Chapter 404: Heads Roll, the River Runs Red

By the time Qian Qianyi finished his long-winded speech, an hour had already passed.

Although Gu Yanwu held Qian Qianyi in utter contempt, he still ordered hot tea to be served to him—there were still many gentry waiting in line to be tried, and even if each family only spoke for an hour, Qian Qianyi's throat couldn't take it.

Qian Qianyi took the hot tea, turned toward Lin Qian, bowed solemnly, and declared in a clear voice: "I thank Your Majesty the King for the tea!"

This remark once again drew a torrent of abuse and mockery from the gentry in the waiting area and the scholars observing, but Qian Qianyi paid it no mind, savoring it as if it were sweet nectar.

The tea was merely ordinary jasmine dregs, yet in his mouth he somehow tasted the finest pre-Ming Dynasty Longjing tea.

While he savored his tea, Gu Yumu's mouth gag was removed, allowing him to respond and defend himself.

Unfortunately, Gu Yumu lacked both his father's and Qian Qianyi's learning, and could not articulate anything coherent.

Added to that, his throat was hoarse from his earlier struggling and shouting, and his lips and tongue had been frostbitten by the mouth gag, making his speech even more garbled.

Even Gu Yanwu, standing on the same platform, could not make out what Gu Yumu was saying, let alone the common folk listening below.

Seeing that there was no more drama to enjoy, the common folk dispersed one by one, and the observing scholars, greatly disappointed, shook their heads and left as well.

Seeing this, Gu Yumu shouted toward the crowd below: "Don't go! Everything he said is false! Qian Qianyi, restore my father's honor!

Don't——my throat——"

Gu Yumu gazed at the heavens, grief and fury mingled together, and made a dash for the corner of a table on the judgment platform, only to be grabbed just in time by the quick-eyed yamen runners behind him.

"Let me go! Qian Qianyi has defiled my father's name—I would rather die than live with this!"

Gu Yanwu said coldly: "This court is no place for your wild antics. Take him away!"

"Yes!" The yamen runners dragged Gu Yumu to the death-row area, where they not only put the mouth gag back on him but also bound his limbs to prevent him from harming himself, trussing him up like a writhing grub.

The gentry below the platform, witnessing this utterly pitiful scene, were so terrified they dared not even breathe.

When Great Xia kills a man, it can only physically destroy the body—ten or a hundred years later, right and wrong will be judged by others.

But what Qian Qianyi destroyed was the reputation of great aristocratic families. Once a name is tainted, one not only faces death but also eternal infamy, with descendants never able to rise again.

This trial had by now developed into a dual torment of physical torture and spiritual excoriation.

Throughout the two hundred years of the Great Ming, or even reaching back two thousand years, never in Chinese history had such ruthless means of killing both body and soul been seen!

At this point, the gentry had no leverage left. Xiang Deming, patriarch of the Xiang family of Jiaxing, was the first to break—he knelt, kowtowed, and wailed for mercy.

Then came the Chen, Mao, Zhang, and other gentry families, all kneeling and begging for mercy, and even in the death-row area a large swath knelt down.

The sound of their wailing was utterly miserable, raising goosebumps on anyone who heard it from afar, and even the few remaining common folk were frightened off by the spine-chilling cries.

Gu Yanwu felt a pang of reluctance and looked toward Li Shixiong.

Li Shixiong said coldly: "The law must be strictly enforced; every violation must be prosecuted!" These were the legal principles Lin Qian had taught him, and he was now putting them to practical use.

The two then looked at Lin Qian, who said calmly: "The law knows no sentiment. Continue the trial."

"Yes." The two cupped their fists in acknowledgment.

Gu Yanwu said: "Bring in Dong Zuchang!"

With Dong Qichang dead, Dong Zuchang would stand trial in his place.

When he was brought to the public trial platform, Dong Zuchang had already sobbed himself nearly breathless, and had to be carried up by two yamen runners.

Compared to the Gu family, the Dong family had far too much dirt to dig up. Qian Qianyi didn't need to embellish anything—there was enough to sentence the entire Dong clan to death eight hundred times over. But before he could even speak, he heard Dong Zuchang say: "I confess! I want to be a witness!"

