Chapter 224: 222【Heavenly King Zhao

The truly bitter fighting was around Zhangshu Town.

Zhangshu Town was the single richest source of tax revenue under Zhao Han's rule. The fiscal contribution of Zhangshu Town alone equaled the combined total of Longquan and Yongning counties!

After the Gan River flows through Ji'an Prefecture, it is joined by one large river and several smaller ones. By the time it reaches Zhangshu Town, the Yuan River also comes surging in with floodwaters, the two rivers colliding to scour out sharp bends and even depositing so much silt that sandbars form.

Back when Wang Siren's government naval forces held absolute superiority, they still dared not sail past the river mouth. In truth, they dared not sail past the sandbars — the channel was narrow, the currents treacherous, and even without a fire attack they would have been surrounded and ambushed.

That terrain had once let Zhao Han face off against the government troops at his ease, but now, because of that very terrain, Zhangshu Town was under enormous flood-control pressure.

"Tweeeet!"

At the sound of bamboo whistles, over two thousand peasant soldiers came running.

Several thousand more able-bodied men, mobilized by the peasant associations, arrived at the downstream area of Zhangshu Town.

The town chief led clerks door to door, knocking to recruit townspeople to build dikes and fight the flood.

In fact, flood-prevention dikes had been built along the entire Gan River shoreline ever since the Tang dynasty.

The eastern Gan River dike along the Fengcheng stretch, in particular, was built from the Tang into the Song and could already protect six hundred thousand mu of farmland. The Ming had continued extending it, but the dikes on the Zhangshu Town side would not be linked up until the Republican era.

After the Wanli reign, local waterworks fell into decay, relying entirely on conscientious local officials to call upon the gentry and great clans to donate funds for repairs.

As long as an official organized it, the gentry and great clans were willing to contribute money — it was their own lives and property they were protecting. Take the dikes here at Zhangshu Town: if the floodwaters overtopped them or they burst, a hundred thousand mu of prime farmland could be inundated, because the banks all lay in low-lying areas.

The Prefect of Linjiang and the County Magistrate of Qingjiang were both occupied with the prefectural seat's stretch of the river and could not get across during the flood.

The safety of Zhangshu Town rested entirely on the shoulders of Town Chief Liu Tongyu.

Liu Tongyu came from a great clan and was a xiucai, accomplished in both civil and military arts; he had first served in the army as a civilian clerk. He had also once joined Zhang Tieniu in taking Xingan county seat by feigned assault. His weight as town chief was no less than a county magistrate's — after all, this was Zhangshu Town, where the money flowed.

At this very moment, Liu Tongyu was on the river dikes, dashing through the rain directing the flood fight.

Under the organization of the authorities, the townspeople joined in en masse, and the peasant soldiers and peasant associations also swung into action.

No one dared slack off. Their families had lived by the river for generations and they knew this year was different. The downpour had gone on far too long; after a hard-won break of clear skies for a couple of days, the heavy rain had suddenly returned.

Not only did the town chief lead men to observe the water level every day, the common folk went daily to check as well — after all, a flood would mean over a hundred thousand mu of land submerged. In the face of a flood, there was no high or low status.

The medicinal herb merchants of Zhangshu Town all banded together, paying to send their shop hands out to build dikes. If the dikes burst or were overtopped, they would suffer the greatest losses; many had several warehouses full of medicinal stockpiled.

From Zhangshu Town all the way north, peasant soldiers and peasant associations lined both banks, organizing the masses to come fight the flood.

Seen from high above, they were like countless ants, carrying sandbags and mud baskets back and forth along the river — the grandest, most magnificent epic ever staged in the human world.

The one with the biggest headache, in truth, was Fei Chun. Not only did he have to allocate disaster relief funds, but once the floodwaters receded, he would also have to reduce or waive the people's land taxes as circumstances warranted. The mountain areas, though spared the flooding, were suffering severe drought, which meant widespread tax relief this year.

The money and grain in the government granaries were nowhere near enough!

Originally, with the amnesty and ceasefire, the salt routes had opened and the fiscal situation had just begun to recover. As long as this year brought another bumper harvest, or even just an average year, every county's storehouses would have been piled high.

What the hell was this, a major disaster year suddenly striking?

