Chapter 398: Land Deed Alliance

The Land Deed Alliance gentry arrived one after another early that afternoon as agreed. Those who lived close were right in Shanghai County, and the farthest were only in Songjiang — a few dozen li, easily covered while eating melons on the boat.

After reaching the Xu Family Grand Residence in the Shanghai city wards, the retainers and attendants the gentlemen brought naturally formed a lively tea gathering in the warm pavilion. The gentlemen themselves, however, took their personal advisors and entered the Da Shufang for the meeting.

As soon as the meeting began, a retainer of the Xu family read aloud the latest damage report before everyone.

The gentlemen had already learned this information yesterday; now they began discussing it one after another. Very quickly, amid the clamor of analysis, the consequences of the garden-burning incident and the opponent's next steps were deduced by the group to near-certainty.

For tenant farmers of this era, crushing debt and immense survival pressure were standard. So for those burned mulberry gardens, unless the landlord spent huge capital in early spring to buy mature mulberry trees, if they planted saplings, the tenants simply had no resources to survive the first few years of garden reconstruction investment — they would inevitably go bankrupt and flee.

The fish ponds surrounding the mulberry gardens were the same logic.

Mulberry-dike fish ponds are an agricultural model combining mulberry cultivation and silkworm rearing with pond fish farming. Mulberry trees are planted around the pond; the leaves feed the silkworms; the silkworm waste and pupae serve as fish bait; and the pond mud becomes fertilizer for the mulberry trees, forming a mutually beneficial production chain that achieves both fish and silkworm yields.

This method was quite common in ancient times, especially on the warm Pearl River Delta Plain, where it remained the main agricultural model for delta silkworm farmers all the way into later generations. In the 17th-century Yangtze Delta, although the cooler climate made mulberry-dike fish ponds less widespread, many mulberry gardens still adopted this approach.

So when farmers discovered overnight that their mulberry trees had been burned and their fish were floating belly-up, it was hardly surprising that some hanged themselves in the fields — since the fate awaiting them anyway was the whole family starving to death by the roadside. Better to leave early and reincarnate sooner.

Burning mulberry gardens and poisoning fish were both very low-cost actions, requiring only a bit of kerosene and some industrial offcuts. Of course, for well-known reasons, the specific names of the chemicals will be omitted here.

This was Xiong Dao's first wave of counterattack, using a tiny force to move a huge weight: first, throw the opponent into chaos.

The consequences of the matter were far from simple.

The tenant farmers would soon learn the truth (this was certain, because the perpetrators would spread the real reason for the garden burnings everywhere), and then the heads of the gentry would catch fire.

Realizing they were cannon fodder in the struggle between their own landlords and the port, the enraged tenants would inevitably demand an explanation from the landlords. And tenants who knew the truth would not be so easily duped into going to the port for gang fights and throwing their lives away.

In short, whether the landlords chose to pacify or forcefully deal with the tenants, they would have to pay an enormous price.

If they pacified them, during the period before the mulberry trees matured, the landlords would not only be unable to collect debts and rent, but would also have to provide grain to feed these people. This was a huge sum — even landlord families had no surplus grain!

If they took a hard line, it meant evicting the tenants, sweeping them out the door, even selling their children to repay debts — many of these tenants had worked the landlords' land for generations. That way, the Land Deed Alliance would suffer a massive loss in reputation.

And this would only treat the symptoms, not the root cause: drive out the old people, and you'd still have to recruit new ones, right? Recruiting new people, the landlord would still have to pay a huge price to rebuild the mulberry gardens and fish ponds, and still have to advance funds to feed the newcomers.

Besides, the tenants were not all lambs. For a large-scale eviction, the landlords would also have to organize large numbers of men for gang fights — otherwise, how could the tenants be made to leave so obediently?

One must understand that the relationship between tenants and landlords was a dynamic balance. Many landlords subcontracted the entire rent-collection process to rent depots precisely because tenants were troublesome and rent was hard to collect.

And now, sitting in the Xu Family's Da Shufang, nominally tasting tea but actually deliberating countermeasures, the assembled gentry quickly saw two even more terrifying consequences from the above deductions.

First: if they restored the mulberry gardens and fish ponds in the future, what would they do when those bandits who came and went without a trace set fires and poisoned them again? They couldn't mobilize all the tenants in the estate to stand guard around the gardens day and night, could they?

Second: if they mobilized large numbers of men to clear the field and seize the tenancies, and Xiong Dao's subordinates infiltrated the resisting tenants, and then a few poison smoke firecrackers flew over — wouldn't that be a disaster?

These gentry, who had spent years seizing others' property and had intrigue and cunning practically seeped into their bones, needed less than half an hour today in the Xu Residence's Da Shufang to deduce the entire situation after the estate was set ablaze and poisoned, and they also guessed Xiong Dao's follow-up moves with near-perfect accuracy.

Yet merely guessing was useless — they had to find a countermeasure.

"For the present crisis, slow maneuvering is already the worst strategy. The estates in your hands still contain many mulberry gardens and fish ponds. If we continue sitting and waiting to die, that gang of soldiers will burn and destroy them all one after another!"

After a collective silence, the first to speak in support of aggressive policy was a plump, forty-something middle-aged man.

This gentleman was surnamed Huang, named Huang Shaozhou, a Presented Scholar of the Wanli Era, a Hangzhou man, now retired and living at home. Like Xu Jin, Master Huang was also spending the winter at his secondary residence in Shanghai County this year.