Following the precedent set by Qian Qianyi, Gu Yanwu also agreed to Dong Zuchang's request.

Subsequently, Dong Zuchang held nothing back, confessing all the crimes his family had committed. Some of the atrocities were so horrifying,

so beyond comprehension, that Dong Zuchang instinctively glossed over them, trying to cover them up.

Whenever this happened, Qian Qianyi would cut in and interrupt, using biting words to expose the Dong family's shameful deeds.

After two or three rounds of this, Dong Zuchang threw caution to the wind—after all, Dong Qichang was already dead, the Dong family was already the target of universal condemnation, and their reputation wasn't worth anything anyway. As long as he could suffer less, he would say anything and confess to any crime.

Forcibly seizing land, forcing good women into prostitution, and abducting common girls were merely the Dong family's standard practices.

According to Dong Zuchang, during the Wanli era, the Dong family, in order to expand their mansion, forcibly demolished over forty households of surrounding residences. It was winter, and the residents were left sleeping on the streets—by the next day, all of them had frozen to death.

Also during the Wanli era, members of the Dong clan illegally felled ancient trees from Yushan's forests and secretly quarried stone from the official river embankments, causing multiple sections of the Huangpu River dikes to collapse during the flood season, drowning over a hundred people and flooding a thousand mu of farmland.

During the Tianqi era, the Dong family took a liking to the feng shui of a villager's ancestral grave, and hired local thugs to destroy the tomb and dig up the bones, discarding them in the wilderness, then forcibly seized the land to build a life shrine for Wei Zhongxian.

When Dong Zuchang had finally vomited out all his sordid deeds, he cupped his fists toward the platform and said: "I know my sins are grave indeed. I ask only for a swift death."

He had stood below the public trial platform for three days. His hands were covered in frostbite, his fingers could no longer bend, both ears had frozen off entirely, three of his toes had turned black, and his wounds had festered—aching and itching at once. He was in such utter misery that decapitation would be a release.

It was the dusk of New Year's Eve. The third year of Zhongxuan was drawing to a close, and the fourth year of Zhongxuan was about to arrive. These gentry who had already been tried might as well remain forever in the past.

So Lin Qian nodded in agreement.

Before sunset, Xu Yuanpu, Dong Zuchang, Gu Yumu, and the other gentry in the death-row area were loaded onto prison carts and transported to the execution ground outside the city.

The gentry still awaiting trial watched them go, their faces showing a mixture of fear, relief, and envy.

Qian Qianyi watched the prison carts heading out of the city, his expression calm, but his heart pounded like a drum and his body trembled violently.

On the road to the execution ground, the gentry said nothing. When they arrived, they discovered the execution ground was already a sea of red—the wooden stakes were crisscrossed with blade marks, soaked through with blood, and merely resting a head on them would squeeze out bloody fluid.

By now it was nearly dawn, and the distant sound of firecrackers drifted over from Suzhou city.

Some unknown gentry member sighed: "The new year is here——"

The next moment, the executioner's blade fell.

Head after head rolled to the ground in batches.

The executioners, swinging their blades while gasping for breath, saw out the old year and into the new.

The execution ground worked through the entire night. By daybreak, a full two hundred and twenty-three heads had been severed, with another three hundred heads still waiting in line, yet to be cut.

The Xu, Gu, and Dong families were nearly wiped out to the last man.

Beside the execution ground, Shen Zhangshi, dressed in white mourning garments, watched with her own eyes as Xu Yuanpu's head hit the ground. Finally unable to hold on any longer, tears burst from her eyes.

"Husband, father of my children, if you can know this in the underworld, you may rest in peace now!"

She wept for a while, then, holding her late husband's spirit tablet in her hands, turned back with the guards leading the way.

After crossing over a mountain ridge, she saw Ye Zhen and Gu Yanwu's wife, Lady Wang, waiting for her by the roadside, with her son and daughter being held by the hands of their two maidservants.

Seeing their mother return, the two children rushed over.

Shen Zhangshi lovingly patted the children's heads.

The young daughter stuffed a handful of candy into her mother's hand: "Mother, eat some candy."

The elder son also stuffed a handful into his mother's hand, then said: "It was Sister Baikou who gave them to us."

