Chapter 345: Observation (Requesting Monthly Tickets)

() Penglai No. 3 Tunbao was located right where the old Anxiang Bao had been. A crowd surged at the entrance of the tunbao, and a play was being performed on the stage. Wu Xiang stood in the back row with two of his retainers. The surrounding noise was chaotic, and he couldn't make out clearly what was being sung for a moment, but from the look of the actors, one was a Tatar, wielding a blade and hacking at several people on the ground.

The audience below was all cursing and shouting. Wu Xiang observed the common folk around him; they were all watching with intense concentration, every face filled with anger. "So the idea is to stage plays to make the commoners hate those Tatars. A good idea. Why didn't I think of it?" Wu Xiang silently noted this point in his mind.

These days he had been wandering around Dengzhou. The city wasn't much different from Guanning, though prices were somewhat cheaper. Apart from a little farmland, the Liaoxi Corridor produced almost nothing. After Yongping and Luanzhou were ravaged, local supplies became even scarcer.

Goods traveling from the Grand Canal to Shanhai Pass were taxed all along the way. Smuggled sea trade used to be somewhat cheaper, but this year, with the Dengzhou and Wendeng naval forces conducting strict inspections, every passing ship was being taxed. The merchants used this as an excuse to raise prices. The Guanning region received several million taels in Liaodong military taxes each year. Although a portion was given as kickbacks to the capital, the funds were concentrated in a few places like Shanhai Pass and Ningyuan, causing extremely high local prices. In truth, Wu Xiang sometimes rather envied Chen Xin. At least from Wu Xiang's perspective, Chen Xin could hide safely in Dengzhou, only needing to ship his army to Lushun to vie for military merit. Even if Lushun were lost, Chen Xin wouldn't lose a single hair. It was far better than de facto exclaves like Jinzhou and Ningyuan, where one could be surrounded by the Jianzhou bandits' siegeworks at any moment if not careful.

"You two remember what's happening on that stage. When we go back, we'll hire a theater troupe to rehearse it too."

The two retainers responded in low voices. Wu Xiang then walked alone around the periphery of the crowd. Many peddlers' carrying-poles were set up around, selling all sorts of sundry goods. Beside a small river were harvested crops, and along the river channel stood a row of waterwheels and dragon-tail pumps.

Wu Xiang came before a peddler. He picked up a piece of goods from the carrying-pole and sniffed it; a strong fishy smell hit him. Using an accent from around Qingzhou, he asked the peddler, "Little brother, where is this dried fish from?"

The peddler looked up, saw that Wu Xiang's clothes were not ordinary, and asked doubtfully, "Sir, you don't eat this kind of dried fish. There's no need to make fun of a humble man like me."

Wu Xiang hurriedly said, "Of course I'm asking because I intend to buy. Don't worry, my servant will be here shortly, and I'll buy several jin."

The peddler's face lit up with a smile as he stood. "I caught these sea fish myself and salted them to sell. The tunbao households in Dengzhou Town all have some silver and need to eat them in winter."

"Salt is so expensive; isn't it too wasteful to use it for salting fish?"

The peddler said, completely unconcerned, "It's sold very cheaply inside these Dengzhou Town tunbaos. It's all private salt from Weihai, practically like picking it up off the ground."

Wu Xiang smiled and pointed at the tunbao. "Then are you also from the tunbao?"

"I wish I were. I'm a civilian household from another bao. The tunbao is full." The peddler said with some regret, "I believed the words of a relative in Anxiang Bao back then, thinking the tunbao was harmful. As a result, I was a step too late. All the land was already distributed. Some clever neighbors got in, and now they buy salt cheaper than we do. I even had to ask them to buy this salt for me."

