Chapter 351: Opening the Port (18)

The courtyard of Zuo Baoliu's house was actually quite decent. Though it lacked green bricks and jade tiles, the outer layer of its rammed-earth walls was whitewashed, and the gray tiles on the roof looked fairly neat.

But all that had been set up back when times were good. In recent years, the Left Family's fortunes had steadily declined, so even basic repairs had become a struggle.

On the third day after Zuo Baoliu was carried home, his somewhat dilapidated front door was kicked open by someone.

As the door panel wobbled, several fierce-looking men, armed with an assortment of weapons, swarmed in, clustering around a man in a long robe who looked like a Shopkeeper.

"Anyone still breathing in here? Get the hell out here, now!"

Zuo Baoliu, who had been on tenterhooks these past few days, felt his heart clench when he heard the shouting from inside the house. He knew that business had arrived. He gestured for his wife to keep the children quiet, sighed, and then lowered his head and stepped out — there was no hiding from this, and he had long been mentally prepared.

Three days had been enough for Zuo Baoliu's eyes and throat to return to normal, but the external injuries on his back and rear were not yet healed, so he leaned on a stick as he walked today.

Seeing him hobble out of the house, the man who looked like a Shopkeeper first sneered: "Ah, injured, are we? Don't tell me you went looking for a brothel girl and your wife beat you?"

"Ha ha ha..." At the Shopkeeper's jest, the hired clowns around him burst into laughter.

Zuo Baoliu could only lower his head, endure the humiliation, and obediently wait for them to finish laughing.

"Is that Sangyuan to the north the one you tenant-farm?" After a few chuckles, the Shopkeeper finally got down to business.

"Replying to the Master, it is the humble one's."

"Mm. Tomorrow, report for work. Dig up all the mulberry trees, and be quick about it."

"Dig...?" Zuo Baoliu was stunned, momentarily speechless.

"What, you've got the guts to rebel against the landlord, but no strength to dig up trees?" The Shopkeeper now looked at him sideways, his face full of contempt.

"That's not... I mean..." Zuo Baoliu was already a bit incoherent: "These, these are all fine mulberry trees just putting out leaves. Why dig them up?"

"Dig them up to plant something else." The Shopkeeper was already very impatient.

But Zuo Baoliu did not see it that way. To a fruit farmer who had spent half his life tending mulberry trees, those trees in the garden were almost like his foster children. How could they be dug up just like that?

"Master, this garden was leased to us. If the trees are dug up, how are we supposed to live!" Zuo Baoliu was now filled with grief and indignation — according to the ancient tenancy relationship, the landlord had no right to demand that tenant farmers change the planting structure. So, in Zuo Baoliu's eyes, the Shopkeeper's demand was "overstepping the boundary."

What Zuo Baoliu forgot, however, was that he was not facing any ordinary landlord at all.

So upon hearing this, the Shopkeeper immediately flew into a rage: "Beat him!"

Before the words had fully landed, Zuo Baoliu was kicked to the ground and lashed with a whip.

"Master, have mercy, spare his life!" The woman inside the house, seeing this scene, burst out crying, rushed over, and threw herself onto Zuo Baoliu. A living drama of an evil landlord bullying the working people was thus vividly demonstrated.

Seeing the adults crying and the children wailing in this household, the Shopkeeper's fleshy jowls quivered. He first flipped through the account book in his hand, then bent down, pointed at Zuo Baoliu, and said: "You bastard, you still owe the firm thirty-seven taels of silver even now."

"Hmph, a destitute wretch like you, and you still dare put on airs." The Shopkeeper paused, looked up and surveyed the slightly dilapidated courtyard: "Listen to me, and listen good. If you don't report for work tomorrow, you'll be handed over to the authorities. First, you'll be branded into the Slave Registry, then your wife and brats will be sold to pay off the debt. Do you understand!?"

Zuo Baoliu, who had fought so hard to protect the Sangyuan, finally sobered up after taking a round of whipping: Yes, things were different now. He couldn't even protect his own life; how could he still care about those mulberry trees?

So, amidst his wife's complaints, Zuo Baoliu hoisted his hoe and headed to the Sangyuan early the next morning.

Walking along the village path, all he saw along the way was desolation. A funeral procession, clad in mourning clothes and weeping bitterly, was slowly making its way toward the burial mound outside the village.

In that armed clash a few days ago, four or five people had been suffocated to death on the spot by the Wolf Smoke, and several more had been trampled to death by their own side. In a single day, dozens of villagers from Zuo Family Village were seriously injured, and over a dozen people died.

After this, Official Runners stormed into the main house, slapped the village head Zuo Hongwu with a charge of "resisting taxes and assaulting officials," and hauled him off to the County Yamen jail.

What followed was a scene like doomsday: grain tax runners and unofficial bailiffs swept through the village like a Sieve, rooting out every single hidden field.

Several hundred mu of hidden fields were confiscated by the authorities without surprise. What Zuo Baoliu did not know was that, once the surveying, registration, and record-making were complete, the County Yamen would reissue deeds for these fields, and then sell them all to Xiong Dao's side at the price of inferior land.

The County Yamen had already made a killing on this: selling the land was a sudden windfall, and after this, since it was now registered, there would be an annual grain tax to collect from it.

In feudal society, the sole task of a local official was, in fact, to complete grain and tax collection — this was the number one, overriding political mission. Everything else, like civilizing the populace or building bridges and roads, was incidental. The imperial court's bottom line was simply: don't rebel.

