[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-a-little-soldier-of-the-late-ming-border-army":3,"chapter-a-little-soldier-of-the-late-ming-border-army-a-little-soldier-of-the-late-ming-border-army-chapter-740":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"chinese","A Little Soldier of the Late Ming Border Army",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":19,"prevChapterSlug":20,"totalChapters":21,"novelImage":22},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":16,"translator":17,"content_hash":18},1206029,1561,"Chapter 740: This Is the Devil","a-little-soldier-of-the-late-ming-border-army-chapter-740",740,"\u003Cp>With an inexplicable feeling in his heart, Li Banghua and the others arrived at the banks of the Yanghe River. Originally, traffic between the two banks had relied on a small stone bridge, along with some pontoon bridges and ferry crossings; now, on the main official road, these had been replaced by several large stone bridges.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Such strategic hubs of water and land routes were invariably places where merchants came and went and commercial goods converged. The banks stretching from the garrison city to the departmental city were no exception, with all manner of carts and horses streaming back and forth, forming one bustling market town after another along the riverside.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li Banghua took a look: the goods were truly diverse. Coming from the opposite bank were mostly cloth, ready-made garments, iron nails, honeycomb briquettes, furs, various ironware, all kinds of meat products, commercial goods the locals called \"meat porcelain jars,\" and so on. There were even various waterwheels, hand-operated looms, spinning wheels, silk-twisting machines, and other such items being transported over.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Meanwhile, what was shipped across to the other side was mostly raw materials: hides and wool, ores, cotton, tea leaves, cane sugar, salt, tung oil, raw lacquer, coal, bamboo, and timber. These small market towns along the riverbanks alone were already a scene of boats and carts in constant, extraordinary bustle.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li Banghua had heard more or less that Wang Dou called the goods from the opposite bank \"industrial products,\" all manufactured and processed in various workshops and mills, while the commercial goods from this side were called \"raw materials.\" It seemed that, almost imperceptibly, every part of Xuanfu had blossomed in a hundred different ways, with market towns of every kind constantly taking shape.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>For instance, Shunxiangbao, Huiyaobao, and Heishanbao within the borders of Baoan Department were famous gathering places for eggs, poultry, meat, and meat porcelain jars. Around the departmental city, all kinds of workshops and mills clustered together, mostly focused on processing. Near the Baoan Guard city, there were quite a few rice towns, while the Yongning city area was a renowned gathering place for hides and wool.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Around the garrison city, there were quite a number of ironworks, coal mines, and nail factories, with more and more workshops related to coal and iron being built. Mining teams and iron-forging teams gathered in the vicinity, and as each related market town took shape, peddlers and merchants buying grain to resell in other commanderies formed an unbroken line along the roads.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>These market towns currently had basically no city walls, forts, or stockades erected; such defenses were no longer needed within the towns, which also demonstrated the peace and prosperity of Xuanfu Garrison.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Yet Li Banghua could not shake a persistent feeling of anxiety. Strong and able-bodied workers were gathering in ever greater numbers within Xuanfu Garrison. What if one day they rose up in rebellion?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Especially if this kind of scene were to spread to the rest of the Great Ming, it would truly be a catastrophe. The thousand-year-old idyll of picking chrysanthemums beneath the eastern hedge and gazing leisurely at the southern hills would cease to exist.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He crossed the river with Ma Guolei and the others. Before reaching the departmental city, they passed through several market towns that forged ironware along the way. The forging of plows, hoes, kitchen knives, and iron hammers was merely routine. Large blades, axe heads, and the like also came out by the cartload. Even cangues, manacles, and iron neck collars were not few in number, though no one knew what they were used for.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>There were also countless types of metal implements of every description, many of which Li Banghua could not even name. The clanging and banging of metal rang out incessantly, the din rising to the heavens.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Iron nails seemed to be very popular. Li Banghua had heard that the Xuanfu Garrison authorities were now the largest purchaser, and the quantity of iron nails they required each year was an astronomical figure.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Seeing the potential for profit, many merchants had rushed into this trade. Even the original residents of Baoan Department had bought iron stock and started working.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Some of them adopted a decentralized household production method: they distributed iron rods to nail-makers, who processed them at home, and then collected the finished products to transport and sell elsewhere. This method struck Li Banghua as very familiar. When he thought about the current textile industry in Jiangnan, weren't many people using this very approach?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Yet more people were setting up workshops and mills for centralized labor. With a single hire, they would employ over a hundred people, among whom were many able-bodied young men — a sight that made Li Banghua even more alarmed.