In fact, Master Huang had only "joined the party at the front line" today, entering the Land Deed Alliance.

As for the reason — well, that's a longer story.

Originally, Master Huang also had an estate near the port. As terrible luck would have it, among the three mulberry gardens Xiong Dao's men burned last night was one belonging to Master Huang.

Having his property inexplicably burned, Master Huang very quickly investigated the whole story behind the matter — the war between the two alliances and the port had long been the talk of the town, and moreover, yesterday's court case at the County Yamen had made the mulberry garden burnings common knowledge.

After this, the furious Master Huang immediately sought out the Xu family. The Land Deed Alliance was no secret in high gentry circles; as a member of the gentry himself, Master Huang easily met the principal, Xu Jin.

When the two sides met, feeling humiliated by a gang of soldiers, Master Huang, after thoroughly cursing Xiong Dao and his gang as commoners without rank, demanded on the spot to join the Land Deed Alliance, to fight shoulder to shoulder with the gentlemen, to strive to take down Xiong Dao as soon as possible, swallow his properties, and let everyone share a piece of the pie.

To be honest, if this had been before today, Xu Jin would certainly have had to deliberate over Master Huang's request to join the alliance. After all, all the shareholders' portions had already been assigned before this; adding a new person would mean redistributing all the shares — quite troublesome.

However, yesterday's lawsuit and the subsequent night of arson had completely changed Xu Jin's thinking.

Xiong Dao, who completely refused to follow the routines the gentry had been familiar with for a thousand years, whose moves were both bizarre and vicious, and who had powerful backing behind him, had already made Xu Jin feel that he was a bit too much to swallow.

So Xu Jin welcomed Master Huang's entry at the first moment: matters like distributing benefits were no longer important now; just taking down Xiong Dao would be enough to thank heaven and earth. Xu Jin urgently needed the addition of fresh strength, and Master Huang had come at the perfect time.

After expressing his welcome, Xu Jin also recalled the scene of Du Yaren's visit back then, and couldn't help feeling a small sense of relief — Xiong Dao's intelligence on the estate and field information the gentry held had come from that Du Yaren's photographic memory when reading the deeds. And that was where the error lay: Master Huang's family mulberry garden had been burned by mistake.

Having figured out the cause and effect, a certain person immediately felt a secret satisfaction, wishing that Xiong Dao would burn a few more mulberry gardens of innocent families and push all those landlords over to the alliance's side.

After this, the other alliance members who arrived at the Xu household one after another also expressed their welcome to Master Huang... everyone had felt how troublesome Xiong Dao was; their mindset was the same as Xu Jin's.

Master Huang very quickly figured out the backgrounds of everyone in the alliance. Pulling connections among gentry was simply too easy — all kinds of same-year exam graduates, fellow students, relatives, friends, and old acquaintances, once aired, always led to a connection.

Having familiarized himself with his colleagues, Master Huang soon voiced hawkish opinions in the meeting that followed: "For the present crisis, slow maneuvering is already the worst strategy."

And Master Huang's opinion won the agreement of the majority present.

There was no helping it — under Xiong Dao's bizarre methods of attack, all the gentlemen felt that the initiative in this matter was slowly slipping from the alliance's hands.

One must know that in the Late Ming Yangtze Delta region, aside from cotton fields, which had the broadest planting area, mulberry gardens and fish ponds were the most numerous. So everyone still had quite a few mulberry gardens and fish ponds on hand. This being the case, if Xiong Dao kept stirring up trouble at the frequency of three fires a night, the mulberry gardens and fish ponds in the gentlemen's hands would truly face a major problem.

If it eventually led to a peasant uprising, Xiong Dao could watch the show or take a boat and escape, while the great landlords sitting here would be hopping mad.

Seeing that the majority of members agreed with the strategic choice of a quick decisive battle, the host Xu Jin symbolically organized a vote on the spot. Then, under the principle of the minority obeying the majority, Xu Jin announced: the previous slow-maneuver strategy was once again overturned; the Land Deed Alliance's next step would return to the earlier track — a one-time armed resolution to eliminate the Xiong Dao bandit gang.

After the announcement, Xu Jin, as executor, began a series of assignments.

The first step concerned Songjiang Prefecture.

Since Jiading County could no longer be moved to act, it was now Songjiang Prefecture's turn. The alliance's demand of Songjiang Prefecture was not high: just slightly suppress Xiong Dao within the next few days, buying a little time.

A Presented Scholar gentleman present who had a very good relationship with Songjiang Prefect Fang Yuegong immediately accepted this task of serving as go-between.

The second and third steps were the true killer moves that would actually employ armed force. And the power bases needed for these two steps had already been in communication with the alliance previously; now they only needed to send envoys to finalize the detailed steps.

All these tasks, of course, did not need to be completed by the new member Master Huang — these tasks all had designated responsible persons from before.

The meeting continued until dusk before all the various groups of personnel were assigned and every task was delegated to an individual. And Master Huang also received, as he wished, his share in the alliance, as well as the 3,000 taels of "war investment capital" he had promised on the spot.

With that, the matter was concluded. After the meeting dispersed, Master Huang, assisted by a man behind him who looked like a retainer, leaned on a crutch and walked out the door... Master Huang had a foot ailment and could not walk easily.