties gazed at Bei Jiwu with lustful expressions, and like budding flowers, they surrounded the most beautiful and charming woman in the center.

They either crouch down, hide behind others, or stand with their hands raised to the side, surrounded by admirers.

The dancers swayed gracefully, like flowers in the wind and rain, or water plants in the spring water.

The musicians, unseen on both sides, were also hidden behind screens and pillars, using their voices to accompany the dancers' steps, as well as their swaying arms and jade-like hips.

Arctic Martial smiled and shouted, "Great! I love this kind of flamboyant style. Keep jumping, and wiggle your hips faster!"

I can't appreciate elegant dances; Arctic Martial Arts prefers passionate, unrestrained, and even somewhat vulgar dances.

Seeing that King Wu was pleased, the dancers who used their beauty to please him also put on a show of their charm.

Outside, the wind howled, the rain poured down, and the water surged like waves.

A torrential downpour descended upon the entire city, the water vapor forming a mist, and the wind stirring the water.

After ten days of continuous heavy rain, the Yellow River's stepmother, unsurprisingly, met with an accident.

Lured by the wind and waves, her legs trembled and then came together, turning the north-south divide into a great flood that could not be contained. Unbecoming of her nature, she poured the entire Huai River into the waterway, submerging ten million acres of land and destroying more than forty cities.

The floodwaters spread from Puyang to Jizhou, creating a giant marshland in the southern part of Qizhou and filling in all the low-lying areas along the way. It also created several large lakes in northern Jiangsu and eastern Henan.

Weishan Lake - Luoma Lake - Hongze Lake.

After the heavy rain stopped, the flood also subsided, and Bei Jiwu personally went to inspect the water level.

Several ministers in charge of flood control and commanders followed him, and more than fifty people rode horses to inspect the 800-mile stretch of the Yellow River waterway that had been flooded.

Heading east from Luoyang, the roads are muddy and difficult to travel, but the lush vegetation reveals a vibrant vitality after a great disaster.

Qi Tian rode his horse alongside Bei Jiwu, speaking respectfully and politely.

"Your Majesty, the damage this time was mainly in the floodplains, and the damaged cities were mostly small towns. Thanks to Your Majesty's foresight, most people built fortresses on the slopes."

Arctic Martial was indeed farsighted, having long considered that the Yellow River, like a stepmother, would not welcome these wild boys from other places, so when enclosing land, he mainly enclosed areas that were not prone to flooding.

The remaining areas were either allocated to subordinates as flood control zones or distributed to disaster victims.

In any case, Arctic Martial Arts University would never do the thing of giving good land to others while keeping bad land for themselves.

When dividing up women, they keep the prettiest ones for themselves.

If you're going to be the boss, you should act like one. You're not going to be an emperor to suffer.

The land near Luoyang was distributed to palace maids, eunuchs, civil officials, soldiers, and a large number of production team members.

Now, almost five years later, Beijiwu is inspecting the now calm Yellow River while contemplating reclaiming the land near Luoyang.

Anyway, those palace maids and eunuchs don't farm themselves, nor do they have the ability to hire people to farm. The land that has been abandoned for almost five years should be reclaimed, and a symbolic compensation of a few taels of silver will suffice. The grain from one mu of land can only sell for two or three hundred wen at most. If it can sell for five hundred wen, that's the output of official land, which has sufficient fertilizer and technical support.

Ordinary farmland yields at most 120 or 130 catties of grain. Farmers have to hire people to plant, harvest, dry, and thresh the wheat, and they also have to find a place to sell their grain. The price is definitely lower than that of government grain, at most three or four coins per catty.

What's worse is that the output of government-owned land has been increasing, and the price of grain this year is actually very low. Many farmers can only eat the grain they grow themselves or give it away.

With large-scale planting and thousands of households developing their own arable land, prices could be even lower next year.

No one rents land to farm. These lands cannot be used to build houses or grow crops other than grains. Nowadays, most of the land has been occupied for grazing cattle and horses.

Nobody does things that don't make money, and even those who are skeptical give up after a year or two.

Arctic Wu owns a large amount of land throughout the country and, with large collective farms as its core, shares the food burden in various places, forming five super-large production teams with a total of hundreds of thousands of households.

The 100,000 households include more than 100,000 regular workers, more than 7 million seasonal temporary workers, and hundreds of thousands of family members of regular workers.

One hundred thousand households will handle 120 million mu of arable land.

Shanxi Province has 30 million mu of cultivated land, divided into four production teams: North Shanxi, Central Shanxi, South Shanxi, and Guanzhong. The geographical scope covers the entire Northwest region. The seasonal farming is carried out from south to north every year. Spring wheat, winter wheat, and millet are managed and harvested separately according to the season. Basically, the busy period lasts from spring to autumn.

The Pingyuan Province has 50 million mu of cultivated land, encompassing Youzhou, Jizhou, and Qingzhou. Two production teams were assigned to manage it, one for the north and the other for the central and southern parts.

The Huanghuai Province has 40 million mu of land, four 10,000-household production teams, 30 million mu of wheat, tea, mulberry, vegetables, rice, seasonings, medicinal herbs, flowers and grasses, and 10 million mu of other crops.

Apart from officials, artisans, palace maids, and soldiers, almost everyone in the entire Shan Nong Kingdom participates in agricultural production during the busy farming season.

The number of agricultural workers is not just 100,000, but more than 5 million, and harvesting wheat with sickles is still the mainstream method.

It's just that they went from farming for themselves to farming for the country.

The number of people farming will decrease. In the early days, it took five 10,000 households to cultivate six million mu of arable land in the Huanghuai Province. Now, four 10,000 households plus one million agricultural workers can complete the planting and harvesting of thirty million mu of wheat.

