Chapter 47: Pigsty

Since the busy farming season was approaching, the soldiers could not train for much longer, so the skill-level evaluations in the army would have to wait until after the farming season.

Moreover, Wang Dou had not made the rules rigid; although skill assessments were held every two months, if any soldier believed he had reached a certain level, or any logistics soldier believed he was capable of being promoted to a combat soldier, he could report to his unit captain at any time, and the captain would then report to Wang Dou, who would personally assess their skill level.

For the military households, though the training was harsh, everyone liked the drill ground. Here, they could drink plenty of water — Wang Dou supplied them with seven sheng of water each day — and at every meal they could eat their fill of rice and wheat, with two taels of meat each day as well. This was truly a pleasure. At home, even though they were the able-bodied laborers of their families, with the grain their families had borrowed from the fort, they had to calculate and recalculate every day the food and expenses for each household member.

The issue of meat had been something Wang Dou pondered for a long time.

Only by providing sufficient meat could the soldiers grow strong and have the stamina to endure high-intensity military training, so that they might become an elite force in the future. Meat could also reduce night blindness among the soldiers, giving Wang Dou an additional powerful means of attack through night raids in the future.

Wang Dou thought it over and decided to slightly adjust the future treatment based on martial skill levels. Henceforth, soldiers rated superior in martial skills would receive four taels of meat per day. Soldiers rated medium would receive two and a half taels of meat per day. Soldiers rated inferior would receive one and a half taels of meat per day. Logistics soldiers would receive one tael of meat per day.

In the Great Ming, one jin was sixteen taels, roughly equivalent to six hundred grams in later ages. A soldier rated superior in martial skills eating four taels of meat per day came to nearly one hundred and fifty grams, comparable to the ration standard of the Japanese Army in the sixth year of the Showa era.

But even so, Wang Dou's five squads of combat soldiers, plus one squad of logistics soldiers, and Han Chao's squad of night scouts, consumed a considerable amount of meat over the course of a year, not even counting the meat eaten elsewhere in the fort. And as the scale of Wang Dou's power expanded, meat would increasingly become a prominent problem.

At present, the meat available in the Great Ming was rather monotonous — apart from pork and mutton, there were only chicken, duck, fish, and the like. Moreover, the disasters afflicting the Great Ming were growing ever more severe, and commodity prices were soaring. The previous year in Baoanzhou, the price of one pig was actually equivalent to that of one ox. If they had to buy all their meat, they would hardly be able to afford it, so Wang Dou decided they might as well raise their own.

To avoid putting all his eggs in one basket, Wang Dou decided to diversify the sources of meat they raised.

Besides pigs and sheep, they would raise chickens, ducks, and fish. However, the environment of Baoanzhou was clearly unsuitable for large-scale sheep farming, so they would just raise a few casually. Chickens were low-cost, could go out and find their own food, required little worry, and could also lay eggs. Ducks were the same — they could be released into the river to eat fish, and ducks could also lay eggs. If a locust plague struck, they could drive those chickens and ducks into the fields to eat the locusts.

The drawback was that chickens and ducks were somewhat prone to infectious diseases; one bout of fowl pestilence could wipe out every last chicken.

Fish were also low-cost and could be raised in ponds built beneath the pigsties. Moreover, pig manure, chicken manure, and duck manure were all excellent feed, which could greatly reduce the fish's need for feed and other food. The drawback was that raising fish required a great deal of water, which was a disadvantage in the northern regions of the Great Ming.

In the end, based on meat yield, Wang Dou decided to focus mainly on raising pigs, supplemented by the others.

However, raising pigs was not easy at this time. In the current Great Ming, a pig raised for a year weighed only one hundred and thirty jin or one hundred and forty jin, yielding roughly seventy to eighty jin of meat from the live pig. A large, fat pig of over two hundred jin required about two years to raise. At this time, there was no such thing as leftovers or kitchen scraps — people did not have enough to eat themselves, so how could pigs have anything to eat? They had to be fed pigweed mixed with some bran, which also required a great deal of manpower to go out and gather pigweed.