Wu Xiang was slightly puzzled. Private salt was nothing unusual; even the salt works sold private salt. Guanning got its salt directly from the Changlu salt works and others. The salt shops were all controlled by military officers, who then sold it to soldiers and civilians at the official salt price. What surprised him was that Chen Xin didn't use this to make money. Since the mid-Ming period, the coast had always used the solar evaporation method. By the late Ming, the cost of sea salt was very low, and its quality was basically comparable to modern table salt. Shandong had nineteen salt tax bureaus, mostly concentrated west of Qingzhou near the Beizhili coast. Dengzhou and Laizhou had none. This place was surrounded by the sea on three sides; setting up a few private solar evaporation salt fields was certainly possible, but if it was too cheap, there was no profit.

He secretly gloated, thinking Chen Xin had missed a major source of wealth. He had no intention of learning this point in Guanning either, because the salt shops were all run by the brothers of the army's generals. Who would idly give up such a good path to riches? Even if he wanted to learn it, he couldn't.

The peddler continued on his own, "Some have fields and placed their land under the tunbao's protection. They can use the water from the canals, and now they only pay one dou of grain per mu. They don't have to pay anything else. For things like road repair or building barracks, the tunbao people go first. Only when they can't fill the quota do they recruit us civilian households. The young lads at home can also go learn to read. Too bad my family has no land; I can only come do some small business."

"Oh?" Wu Xiang quickly noted this point. "So if you're not a tunbao household, your son can't go to the tunbao to learn to read?"

"That is actually possible. The tunbao doesn't restrict it. Any family's child who wants to study can just bring their own food. I have two boys. The younger one is too small; they won't take him. I sent my eldest son, and he can now write over a hundred characters." Mentioning his son, the peddler's face brimmed with a happy smile.

At that moment, a burst of enthusiastic cheers came from beneath the stage. Wu Xiang turned to look and saw a person on stage wearing the distinctive short military uniform of Dengzhou Town. He was fighting two Tatars alone and quickly killed them. Then the soldier helped an old man up from the ground and took out a flatbread to give him to eat. Waves of applause rose from the audience.

Having stayed these days, Wu Xiang also knew that Dengzhou Town liked to applaud, clapping loudly every time. He had no idea where they had learned this from. Wu Xiang naturally didn't believe Dengzhou Town would give things away to commoners, and couldn't help cursing, "Nothing but a bunch of damn liars."

As he turned his head back, the peddler was already standing right in front of him. Grabbing Wu Xiang by the collar, he cursed, "You turtle-spawn are utterly hateful. I was just chatting idly with you, and you call me a liar. What did I lie to you about?"

Wu Xiang hastily said, "I wasn't cursing you, brother. I was only saying those actors are liars."

The peddler refused to let it go. "I've heard from the tunbao households that what's performed on stage is all true. How many Tatars our Dengzhou Town has killed, and they even let my boy learn to read and do sums. With no proof or evidence, why do you say they're liars? Are you a Tatar spy? If you don't explain clearly, I'll call my neighbors over to seize you."

Wu Xiang, being grabbed by him and seeing several other commoners gathering around to watch, feared being taken for a Tatar spy. Given the crowd's current indignation, he might well be beaten to death. He quickly begged in a low voice, "This brother, I'm from Qingzhou Prefecture and truly don't know the real situation. I offended you greatly just now. I'm here to buy fish. Let's weigh the fish first, then talk."

Hearing him mention buying fish, the peddler finally remembered this was a customer. Tilting his head, he looked at him. "How many jin are you buying?"

"Ten jin."

"You came all the way from Qingzhou just to buy ten jin of salted fish? Who does that? Are you a spy?"

Sweat beaded on Wu Xiang's forehead. Having traveled the world, he knew these rural folk were all locals and the hardest to provoke. He had only brought two retainers; they were absolutely no match for them. "This... I'm just bringing some for relatives and friends, not doing the salted fish business. Then, brother, tell me, how many jin would count?"

The peddler glanced left and right and said in a low voice, "Buy both my carrying-pole loads."

"I'll buy them, I'll buy them."

"Then buy the carrying-poles too."

Wu Xiang suppressed his anger and felt for his silver. The peddler accepted it with a beaming smile. Wu Xiang breathed a sigh of relief. He didn't dare just give the money and not take the fish, lest he be called a spy again. He hoisted the two loads of dried fish onto his own shoulders and walked back to where his two retainers were.