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Before he had even reached the foot of the departmental city, he was already thoroughly weary of it all.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Everything his eyes fell upon reeked of money; everything his ears heard was about business and commerce. So-and-so had struck it rich; so-and-so had invested a thousand silver dollars to open some factory and made a fortune — how enviable!\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>What many people read were also commercial newspapers. The air was thick with a flavor of impatience and restlessness. Each bustling market town seemed like a nest teeming with devils.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li Banghua knew that everyone in Baoan Department was well-off and thus had spare money to run commercial enterprises and workshops. Although they employed many people and solved the problem of feeding many mouths, he could not help feeling that, in the long run, what these people brought was very likely to be evil.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>According to what Ma Guolei told him, although Wang Dou had repeatedly issued strict orders — that workshop owners hiring laborers must guarantee a certain level of wages, that in hazardous trades the death and injury rate must be controlled below a certain threshold, and that daily working hours must be fixed —\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>these orders were repeatedly violated despite the bans. There were always those who, for the sake of greater profit, cruelly squeezed the workers.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The government's requirement was that work must cease precisely at the hour of you (5–7 PM), with no night shifts. But there were always \"clever people\" who found loopholes: if night shifts aren't allowed, can I start work earlier? Before daybreak still counts as daytime, doesn't it?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>And besides, I'm not actually forcing the workers — it's they who, to earn a bit more money, willingly and voluntarily work overtime. How can you blame me?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>You demand that we guarantee a certain wage, but the more people need work, if we pay too high, doesn't that mean hiring fewer people? Are we supposed to just watch others endure hunger and go without food? That goes against the teachings of the sages!\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The death and injury rate must be controlled to a certain level? In mining and iron forging, how can such things be avoided? You're really making things difficult for us.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Many people also preferred to hire women and children, because they demanded even lower wages. With Xuanfu Garrison imposing this requirement and that, costs kept rising again and again. Fine then — we'll set up our workshops outside the garrison. There are as many refugees and famine victims as you could want; you don't even need to pay wages, just giving them a mouthful of food is enough.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>There were also those who secretly abducted and trafficked people from beyond the frontier to work in the factories and mines. No one even knew when these people died inside, and even the compensation payments were saved.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>All such things made Li Banghua increasingly indignant. This was utterly at odds with the sages' spirit of benevolence and generosity.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In truth, he did not realize that the situation in Xuanfu Garrison was already the result of Wang Dou's utmost efforts to control it. If one looked at the wider world —\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>during the Industrial Revolution, the normal working hours in Western countries were sixteen hours a day. Finding a job with a twelve-hour workday was already a blessing from Jesus. In 1812, an investigation by the British Parliament was shocked to discover that tens of thousands of child laborers worked at spinning machines for up to eighteen hours a day.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Laborers on plantations were described as \"slavery revived.\" The average annual mortality rate among coolies was 46%. Why did British goods dominate the world? Because their workers had the lowest average life expectancy. The exploitation of labor had been pushed to its extreme, and no other country could compete with them on cost.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>According to statistics from a London economic journal, in the 1830s and 1840s, 1,400 miners died each year in Britain, and the average life expectancy of workers in Liverpool was only fifteen years. In the 1840s, the average life expectancy of factory workers in France did not exceed thirty years.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Beyond this, the abysmal working conditions caused all manner of occupational diseases and infectious diseases to spread among workers — silicosis, scrofula, rickets, typhoid, cholera, and so on. Due to prolonged engagement in monotonous mechanical operations, many people developed physical deformities, and their health was severely ravaged.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Their pay was also extremely meager. An adult male worker in France could not earn enough in a month to buy a single suit of clothes. A child laborer's daily earnings were barely enough to buy some bread to stave off hunger.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Even so, to avoid having their wages docked or being dismissed, female workers continued to labor in the factories right up until the eve of childbirth, often resulting in miscarriages, or even giving birth beside the machines. A week — sometimes just three or four days — after delivery, they would have to return to the factory to work full days.