Shen Zhangshi tucked the candy into her bosom for safekeeping, then led the children over to Ye Zhen and the others.

Ye Zhen said: "The departed are gone; life must look forward from now on. Today is New Year's Eve, why not————"

Before she could finish, Shen Zhangshi had already knelt down with her children.

"Our lifesaver is before us, please accept this humble woman's bow!"

With that said, she led the two children in three heavy kowtows.

Ye Zhen hastily ordered people to help the mother and children up.

Shen Zhangshi choked with emotion and said: "When this humble woman returns home, I shall set up a longevity shrine, burn incense and offer prayers day and night, beseeching blessings for all my benefactors!"

Ye Zhen invited her to stay in Suzhou for the New Year.

Shen Zhangshi refused: "I have been away too long already; the farmstead at home needs tending, and my late husband's spirit tablet needs to be properly installed. In the end, I must return."

Ye Zhen and Wangshi urged her a few more times, but Shen Zhangshi insisted on returning, so Ye Zhen ordered several personal guards to escort her home through the night.

Before long, the figures of the mother and her three children vanished into the darkness.

On New Year's Eve, the remaining gentry awaiting trial huddled in the prisoner camp outside the city, each receiving half a bran ball as their New Year's dinner.

This thing was made by mixing coarse rice husks and wheat bran with a tiny amount of moldy rice, adding water, kneading it into balls, and steaming them—it had almost zero nutritional value, and

felt rough and scratchy on the throat, completely impossible to swallow; even when feeding livestock, people rarely mixed this stuff in.

Even famine refugees fleeing their homes, when tree bark was available to eat, would not choose to eat the bran balls first.

Zhou Yanru and the other gentry were used to a life of comfort and privilege—at meals, at least two servants attended them, sometimes seven or eight laying out dishes and pouring wine; a single meal cost as much as an ordinary family spent in months.

As for bran balls, let alone eating them, some gentry from old aristocratic families had never even seen one.

But the gentry had already been tormented for a month, hungry enough to want to eat their own frostbitten ears, and now even bran balls seemed like a delicacy.

As soon as the garrison troops distributed the bran balls, the gentry scrambled for them like wild boars rooting for food.

After eating, the gentry listened to the firecrackers within the city and wept without cease, every one of them cursing Qian Qianyi.

Zhou Yanru secretly shed tears, regretting that he had paid lip service to Chongzhen's orders; had he agreed to peace with the Jianzhou barbarians early on and transferred the Guanning army south, perhaps the Southern Xia would already have been pacified, and he would still be the Chief Grand Secretary of the Great Ming.

On the first day of the new year, the public trial continued, with the chief presiding judge changed from Gu Yanwu to Huang Zongxi.

The public trial had already been going on for four days by today; no matter how iron-willed Gu Yanwu was, he needed to rotate and rest.

The first person brought up for interrogation today was Zhou Yanru. He had long lost all his defiance, and following Dong Zuchang's example, obediently confessed his crimes.

But the news that Chongzhen wished to negotiate peace with the Jianzhou barbarians, he did not reveal—firstly, because this matter was extremely secret, known only between sovereign and minister; Qian Qianyi and the Great Xia knew nothing of it.

Secondly, seeing the Jiangnan gentry tormented to such a miserable state, it was impossible for Zhou Yanru to feel no resentment; since death was inevitable either way, he concealed everything he could.

After Zhou Yanru's interrogation concluded, the Yixing Chen clan was brought up.

The Chen clan patriarch Chen Yutai was the new Zhuangyuan of the second year of Chongzhen, currently still serving as an official in the capital; standing trial in his place was Chen Yuding, a Junior Compiler of the Hanlin Academy in Nanjing, responsible for staying in his hometown to manage the family estate.

The Chen clan and the Zhou clan were both newly risen powers of the Chongzhen era, and moreover, the two families were joined by marriage.

The two families supported each other, terrorized the countryside, and together provoked the Yixing popular uprising.

The leverage Chongzhen used to coerce Zhou Yanru into negotiating peace with the Jianzhou barbarians was precisely the Yixing uprising.

Because their methods were crude and they showed no restraint, these two households were convicted quickly.