The retainers saw him and hurriedly took the loads. One of them said, "My lord, why did you think to buy salted fish? You could have just given your servant the order; why trouble yourself to carry it?"

Wu Xiang coughed. "This dried fish is excellent. I was afraid someone else would buy it all soon. Did you two remember clearly?"

"We remember clearly. It was two Tatars killing commoners, and one Dengzhou soldier killed the Tatars."

Wu Xiang glared. "Did you not see anything else?"

"My lord, that Dengzhou soldier's uniform was really good-looking. Much better than our mandarin-duck battle jackets. It's both spirited and convenient. Even I want to get a set. No wonder those commoners like it."

The other one added, "I squeezed to the front just now. The Tatars were all saying they wanted to loot everything in Dengzhou and Laizhou, then kill everyone in Dengzhou and Laizhou. It made those tunbao households so furious they were jumping in rage."

Wu Xiang thought this was feasible. Anyway, the Guanning army was now all warlords, so he could still make decisions on this point. In the late Ming, Ming armies mostly looked like beggar troops. Let alone unified uniforms, those in tattered clothes were everywhere.

"Mm, the uniforms must look good. Remember to have the Tatars say they'll kill people and loot things." Wu Xiang noted down another point...

Wu Xiang wandered around inside and outside Dengzhou for a few more days. He also knew Chen Xin might have sent people to watch him, so every time he went out, he did so openly to avoid arousing Chen Xin's suspicion, and he absolutely never left the boundaries of Penglai County, although he very much wanted to visit Wendeng.

He listened to people chatting everywhere and roughly sketched in his mind the outline of Chen Xin's tunbao system. It seemed to be renting land to farmers at low rents, but the farmers had to train in combat skills. The most common drill, he heard, was marching back and forth in formation. Then the tunbaos ran schools. Combined with Wu Xiang's own experience dealing with the trading company, he believed the trading company and gold mines were used to make money to arm the combat troops. After thinking it over, Wu Xiang felt it was actually similar to the guard-battalion system, except Chen Xin made more money and ran things a bit more strictly. He couldn't figure out how that produced elite troops.

He stayed until the Liaodong sea froze over. Wu Xiang figured it was about time to report the merit and he needed to hurry back to Ningyuan to await the restoration of his official post. He then took a few retainers and returned home by land. Last time, when delivering the horses, he had rushed and not paid attention to the roadside conditions. This time on the road, he observed carefully. There weren't many tunbaos in Huangxian and Yexian, but both had proper barracks. Inside were rows of brick and tile houses, and the camp gates were very imposing. The soldiers at the gate stood in the exact same posture as those on the Dengzhou parade ground. This was also his deepest impression of Dengzhou Town: all the soldiers seemed cast from the same mold. He had once watched a changing of the guard, with all the saluting and goose-stepping; he thought it was too wordy.

Starting from Yexian, tunbaos dotted the roadside thickly. Wu Xiang would sometimes rather take a small detour just to circle around a tunbao. Every time he traveled in the morning, he could see groups of teenagers around ten years old heading to school. These schoolhouses were not large, basically only two or three rooms. Although most of the buildings inside the tunbaos were thatched huts, the schoolhouses were all brick and tile buildings. In front of the doors were large open spaces, and on the north side of each open space stood a flagpole with a flying tiger banner hanging from it. Generally, if he passed a tunbao in the afternoon, he could see students marching in formation, and with quite an imposing air.

On the road, he even made a point of testing them. The tunbao households were just as he knew them to be, still somewhat slow, unable to explain things clearly after a long time. The teenagers, however, were very enthusiastic and spoke in an organized manner.

One day, outside Pingdu Department, Wu Xiang learned that near Daze Mountain there was a large workshop. The area had rivers and trees, very suitable for ironworking. According to the tunbao households, the people in the workshop were even wealthier. He detoured again to take a look. It was indeed a very large complex of buildings. When he was still a li away, he was stopped on the road by several youths holding seven-chi short spears.