Fei Chun felt a deep, profound malice, as if Heaven itself was deliberately working against him.

Han Chengxuan, the Nanchang County Magistrate appointed by the imperial court, had now also left the county seat and come to the banks of the Gan River to direct the raising and reinforcing of the dikes.

He had long been sidelined, stripped of any real authority.

But his active performance in disaster relief had now won him a measure of command, as though he had become an official under Zhao Han.

After two full days and nights of toil, watching the water level inch down at last, Han Chengxuan collapsed from exhaustion right there on the dike.

"Master Han, have something to eat." A woman came over with a smile, bearing food.

Han Chengxuan struggled to sit up and smiled faintly. "Thank you."

As he ate, he looked around; the dike was strewn with officials and commoners lying every which way.

Hu Dinggui came over holding his own rice bowl and said with a grin, "Your Honor, you might as well join the rebels. You're a good official — it's a shame to waste your life on that dog emperor."

The phrase "dog emperor" left Han Chengxuan not knowing whether to laugh or cry; he had heard it countless times in Jiangxi. At first it had enraged him, but gradually he grew numb to it — let people say whatever they liked.

Han Chengxuan changed the subject. "The floodwaters won't come again, will they?"

Registrar Liu Zirong looked up at the sky, walked over, and said, "If Heaven keeps sending this downpour, no amount of dike-building will help."

"Why is that?" Han Chengxuan asked.

Liu Zirong said, "You're a northerner; you don't understand the ferocity of southern floods. We've weathered two flood peaks — probably because it wasn't raining over Lake Poyang, so the water drained off very fast. By now, Lake Poyang is likely filled to the brim. If another flood peak comes, I'll lead the people straight to high ground."

Another old clerk came over with his rice bowl. "We're so fortunate to have Mr. Zhao. If the imperial court were in charge, even with good officials on the scene, tens of thousands of mu of prime farmland would certainly have been flooded this time."

Liu Zirong sighed with feeling. "That's true. The second flood peak came too fast and too fierce."

Han Chengxuan now understood. The reason they had held off the second flood peak was entirely the superbly effective organization of the peasant associations and peasant soldiers. If this place were not held by rebels, and he as county magistrate had to mobilize the common people for flood control, who knew how much dawdling and delay there would have been — they would certainly have missed the critical window.

To be honest, Han Chengxuan liked it here, even though this was rebel territory.

Any official who genuinely wanted to get things done would like this atmosphere and this popular spirit. After two days and two nights of flood fighting, Han Chengxuan was completely won over, and at the same time his thoughts turned to all that mess back in his old home in Shanxi.

Compare the two, and one was heaven, the other earth.

As the flood disaster gradually passed, the morale of the people under Zhao Han's rule reached an all-time high.

The reports coming in one after another from various places struck Li Banghua as unbelievable. Of all those riverside county seats and small towns, only two towns had suffered dike breaches. The other places that flooded were not especially critical areas — at worst they had merely lost a great deal of grain revenue.

At any other time, this would have been impossible.

After careful analysis, the senior officials of the Regional Commander's headquarters all agreed that the victory in flood control came down to three key factors: first, capable and diligent officials; second, guidance by the peasant associations and the active engagement of the peasants; third, the participation of the army, with both regular soldiers and peasant soldiers rendering great service.

Every single official was someone who could get things done. Nepotism was surely hard to avoid, but even those who got their posts through connections had to produce a respectable record of service.

Such is the vitality of a regime in its early days.

Take the military alone: comparing the early Ming with the late Ming, they might as well be two different worlds.

In the great battles of Liaodong in the late Ming, the local battlefield was like a sieve — the Tartar armies could infiltrate at will.

Yet in that pivotal early Ming campaign in Liaodong, Zhu Yuanzhang wrote the entire script in advance from Nanjing, while the two frontline generals, Ma Yun and Ye Wang, served as directors and filled in the details.

First they stripped the countryside and lured the enemy deep, holding a lone city to wear down the Yuan army. At the time, the city walls had not even been fully repaired; many breaches were merely plugged with timber, and the fighting was ferociously bitter. The Ming relief force struck the enemy's rear, fully trusting that their comrades would not lose the city.