Those interrogated afterward were the Chen and Zhang clans, then the Zeng, Wu, and Tao clans.

The public trial began on the first day of the first month and continued all the way to the fifteenth, sentencing a total of fifty-five gentry households and concluding nearly a thousand cases both large and small; copies of the judgments papered the entire ten-li long street before the Confucian temple.

The judgment notices covered over all the previous posters, leaving not a single gap on the blue-brick walls.

The scene was so horrifying that common folk no longer dared to walk before the Confucian temple.

Starting from the sixteenth of the first month, the accumulated prisoners from after the New Year were executed in one batch.

From gentry to servants and henchmen, all were put to death in one go, totaling over five thousand three hundred people beheaded.

The killing ground was surrounded by blood flowing like a river and gusts of stench; the blood pooled into streams and poured into the Xu River, turning the waters entirely red, the flow not ceasing for half a day.

The great clans of Xu, Dong, Zhou, and others who had participated in the Yangcheng night banquet were exterminated to the last household—counting main branches and cadet branches together, the oldest surviving male was only eight years old.

Moreover, the remaining children and womenfolk were forcibly split apart from their clans, no longer permitted to live together in one place.

Even though Qian Qianyi had surrendered to the Great Xia, his clansmen did not escape the blade—more than half were cut down in one stroke, and the survivors were forcibly dispersed; all adult males were forcibly sent to the South Seas to open up Oceania.

Qian Qianyi himself, because his contributions were truly too great, narrowly escaped the death penalty and was exiled to Water Chenla, becoming an indentured tenant farmer, to depart once the cataloguing of gentry crimes was complete.

The day after all the verdicts were announced, the Great Xia Times published a special edition, briefly introducing the proceedings of the public trial of the Temple Lamentation Case, along with a long list of those executed.

No words were needed to describe it—this list alone was chilling enough.

After the list, the paper announced that the Great Xia would from this day forth completely abolish gentry tax exemptions; no status whatsoever would enjoy tax reductions or exemptions, and no judicial privileges would be permitted either.

Even with Ye Xianggao's years of groundwork, this was a step so large it could tear something.

Yet throughout the entire Great Xia, there was not a single voice of opposition.

In fact, there was not even any applause.

Lin Qian's slaughter this time had been too ruthless, too absolute—everyone was frightened into silence, no one daring to speak, fearing punishment for their words.

This was precisely the problem Lin Qian had worried about before: high pressure and vitality are two ends of a seesaw—a country cannot maintain positive, vibrant energy while simultaneously ruling through repression.

The bloodlust and repercussions of this execution of the Jiangnan gentry could only be worn away slowly by time.

Beyond that, the complete extermination of the gentry dealt a severe blow to Jiangnan's economy.

The gentry were like a cancer on Jiangnan; when surgically removing the lesion, if you cut too little, the tumor metastasizes and proliferates, resisting covertly and flaring up again; if you cut too much, you damage the bones and sinews, draining vital energy.

Since things had come to this, debating whether too many or too few were killed, or whether the correction overshot the mark, was meaningless—better to think about how to ease the pain.

At the end of the paper was appended an imperial decree: the two provinces of South Zhili and Zhejiang, south of the Yangtze, would be tax-exempt for three years.

These three years were for recuperation and recovery, smoothing over the civil unrest brought by the purge of the gentry, while also providing a buffer for land surveys and industrial reconstruction.

This was like a person who had just undergone surgery needing rest—there was no logic in stepping off the operating table and immediately arm-wrestling someone.

In the long term, cleansing the gentry was always more beneficial than harmful. Whether it took three years or five, in the span of the dynasty's fate, it was but a snap of the fingers.

Once the wounds healed and new flesh grew, only then could this splendid Jiangnan be wielded by Great Xia like an arm directing a hand, with no further obstruction.

Over five thousand heads had rolled, yet the tide of Great Xia's gentry purge had not ceased—it merely no longer sought speed above all, instead shifting into normalized rectification, continuing from the bottom up to clean out the roots and tentacles the gentry had left among the common folk.

Lin Qian lingered in Suzhou for several days, then promptly moved eastward, arriving at Songjiang Prefecture.

One of his primary tasks on this northern inspection tour of Jiangnan was to personally verify the scale of development and level of craftsmanship in the cotton textile industry, in preparation for its subsequent major expansion.

