Chapter 494: A Bowl of Vegetable Porridge

He Biandan was a native of South City, but he no longer had any family property there and lived as a boarder.

In his early years, when He Biandan first came of age, his family still owned a courtyard house. Later, after an epidemic swept through, He Biandan lost both parents. Not only that, due to previously accumulated debts and medical expenses, the house was also seized by creditors, and He Biandan thus became a wanderer.

Fortunately, this lad had reached adulthood at seventeen, was built like an ox, tall and sturdy, and had an unforgettable long horse-face — he wouldn't starve doing manual labor for others. So he got himself a lychee-wood carrying pole and scraped out a living as a porter in South City. Over time, this horse-faced fellow who never had his fill of food and grinned a bit foolishly came to be called He Biandan.

Several years hurried by, and He Biandan's frame, far from being crushed by the loads, had actually grown a little more. But because of this, his skeleton seemed even more gangly... a person who often goes hungry doesn't carry any spare muscle.

Today, He Biandan's task was to carry "machine-made charcoal" to the residence of old client Master Hu.

This newly appeared "machine-made charcoal" on the market, though a strange name, had since the moment it appeared become a new type of fuel beloved by households of the middling sort and above.

Black, hexagonal charcoal rods of identical shape and specification, with steady heat output, burning three times as long as ordinary charcoal, and producing no smoke or popping ash — extremely well-suited for cooking, tea-boiling, wine-warming, fish-grilling, and other occasions requiring control of heat and timing.

Moreover, price-wise, machine-made charcoal produced from ordinary wood scraps and rice husks, though a bit more expensive, proved cheaper than traditional charcoal when overall performance was factored in, so many people bought it.

After receiving the order yesterday, He Biandan went this morning to the docks outside South City, collected the even more expensive "high-grade fruitwood machine-made charcoal" from the Hu family's long-standing connection at the general store, and carried it all the way to the Hu residence for Master Hu's use while entertaining friends and tasting tea.

As he was carrying his second load of charcoal rods past the County Yamen, the young man discovered a big show suddenly unfolding at the main gate, so he cheerfully went over to join the excitement. After admiring the heroic bearing of the Six Gentlemen in the standing cage, He Biandan turned back, shouldered his pole, and delivered it to Master Hu's residence before noon.

He unloaded the pole in the Hu family's firewood shed and helped take out a round of trash. Only then did Biandan settle up with the kitchen Steward, receiving a string of copper coins, and happily headed back to his den.

He Biandan's den was behind Caishikou, in a dilapidated alley called "Ancient Early Street."

This broken-down alley belonged to a Ming dynasty slum, inhabited entirely by bottom-rung city dwellers. Within it was a courtyard house whose left and right wing-rooms were rented out by the landlord to nearby laborers and porters; He Biandan possessed one bed-space among them.

After hurrying back to Ancient Early Street, He Biandan first poked his head in at the courtyard gate to take a look, and then he relaxed: a large pot in the middle of the courtyard was steaming from the gaps around the lid — it seemed mealtime hadn't arrived yet.

Entering the room, he set his pole down in its usual spot by the wall. Without a word, He Biandan grabbed the ladle, scooped water from the vat in the corner, and gulped it down fiercely. Afterwards, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve, caught his breath, and only then greeted his "roommates" in the shared room.

The roommates were all rough old fellows sleeping on one big communal bed. Those who'd returned early were either lying on the bed smoking a pipe or lying there pretending to doze — in short, these hard-labor men were seizing every possible moment to recover their strength.

The only thing that could rouse the laborers from the bed was the call for food. With the clang-clang-clang of an iron ladle banging against a pot, no words were needed — everyone nimbly filed out of the room.

At this moment, standing in the middle of the courtyard was a dark, fat, vicious-looking old woman with arms thicker than most people's thighs.

This woman was called Sister Gui, and one look at her bearing told you she was the landlady. Sister Gui's family was doing fairly well for the slums; her husband worked as a Steward on the docks outside the city, while she herself was responsible for renting out rooms, cooking, and other odd jobs.

Most of the laborers in the courtyard, like He Biandan, had signed on for meals with Sister Gui. The reason wasn't that Sister Gui's cooking was good, but that Sister Gui's cooking was cheap.

Cheap, naturally, meant no good stuff. So when Sister Gui lifted the pot lid, as expected, today was another pot of hodgepodge.

This pot of food — not quite rice porridge, not quite rice — was a mixed stew of forty percent rough brown rice, thirty percent vegetables, and thirty percent sweet potatoes.

The adorably colored vegetable porridge gave off a sweet fragrance that wafted everywhere. But the laborers all knew that this food wasn't actually easy to swallow.

Even so, a group of hungry men still jostled noisily to grab coarse ceramic bowls from the table, crowding around the pot, watching eagerly as Sister Gui ladled out the food with a big iron spoon.

"No manners at all — stuff yourselves to death, you bloated sacks!" At times like this, the dark, fat Sister Gui, who was in charge of ladling, would start cursing and grumbling. But cursing aside, Sister Gui ultimately still scooped out a full, heaping bowl of shredded-sweet-potato vegetable porridge for each person. Additionally, from a jar off to the side, everyone also received one salted radish or one salted vegetable head... though whether it was the Fuling brand was anyone's guess.

The next moment, He Biandan got hit again.