What followed on the battlefield was like something out of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The Yuan army fled in panic and, encountering several hundred crossbowmen in a mountain valley, changed their escape route in terror. But then, overnight, the Ming army had built an ice wall several li long. The Yuan cavalry could only run along the ice wall; when they finally struggled to its end, they fell straight into pit traps dug in advance.

Fighting a war in Liaodong, Zhu Yuanzhang micromanaged the whole thing from Nanjing ahead of time and arranged the Yuan forces neatly and precisely.

That battle gave Zhu Yuanzhang such deep satisfaction that he thereafter entrusted the entire Liaodong theater to Ma Yun and Ye Wang.

Zhao Han uses men the same way Zhu Yuanzhang did — whether civil officials or military officers, they must be people who can get things done!

This flood-fighting and emergency rescue effort also solidified the leadership's — Pang Chunlai, Li Banghua, and other high-ranking figures — future principle for selecting men: prime ministers must rise from commandery posts, fierce generals must emerge from the ranks!

On Zhao Han's territory, the flood fight was victorious — even places infiltrated by the peasant association suffered no flood damage. The court's territory, by contrast, could only be described as a complete and utter mess.

Take the drought first: because water infrastructure had fallen into ruin, even right beside the vast Lake Poyang, the land just a little distance from the lake was all withered and yellow.

Then the floods: as the water level of Lake Poyang rose at a terrifying speed, and even the Yangtze's waters flowed into the lake because of heavy rains upstream, officials everywhere treated it as no concern at all. Instead, it was the local gentry who spontaneously organized to build dikes. But the gentry's organizational strength fell short, and dikes burst in many places along Lake Poyang's shores.

A vast area around Lake Poyang was submerged. At the same time, the mountain regions only a few dozen li from the lakeshore were suffering an extremely severe drought.

Including at Jingdezhen, the Chang River's water level dropped to an extreme low, and Lake Poyang's water was flowing back upstream into the river.

With two consecutive years of severe drought and the government offices ceaselessly pressing for taxes, great numbers of starving people appeared in northeastern Jiangxi.

These starving people fled west and south in droves, begging for food along the way, countless numbers dying of hunger on the road.

Beside the Dragon Mouth River.

Ding Jiasheng, a poor xiucai who had gone hungry the entire day, gathered a few friends from the same village and said, "Everywhere along the way has suffered severe drought. Small households have no surplus grain, and the great houses keep their gates tightly shut and refuse to give food. If this goes on, sooner or later we'll all starve to death. I say we might as well rise up in revolt."

"Can we really succeed in revolt?" one of his companions asked.

Ding Jiasheng pulled a copy of The Great Unity Collection from inside his clothes and said, "To the south there is a Heavenly King Zhao. He does things with great method, has defeated government troops many times, and sooner or later will take all of Jiangxi. This book was compiled by Heavenly King Zhao. I picked it up last year outside Master Zhou's gate."

None of the other companions had ever studied. They asked, "What's written in this book?"

"It's written how to revolt," Ding Jiasheng said. "This whole year, I've read it every single day. I can recite everything written in the book from memory. We'll start by killing a few landlords, open their granaries and distribute the grain, and pull more common folk into our band. Dividing the land will probably be difficult — we'll lead our men straight to attack the county seat. Once we've taken the city, we'll go invite Heavenly King Zhao to take charge, and we can become dragon-attendant meritorious officials. Remember, Heavenly King Zhao is benevolent and virtuous. Killing common people is forbidden, and so is raping or plundering women. These two rules cannot be broken. If anyone breaks them, I will turn my face away and disown them."

That very day, Ding Jiasheng incited several hundred people and broke through a landlord's compound. While opening the granaries and distributing grain, he also killed several who broke the rules to establish his authority.

Along the way they swept up starving people, robbing landlords as they went to raise provisions for the army.

Midway they split their forces: the main body made a show of heading for the prefectural seat of Raozhou, while Ding Jiasheng personally led a small elite force straight for Duchang County, disguised as civilians and seizing the county seat in one stroke.

At the same time they raised the banner of Heavenly King Zhao, and countless starving people came to join them.

This man also selected talented people and actually began distributing land to the common folk around the county seat.

(End of chapter)