Moreover, the Xu and Dong clans of Huating were both great families of Songjiang Prefecture, their webs of interest tangled and interwoven. Once these two fell, the old order would collapse, and all of Songjiang would be turned upside down in an instant.

Lin Qian also needed to personally take up position there to supervise—he absolutely could not allow local disorder to spiral out of control, producing the tragic scenes of children being sold and people resorting to cannibalism.

Ten days after five thousand heads rolled.

Huating County, Songjiang Prefecture.

Wind wrapped in the river's chill slammed violently into this prefectural seat.

In the home of the weaving household Chen Afu, Madam Wang, the pear-garden broker, pinched a little girl's chin, looking her over left and right. After a moment she laughed in a shrill voice: "Proper features, clever eyes too—truly not bad. What's your name, and how old are you?"

Tears welled in the little girl's eyes as she held them back and said: "Called Yuanyuan. Ten years old this year."

Madam Wang laughed even more happily, her face blooming like a chrysanthemum: "Aiyoyo! The girl's voice is crisp too—she'll tug at people's heartstrings when she cries. Quite clever."

Yuanyuan's uncle by marriage, Chen Afu, said from the side: "This is my wife's sister's daughter. Her original surname was Xing, but after her parents died, she was adopted over to us and changed her surname to Chen."

A fawning smile sat on Chen Afu's face, yet his expression was full of bitterness, while the aunt secretly wiped tears from the side.

Although Yuanyuan was not their biological child, she was proper-featured and endearing. If the whole family had not been pushed to the point where they could not survive, how could they bear to sell her?

Madam Wang smiled reassuringly: "I'm a genuine businesswoman. This child Yuanyuan has good qualifications, just a bit old—I'll have to train her from scratch. Ten taels of silver, how about it? If you're willing to sell, we'll sign the deed of indenture right now."

Both husband and wife showed hesitation.

Madam Wang smiled: "You all know how the new Emperor had heads rolling in Suzhou, and now every trade is in a slump because of it.

It's only because your child has such clever features that I'm willing to part with silver. Anyone else could beg at my door and I still wouldn't buy."

"Yes, yes—" Chen Afu forced a bitter smile.

Madam Wang's words were by no means empty threats. The Xu clan controlled half of Songjiang's cotton guilds, and the Dong clan held the other half. With those two families toppled, weaving workshops were sealed, traveling merchants cut off, cloth unsold, and grain prices soaring.

In barely two months, several thousand weaving households in Huating County had all lost their livelihoods. People selling their sons and daughters filled the streets—far more than just their one family.

An ordinary little girl could only fetch one or two taels of silver. Madam Wang's offer of ten taels for Yuanyuan was truly already a sky-high price, already extremely conscientious.

The husband and wife hesitated for a long while, unable to make up their minds.

Chen Yuanyuan steeled her heart, stepped forward, and gave a bow, saying: "Mother, I'm diligent and can endure hardship. I'll do any kind of work, and in the future I'll surely earn lots of silver for you. Please, Mother, give a bit more silver to my aunt."

Madam Wang's gaze softened, and she patted Yuanyuan's head.

Her line of work made her the most skilled at reading people's hearts. When Chen Yuanyuan said this, she was both hoping her aunt's family would gain more benefit and harboring a sliver of desperate hope that her aunt would keep her.

This girl, so young, living under another's roof, had grown a seven-apertured exquisite heart. Even when she didn't want to be sold, she had to speak around it in circles—truly heartbreaking.

Madam Wang sighed and said: "Very well. I know your difficulties, and I'm no villain who delights in tearing families apart. This two taels of silver will count as a deposit—take it and use it. A month from now, if your circumstances ease, return the deposit and this transaction is void."

The Chen couple took the money, knelt on the ground, and kowtowed repeatedly, expressing a thousand thanks and ten thousand gratitudes to Madam Wang.

"Alas!" Madam Wang sighed and departed.

That night, in the Chen family's room, an oil lamp held up a light the size of a bean, casting a deathly ashen pallor across the couple's faces.

The husband and wife clutched the two taels of silver Madam Wang had given them and did the accounts, but no matter how they calculated, it still could not cover the family's expenses.