He Biandan, this fellow, usually seemed quite clever, but the moment mealtime arrived, his IQ plummeted into the negatives. From childhood to adulthood, Biandan had taken who knows how many beatings for this.

Today was the same old routine: after collecting his own portion, He Biandan reached into the jar to grab an extra radish, and was promptly rapped twice on the head by Sister Gui with the stick she used to stir the food.

The laborers, squatting right there in the courtyard to eat, watched this staple sideshow with amused grins. Everyone knew He Biandan never got enough to eat year-round, and everyone also knew Sister Gui was a woman with a fierce face but a soft heart. So after taking two raps, He Biandan ultimately still made off with his spoils of war, grinning as he squeezed into the crowd and noisily slurped down his vegetable porridge.

What followed was the happiest moment of the day for these hard laborers: sitting on the well platform, slurping and gulping to fill their bellies, while shooting the breeze about everything under the sun, exchanging information from the world of manual labor.

Recently, the main topic of concern for everyone had been the improvement in food quality.

In the years before this, the porridge Sister Gui cooked had very little salt in it, and during certain periods, she didn't even add salt at all. The laborers' daily salt intake relied entirely on the salted vegetables from the jar.

However, even the salted vegetables weren't so easy to rely on; whenever the price of salt fluctuated in the city, Sister Gui's salted vegetables would become noticeably less salty.

Salt is an essential substance for human cells to regulate fluid osmotic pressure. For manual laborers, salt content is the critical link that ensures the fresh water they drink is converted into sweat.

The greasy men and women of later generations regard salt as they would snakes and scorpions, but if you made those people carry a few loads like He Biandan, they'd be desperately gulping salt soda — otherwise, they'd go into shock and eventually die.

So all along, the salt content in the food had been a matter of great concern for the laborers.

As it turned out, starting two or three months ago, the situation had changed.

The people of Guangzhou City suddenly discovered that down south at that New City Construction Site, there was a huge loophole to exploit: anyone who went to do labor for Regional Commander Cao could buy cheap salt at the worksite.

Everyone knew this Regional Commander from Taiwan had deep pockets; the story from before at White Goose Pond, where he brought out silver dragons to pay the soldiers, was still circulating in the city to this day.

And the Old Man's subordinates, without a doubt, had also inherited their boss's tradition of deep pockets: for the same price, the same weight, people could buy top-quality, snow-white salt grains from the New City Construction Site, rather than the blackish, sand-adulterated, bitter official salt.

And so, word spread from one to ten, from ten to a hundred. Very quickly, some people spotted the profit in it and organized large groups of the dirt-poor to go work at the construction site — only the foreman could buy salt, and the more workers under him, the more salt he could buy.

Note, this quota was extra; the workers' wages were still paid as usual.

This blatantly obvious rule was initially meant to slightly tamp down public criticism: only people working for me can buy salt — nothing wrong with that.

After this continued for a while, on the day the telegram of Regional Commander Cao's great victory in the north reached Guangdong, the rules changed: any individual who paid silver could buy salt wholesale, unlimited quantities, starting from a thousand taels per sale.

And so, at the New City docks, salt smugglers from Liangguang swarmed in. These people brought silver, Guangxi rice, and indentured laborers duped out of the mountains. After exchanging for salt, the salt smugglers hired people nonstop day and night to load ships, then vanished into the endless waterways of the Pearl River Delta.

At the same time, New City was also wholesaling salt products in massive quantities to the local salt merchant system — everything from salt grains to snow-white refined salt was available, at low prices, with fair dealing for all.

Faced with such an overbearing CEO who possessed Battleships, the local salt merchant system of Guangdong was powerless to resist and could only choose to cooperate — which could also be understood as being forcibly screwed. Thus, endless salt goods, centered on New City, began to permeate every corner of Liangguang.

The most direct impact of this matter was: salt prices in Liangguang, just like in neighboring Fujian, plummeted instantly. The vegetable porridge in He Biandan's bowl became a much tastier salty porridge. The salted radish in his hand could truly be called a salted vegetable now.

So recently, every mealtime, everyone would always happily discuss the endless salt goods at the New City docks. Several of the laborers in the courtyard were working as porters at the docks, so they knew exactly how much had to be unloaded every day.

And today's mealtime excitement was this: someone who had gone to Taiwan to do short-term labor had come back and confirmed it as solid fact — Taiwan had a salt mountain, reportedly spat out by a salt dragon in a lake, several dozen zhang high, and no matter how much you dug, you could never finish digging it.

At moments like this, Sister Gui would also pat her chest with her calloused, plump hand and utter a couple of blessing phrases like "Bodhisattva protect General Cao from illness and disaster" — in the view of a coarse, bottom-rung woman like Sister Gui, anyone who could bring her cheap salt deserved to live a hundred years.

Today, in this bowl of vegetable porridge, besides the topic of saltiness, there was another eye-catching item: yellow potato strips.

Potatoes, this thing, don't store well in the relatively warm south; they sprout if kept too long. Although the Transmigrators could do secondary processing to turn potatoes into rice flour and starch, the best way to handle potatoes was still to eat them at the first moment.

So starting from the second half of this year, whenever the farms in Tainan had a large harvest, ships would carry fresh potatoes to Guangzhou and Fujian.

These potatoes would be used at various construction sites to feed the farmer-laborers. This way, the Transmigrators could store the locally purchased rice as a reserve for unforeseen needs.