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Child laborers crawled on all fours through the tunnels, dragging coal carts. Often left with missing limbs from work injuries, they endured the filthy and squalid environment, and the grueling toil day and night made every one of them look emaciated and pallid.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>So capitalism is by no means beautiful. Every coin earned drips with filthy blood. Wang Dou, coming from a later era, had already been doing his utmost to protect workers' rights and give them the power to vote with their feet. Yet in the eyes of people like Li Banghua, it was already unbearable. If they knew the full details of later ages, they would truly go mad.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As sons of the Confucian school, Li Banghua and his peers revered a simple life: rising with the sun to work, resting at sunset, the crowing of cocks and barking of dogs within earshot, green hills and clear waters, pastoral scenery — how beautiful was all of that?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>What he saw now was only the embryonic form. Li Banghua could imagine that, as time went on, everything one heard would be the stench of profit-seeking. All manner of vile and despicable merchant behavior — monopolistic profiteering, betrayal of trust, bribery, fraud, and other ugly phenomena — would saturate this garrison. Morality would be utterly lost before the power of money.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>What was especially terrifying was: what if the affairs of Xuanfu Garrison spread outward? The sages' teachings of a thousand ages would be destroyed in a single day.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Moreover, the establishment of workshops and mills inevitably brought pollution. Li Banghua saw places where lime and gravel lay everywhere, and coal dust covered the ground. He also noticed with sensitivity that some streams and small rivers were showing a tendency to turn into foul, stinking water.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>With severe drought everywhere at present, these water sources were barely sufficient for people to drink and livestock to be watered — and Wang Dou was just wantonly wasting them like this?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Was this what Wang Dou called productive merchants? What they brought was filth everywhere and the twisting of human hearts?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\"This is the devil!\"\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li Banghua could no longer contain the fury burning in his chest and shouted out harshly.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>……\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Even after sitting down in a restaurant, Li Banghua was still seething with righteous indignation. Beside him, Ma Guolei remained silent.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>To be honest, Ma Guolei also felt that the situation in Baoan Department was not right, yet he did not know how to handle this problem.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He had also heard Wang Dou's theory of social strata back then. As Wang Dou had said, diversifying industries and creating more strata to support more people — he also found it reasonable and a good thing in principle.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But he also knew that the matter was far from that simple. For instance, it brought difficulties in governance and a whole series of chaos. The ironworks, the mines, and so on were each like a volcano.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The miners, in particular, were a mixed bag of good and bad, and fiercely combative. Back in the day, the famed Qi Family Army had been recruited from among miners. Incidents of armed brawls among miners had been endless throughout history. The more of these strong, able-bodied fellows there were in Xuanfu Garrison, the more Ma Guolei's head ached just thinking about the day they might stir up trouble.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Many workshops and mills were also being built larger and larger, casually employing several hundred workers each — likewise a source of unrest, and the mere thought of it made Ma Guolei want to keep well clear.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Wang Dou's method was to strengthen management — using employment permits, using shelters, and so on. Ma Guolei still found it a headache. He too was a son of the Confucian school, believing in the principle of tranquility and non-interference, and what he most desired was peace and order within the territory.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Places like Yanqing City and Huailai City, for instance, quite satisfied Ma Guolei. There, the common people could live well, while the hills remained green and the waters clear, the beautiful scenery of home and hearth preserved, without so many complicated elements among the population.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In short, he too disliked everything about Baoan Department.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was just that these workshops and mills could indeed solve the problem of feeding many people. Because these workshops and mills existed, more and more commercial activities attached themselves to them, market towns sprang up one after another, which in turn brought even greater commercial prosperity, allowing even more people to find their rice bowls, and the faster Xuanfu Garrison developed, and then…\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Conflicting ideas clashed from all sides, and Ma Guolei had been caught in this contradiction all along.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>〖∷Fast Updates∷∷Plain Text∷〗\u003C\u002Fp>",2417,"2026-06-03T14:06:10.567Z",1,"Novelzhen Translator","4117b7bbd7d928b72d591002234a5a257e37239122585da357f927f9e5497520","a-little-soldier-of-the-late-ming-border-army-chapter-741","a-little-soldier-of-the-late-ming-border-army-chapter-739",896,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Fa-little-soldier-of-the-late-ming-border-army-cover.jpg"]