The vast amount of farmland that has been submerged today consists mainly of private lands and lordly fiefdoms that are easily flooded.

Arctic warriors surveyed the disaster-stricken area with a blank expression.

After looking around and hearing countless grievances, I remained unmoved.

What can we do? It's a normal thing.

Water will inevitably flood the bottom.

Even the mightiest waves of the Yellow River cannot reach Mount Tai.

Distribute grain and money as needed, relocate disaster victims, exchange territories, bury the dead, and implement epidemic prevention measures.

They originally intended this area to be a flood control and grazing area, but they disobeyed the imperial court's orders and insisted on returning to their hometowns. So what if they drowned?

As the emperor of the Mountain Farming Kingdom, Beiji Wu is not responsible to everyone.

Legally speaking, those who don't pay taxes are considered troublemakers, especially since many of them came from the south on their own.

Fewer people means fewer deaths.
The more than four million people in the entire Huanghuai Province either live around Luoyang, or near major cities such as Nanyang, Xinyang, Zhengzhou, and Kaifeng, or in places like Yancheng and Yangzhou.

Most of the remaining people also lived in the city, and could take refuge on the city walls if something happened.

The deaths of more than 50,000 people were of no concern to the entire Shan Nong Kingdom. Everyone there was experienced and didn't care about such a small number.

From the first year of the Wu Dynasty to the autumn of the fourth year of the Wu Dynasty, there have been major disasters almost every year, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people.

"These disaster victims will be resettled under the names of hereditary households with insufficient population in various places, and the resettlement will be the responsibility of several nearby lords."

Beijiwu originally intended to sell people for money, but now that he was not short of money, it was not worth leaving a stain on his reputation in history books for a little over a million taels of silver.

“Two million taels of silver will be allocated from the national treasury as resettlement allowance. Each person will receive ten taels of silver, and each household will be given an iron pot, a hundred catties of grain, and twenty catties of wheat seeds.”

“They will be settled nearby by lords who treat the people well. The remaining 100,000 people will be assigned to Wang Daoji’s 10,000 households, and the rest will be settled in Chang’an, Yangzhou, Yancheng, and Tiezhou.”

"This is a natural disaster, beyond human control. Although I am not from the mountain farm, those who have suffered are all my people. I cannot bear to see them suffer, so I have resettled them in prosperous areas so that they can forget their pain as soon as possible."

The crowd and officers nearby shouted, "His Majesty is unparalleled in benevolence and righteousness!! Long live the Emperor! Long live the Emperor! Long live the Emperor!"

After returning to Beijiwu, he forgot about the disaster area. He could easily manage the hundreds of thousands of disaster victims. The experience of the mountain farmers in resettlement and management was accumulated from practice and was sufficient to deal with all kinds of complex and ever-changing situations.

After riding horses for over a month, his trousers were worn out in the crotch area, so Beijiwu decided to treat himself.

"An imperial edict was issued to recruit beautiful women from all over the country to serve as palace maids. Officials in wealthy areas were ordered to be in charge of selecting palace maids, and to recruit women who were dignified and beautiful, charming and honest."

"It's not appropriate for men to do this kind of thing. Let their wives, concubines, sisters, or sisters-in-law do it. We don't need to recruit married women."

“Let the city garrison of each region offer up a woman, one out of ten thousand. For every ten thousand people born in the territory, offer up one beautiful woman aged 16 to 28, based on the registered household registration.”

“Every October, palace maids are recruited in Luoyang. A thousand beautiful women are selected. They can apply themselves. Those who pass the selection and are poor can sell themselves into the palace for a hundred taels of silver.”

“Those who possess fiefdoms may offer beautiful women as tribute.”

Beijiwu has plenty of money and food, so having more palace maids is fine, but he must make himself happy!
"Publish it in the newspaper!!" Arctic Martial ordered.

****
"Shan Nong Daily! Shan Nong Daily! King Wu is selecting concubines! He is summoning beauties from all over the land to enter the palace!"

The newspapers sold very quickly that day and were rapidly distributed throughout the country.

But on that same day, five thousand older palace maids, lacking both skills and beauty, were driven out of the palace and left homeless.

Soon these people were taken in by various production teams, brothels, and mansions.

Some were used for marriage and having children, some for making money, some for serving as servants to indulge in the emperor's fantasy, and some were taken home to work, raise children, or be concubines.

The female officials, maids, and dancers who remained in the palace immediately became obedient and began to seriously exercise, learn dance, and acquire skills to please the emperor.

Not only palace maids, but also some eunuchs were reassigned to temples in various places to earn money.

The palace has shrunk considerably, but it will soon be full again.

In a small courtyard in Luoyang, Ma Tuchai and several women were reading the newspaper together.

Gao Qiuyue sighed, her face full of sorrow.

Since arriving in Luoyang, everyone has been unhappy.

"Mommy! My brother stole my pony!! Ahhhhh! Waaaaaah..."

Looking at the crying child, Gao Qiuyue couldn't help but sigh again.

These ignorant children spend their days laughing, crying, and playing around without a care in the world.

Gao Qiuyue and the others used to be quite happy. But ever since they came to Luoyang, ate delicacies from land and sea, and witnessed the magnificence of the imperial palace, they couldn't eat the coarse flour buns in their hands. They felt as if there was endless work to be done, and they had no strength left in their bodies and didn't want to move at all.

I never thought pickled vegetables were unpalatable, nor did I find mixed grain steamed buns hard to swallow, nor did I think the house and yard were too small or the children were too noisy.

Once you've experienced the best of life and seen the most luxurious residences, spending all your time in this small courtyard with a view of distant palaces and the residences of emperors and empresses feels like being in prison.

"You heartless lover...when will you ever remember us poor souls..."

(End of this chapter)