Nearly two months had passed since the Xia army had confiscated the Xu family's property.

The three bolts of cloth the Chen family had woven before the new year were all stuck unsold on their hands. Worse, the debt for the autumn cotton used in weaving had not yet been settled. With the repayment deadline looming, Chen Afu's hair was nearly white from worry.

Chen's aunt said: "This two taels of silver should be about enough to repay the debt. As for the rest, we'll sell the loom and borrow a bit more from others.

From now on we'll eat only husked rice, and buy the cheapest salt, oil, and firewood—"

Chen Afu sat beside her in silence, sucking on his pipe. There was no tobacco in the pipe, and it wasn't lit—he just held it to his lips and smacked it, indulging in the habit for the mouthfeel.

His family lived in the prefectural seat, and Chen Afu was even a master weaver at the workshop. On the surface, their life was prosperous, with food and drink in plenty.

In reality, the gentry monopolized the entire industrial chain from raw materials, to production, to sales, ruthlessly pressing weavers' wages down to the barest subsistence line.

Through exquisite institutional design, they deliberately maintained weaving households in a state that looked splendid on the surface but in truth had extremely poor capacity to withstand risk.

Add to that usury interest, miscellaneous levies and exploitation, production losses, year-end expenses, and so on—an ordinary weaving household could go their entire life without accumulating any significant savings.

The benefit of this approach was that it could bind the common people to the gentry, allowing them to continuously bleed the populace dry while making the court fear to act rashly, unwilling to move against the gentry easily.

With the gentry's careful design, it was utterly unremarkable that a single disturbance could drive weaving households to sell their sons and daughters.

Their son Chen Ashi said: "It's useless, Mother. I went to the streets this morning to check—nobody is buying looms at all, but rice, flour, grain, and oil are all skyrocketing."

Chen's aunt said: "What about day labor? Is there any day labor?"

Chen Ashi shook his head: "Never mind day labor—there isn't a single person in the market quarter. Every dock is completely empty."

Chen's aunt looked as if struck by lightning, murmuring: "How could this be? Didn't they say Master Xu's and Master Dong's downfall was a good thing?

The day before yesterday I heard someone say the court was going to exempt us from taxes—a full three years of tax exemption—"

"We can't even survive, and they're still collecting some damned tax!" Chen Afu said, slamming his pipe hard against the edge of the bed.

Chen's aunt hurriedly said: "Keep your voice down! Cursing the court at a time like this will bring disaster upon us!"

This admonishment only made Chen Afu angrier: "Kill, kill, kill! That King Yama has had his fill of killing—who cares whether we live or die! If you ask me, Master Xu at least gave us a mouthful of rice—better than this new court by far!"

Chen Ashi also said: "There aren't that many wicked gentry—it's just that the new court had it out for Master Xu. The new court claims to speak for the people, but I think it's worse than the Great Ming."

Chen's aunt wept: "Stop talking! Isn't our family unlucky enough already?"

Ten-year-old Yuanyuan hid by the stove in the outer room, her head buried low, tears streaming silently down her face.

She knew she was living under another's roof and shouldn't add to her uncle and aunt's burdens, but whenever she thought of being taken to that place called the "pear garden," where—as the old man at the lane's mouth had said—she would never be able to hold her head up for the rest of her life, she was terrified beyond measure.

She glanced at the front gate, wanting to run away then and there, but she feared implicating her uncle and aunt. Besides, the world was vast, and there was no piece of land without an owner—even if she fled, she would only starve to death somewhere else.

The three members of the Chen family discussed through the night, but besides weeping and complaining, they could think of no solution at all.

The family endured until dawn in anger and anxiety.

In the morning light, Chen's aunt looked at the two taels of loose silver in her hand, tears dripping ceaselessly into her palm.

"Yuanyuan, your aunt has failed you——"

Just at this moment, from outside the alley came the sound of gongs, and someone shouted at the top of their lungs: "Hear this, all you weaving households! The Xu and Dong family weaving workshops have been taken over by the government, and now they're recruiting weavers! Wages paid daily by the chi of cloth — go look at the notice! Hear this, all you weaving households——"

Yahei

Fenyuan

Pen