Moreover, for large-scale pig farming, brood sows that could farrow and numerous piglets were not easy to find. Wang Dou decided to start by raising one hundred pigs.

After word spread that Wang Dou had decided to raise pigs, it immediately became a hot topic within Jingbian Fort.

Qi Tianliang accepted the important task from Wang Dou of going out to purchase piglets, chicks, ducklings, fish fry, lambs, and the like. Taking silver and some experienced old military households, he traveled all over Baoanzhou, even going as far as Huailai and other places, before finally buying the full quantity of livestock fry that Wang Dou required.

While Qi Tianliang led men out to purchase the livestock, Wang Dou also transferred a group of Jingbian Fort military households to build a livestock farm in the area of the Baili Canal.

Pigs, sheep, and the like certainly could not be raised inside the fort, so they had to be built outside. At the end of the Baili Canal, the area had long been silted up and abandoned. Because the great waterwheel diverted water to irrigate the fields, water flowing there collected into a stretch of marshy wetland.

Wang Dou had men dig several fish ponds there. On the higher ground above the fish ponds, built up with earth, he had several pigsties constructed. Beside the pigsties, he also built some duck pens and chicken coops.

In the future, the pigs would eat pigweed and bran, while the chickens and ducks would either eat the pig manure or go out to find their own food. The fish below could eat the pig manure, chicken manure, and duck manure. Whatever manure was not eaten could still be taken to fertilize the fields. This formed a cyclical method of raising livestock.

Furthermore, not far from the livestock farm, separated by a stretch of marshland and a drainage ditch, they also planted over ten mu of vegetable fields to supply the military households of Jingbian Fort with food. The fertilizer for the vegetable fields could be taken from the various kinds of chicken, duck, and pig manure.

Wang Dou's plan not only struck the military households of Jingbian Fort as novel, but afterward, when the soldiers and civilians of Xinzhuang, Dongjiazhuang, and Shunxiang Fort heard about it, many came over out of curiosity to see the excitement.

In truth, Wang Dou's approach was not new; this kind of cyclical livestock-raising method had been practiced as early as the Wanli reign of the Ming by a household named Tan Xiao in Changshu, Suzhou.

In the early sixth month of the eighth year of Chongzhen, Qi Tianliang returned in a grand procession with those military households, having purchased everything Wang Dou wanted.

On this trip, he had traveled to many places, going as far as the city of Huailai. When he reported his experiences to Wang Dou, he grumbled and cursed about the exorbitant prices in the Great Ming nowadays. In the past, a piglet cost only six qian of silver; now it cost over one tael. In the past, an old brood sow capable of farrowing cost only ten taels of silver; now it had risen to thirteen taels. Adding the purchase of fish fry, chicks, ducklings, and the like, the silver he had taken out this time was once again completely spent.

However, once the piglets, fish fry, and the rest were all bought, this Baili Canal livestock farm officially began operations.

Wang Dou had Madam Tao select a group of women from Jingbian Fort, along with some elderly and weak men, and some children capable of labor, to tend the ducks, herd the sheep, raise the pigs, and grow the vegetables.

Their monthly grain wages were likewise paid by the fort. This made the Jingbian Fort military households who obtained this work very happy, as they now had an additional way to supplement their family income and enable their families to live better.

Inside the walls of Jingbian Fort now, row after row consisted of barracks for the military households, separated by several streets and alleys.

Obviously, the military households inside the fort currently lacked the ability to purchase their own land or build their own houses. Moreover, there was not much vacant land left inside the fort, so every household lived in the barracks. At present, Jingbian Fort also strictly prohibited outsiders from entering casually. If any military household inside the fort needed to bring an outsider in, they had to report it in advance, and a careful investigation would be conducted afterward.

While building the livestock farm outside the fort, Wang Dou also decided to build a public bathhouse inside the fort, something he had been planning for a long time.