Therefore, on the matter of Land Requisition, the reason the Jiading County Office tacitly allowed Yu Bende to run amok under the color of official authority was not only because Xiong Dao had called in favors, but most importantly, because Xiong Dao had made a promise beforehand: all uncovered hidden fields would be put on the register, and all recovered back taxes would be split with the County Yamen...

With this promise in hand, the incoming County Magistrate, who was extremely concerned about his performance evaluations, would naturally lend Xiong Dao his silent support. After all, he didn't have to stick his own neck out; it was just some minor friction between merchants and commoners. Why not give it a try?

This Behind the Scenes Tacit Understanding was the fundamental reason Yu Bende could act with reckless impunity, forcefully "demanding lives" during the spring planting season and mobilizing large numbers of Official Runners and unofficial bailiffs to collect taxes in the off-season.

And by the day Zuo Baoliu reported for work, Zuo Family Village had already been transformed by that armed clash — all the hidden fields had been ferreted out.

Once the hidden fields were found, the hidden households naturally surfaced as well. Of course, for a certain Power Base that placed exceptional importance on labor, these hidden households did not need to be registered: shipping them all overseas was the correct solution. Leave quietly, without taking a wisp of cloud. The Ming Dynasty had never registered these people in a household anyway.

So when Zuo Baoliu went to work, he saw not only the funeral procession but also the hidden households in the fields, sighing in despair as they turned the soil.

"Heavens, what kind of sin is being committed here?" Zuo Baoliu now knew he was not fighting alone: in all the fields he passed along the way, everyone was turning the soil. Yes, in fields where seeds had already been sown, the earth was being turned over once more.

With deep doubt and despair for the future, Zuo Baoliu arrived at the Sangyuan. Not long after, the Shopkeeper from yesterday also arrived with his men.

Following behind the Shopkeeper were not only thugs but also ten hidden-household members from the same village.

"Dig up all the trees, obediently. If you dare try any more tricks, I'll send the whole lot of you to the authorities!" After issuing this Threat, the Shopkeeper left, leaving Zuo Baoliu and a few hidden-household members to begin the great tree-digging endeavor.

The trees were not so easy to dig up: Zuo Baoliu and the others had to follow requirements, first pruning the mulberry branches and leaves, then digging the trees out of the ground along with the soil around the roots, and finally binding the semi-circular root ball with hemp rope.

After this, they still had to use a Cart to transport the bundled mulberry trees to the river dock outside the village — where a boat was already waiting.

Digging up and bundling trees with just over ten people was very slow, so it took Zuo Baoliu and the others an entire One Week to send off all several hundred trees in the Sangyuan.

Next, they received a new task: go to a distant place to carry soil and fill in the Pits, then connect the Sangyuan with the surrounding cotton fields to prepare for planting crops.

In fact, there were no longer any cotton fields around the Sangyuan. Previously, most of Zuo Family Village had been cotton fields, but within this One Week, all the land that had fallen into the hands of the Rent Depot had been re-plowed. Whether cotton fields, rice paddies, or mulberry fields, everything had now become virgin land, with no crops growing in them at all.

And during this One Week, the villagers of Zuo Family Village finally figured out these outsiders' modus operandi.

First were those hidden households. These unregistered people were the easiest to manipulate, so the Majority of them were sent off to work at Zhang Sutan by the river.

It was said that a large port was to be built, so this group was there every day digging sand and carrying soil. The one good point was that the master provided wages and meals. Because the food was quite decent, these hidden-household members now expressed emotional stability.

As for the fields they left behind, these had now been joined with other fields into large, continuous tracts. Such large fields, devoid of the dense network of footpaths and ridges, had not been seen in the Jiangnan region for a long time. It was unexpected that they would reappear in Zuo Family Village.

The Manpower handling these fields was only One Quarter of what it had been before. One must understand that in ancient times, a single household's able-bodied laborer, plus an ox, could fully manage fifty mu of land. Thus, a great deal of labor was saved in this way.

In addition, while the fields were being consolidated, the Landlord class in Zuo Family Village was also rapidly dying out — the campaign to press for back taxes had also begun.

This move truly threatened the lives of the landlords. Having lost their last means of violence, these rural, local rich men were essentially no different from chickens.

The rapacious Official Runners easily squeezed large sums of silver from them: if they refused to pay, they could just wait to have their fields and houses confiscated, and then take a trip to the County Yamen. Whether it was the standing cage or imprisonment, there was always a way to make a man lose his life quickly.

This era was not Later Generations, where a tax-evading starlet could just pay a fine and be done with it... This era operated on unlimited liability. If you couldn't pay your debts, your wife and daughter would be used to settle them.

So, to avoid having their families broken up, the landlords had no choice but to bring out their family wealth and pay the back taxes first. However, paying back taxes was easy, but paying taxes going forward was not so simple. Yu Bende had account books for all the accumulated arrears from previous years.

Including the schemes previously colluded on with the grain tax runners — such as fraudulent registration (using commoners' tax payments to offset the landlords' own accounts) and the tax grain evaded thereafter — the landlords now had to pay it all back in one lump sum. In this way, even without calculating interest, the collection campaign emptied the landlords of all their Floating Wealth, along with some of their real property.

So after the old master of the Fourth Branch hanged himself, within a single week, two more landlords whose family properties had been seized also hanged themselves.

Yet reality was this cruel: after paying off the tax shortfall, the landlords, greatly emboldened by their Essence Refining, still had to obediently sell their fields to the knife-wielding Rent Depot... This time they weren't so lucky — the Rent Depot's land purchase price had already dropped to the average price of surrounding land; the grace period was over.