Water had always been inconvenient in the north, especially with the climate of the Great Ming growing increasingly arid, making water use everywhere even more difficult. Even in Baoanzhou, a relatively better location, many people had trouble bathing. Women in particular, except during the New Year, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Mid-Autumn Festival, ordinarily did not bathe or wipe their bodies. This easily led to the spread of various diseases.

From the mid-Ming period onward, public bathhouses had sprung up in many places across the Great Ming, but these were limited to some large cities, and those who frequented bathhouses were mostly men. Women mostly still bathed or wiped their bodies at home.

Therefore, at the same time as completing the livestock farm, Wang Dou decided to mobilize manpower to build a public bathhouse inside the fort.

This was clearly very welcomed by the military households in the fort — no one disliked bathing — but building a bathhouse required a great deal of water and coal, and the cost was not small.

Still, Wang Dou built it. The site chosen was on West Street, not far from a well at the street corner. At the same time, another well was dug inside the bathhouse.

At present, bathhouses in the Great Ming typically had two kinds of facilities: the pool hall and the private hall. The former was a large bath pool where many people could bathe at the same time; the latter was a private room, accommodating only one person or just a few, and inside there were also attendants to fetch water or scrub the bather's back. The Jingbian Fort bathhouse naturally had no private halls. Here, whether soldier or officer, everyone was equally candid with one another.

Bathhouses in the Great Ming all prohibited women from bathing, but Wang Dou decided to build a women's section anyway, so that the women of the military households inside the fort could likewise enjoy the pleasure of bathing in the bathhouse.

Wang Dou's decision set off endless private discussions among the military households in the fort, though the women were all delighted when they heard the news.

Several military officers in the fort, such as Han Chao, Yang Tong, Qi Tianliang, Zhong Diaoyang, and Zhong Rong, also felt it was too shocking and would harm Wang Dou's reputation. Unwilling to speak to Wang Dou directly, they collectively sent the loudmouths Han Zhong and Gao Shiyin to come and dissuade Wang Dou.

After listening to the two men's endless exhortations, Wang Dou was silent for a moment. He said, "I have heard that within Xuanzhen, and even within the capital, epidemics have broken out repeatedly in recent years, causing countless deaths among the common people. Do you two know why?"

The two naturally shook their heads — how could they know about matters inside the capital?

Wang Dou said, "It is because of filth and disorder. Because the streets are not cleaned, flies, ants, rats, and insects are everywhere. Moreover, the common people have no water to wash their bodies, making them even more susceptible to epidemic diseases. Those women are likewise residents of our fort. If they contract disease, we likewise cannot escape. Therefore, diligent bathing should be the first priority in preventing epidemics."

Both men were stunned for a moment. Han Zhong then said, "But men and women bathing together promiscuously — isn't that... a bit too much?"

"Men and women bathing together promiscuously?"

Wang Dou did not know whether to laugh or cry, not expecting the rumor to have turned into this. He said, "Where is there any promiscuous bathing of men and women together? Those women — they will have their own dedicated pool hall, which men are not permitted to enter."

"Oh."

The two nodded in unison. Gao Shiyin let out a breath, his expression unclear whether it was one of relief or disappointment.

While building the bathhouse, Wang Dou also had men construct several public latrines inside the fort, to prevent the military households from dumping chamber pots indiscriminately and polluting the environment, while at the same time collecting large quantities of high-quality fertilizer.

After the bathhouse and public latrines inside the fort were completed, the military households of Jingbian Fort would have to begin preparing for the grain harvest.

One day, Wang Dou was in the official hall discussing the upcoming grain harvest with Qi Tianliang when a military household member came in with a strange expression to report that another woman had arrived outside the fort seeking refuge, hoping that the Company Commander could take her in.

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Old Bai Niu: To the reader Huiluke, in the book Han Chao had several of his subordinates eat tadpoles raw — that was already a matter from mid-fifth month of the eighth year of Chongzhen, when tadpoles were everywhere by then.