The leader of the youths was only twelve or thirteen years old. Seeing that Wu Xiang's bearing was not ordinary, he came over, saluted, and asked politely, "Sir, have you taken a wrong road? The road ahead only leads to the workshop. If you don't have a work pass, you cannot enter."

Wu Xiang saw that this small child had actually given a military salute, yet wasn't wearing a military uniform. Puzzled, he switched to a Hejian Prefecture accent and asked, "Little brother, I'm from Hejian Prefecture. I took a ship to Dengzhou, but the sea froze over for the return trip, so I have to travel home by road. I'm not familiar with the routes and may have taken a wrong turn."

The child quickly ran back, muttered with a few other children for a moment, then brought over a charcoal pencil and paper. Squatting on the ground, he drew as he spoke, "There's a checkpoint of the tun-protection team ahead. Sir, you won't be able to get through. You'll have to go back until you see Pingdu Department City, then find a three-way fork. There's a road sign there. Follow the direction toward Changyi, then keep going west."

The child sketched a few lines to represent the roads, then crookedly marked the four characters for east, west, south, and north on the edges of the paper. These characters were among the two hundred basic characters taught in the Dengzhou schoolhouses, which all students knew. But he didn't know how to write the 'yi' in Changyi, so he only wrote the character 'Chang'.

Wu Xiang was secretly amazed. Among his own retainers, few could write, let alone draw a simple map. "Little brother, you draw this very well. Did you learn it in the schoolhouse?"

The child finished drawing carefully, held it up for Wu Xiang, then turned his left arm over, pointing to the two characters "Tongjun" (Youth Corps) on it. "Not taught in the schoolhouse. The schoolhouse only teaches reading and sums. This is taught by our workshop's Youth Corps. There are two squad leaders inside who came back wounded. When they're not working, they take us to learn. It's useful when camping in the mountains."

"Is this Youth Corps everywhere? What about older children?"

"Only our workshop has it. The children in those tunbao schoolhouses all have to work when they go home. They don't earn as much as our workshop wages, so even if they set one up, no one was willing to go. Later, only the workshop's Youth Corps remained. Those fifteen and older are under the instructors. I'm still two years away."

"Oh, I see." Wu Xiang quickly noted this down. He carefully put the paper away, planning to try it among the tunbao households when he returned. Turning his eyes, he saw the Youth Corps member still in front of him and hurriedly took out a silver ingot, a full tael.

The Youth Corps member's eyes lit up. The few behind him also crowded around, swallowing hard. Wu Xiang thought they found it too little and, not daring to offend these locals, quickly felt for another piece. But the several Youth Corps members just stood there swallowing, not reaching out to take it.

Wu Xiang was annoyed inside, thinking he was going to be ripped off again today. But then the Youth Corps member looked up at him and said, "We Youth Corps members can't accept rewards for helping people. It's written in the Youth Corps rules set by Lord Liu. I don't want it."

"You really don't want it?"

The several children stared at the silver and shook their heads together. Wu Xiang was only too happy for this. He put away the silver, turned around, and left. After walking a long way, he looked back and still saw those few Youth Corps members standing there watching him, with a look of reluctant longing.

"Heh heh, regretting it now." Wu Xiang finished his gloating, then sighed in a low voice. A twelve-year-old child who could draw rough maps, write, and was willing to take up a long blade and spear — if he joined the army a few years later, he'd be a hundred times better than some farmer grabbed from the fields. It wasn't that Wu Xiang didn't want subordinates like that, but the children in the Liaoxi garrison households didn't even have clothes to wear. Training child soldiers was pure fantasy.

Pingdu Department felt more like the Dengzhou Garrison than Dengzhou itself. The common folk passing along the roads wore plain clothes but radiated a kind of confidence, greeting each other with clasped hands when they met. Now that winter had arrived, there was no farm work in the fields, and many people were drilling at the various forts. But the training grounds were all set back from the road. Every time Wu Xiang tried to edge closer, he would be stopped and questioned. He could only watch from a distance, barely making out those dense, extra-long spears, which seemed different again from the Mandarin Duck Formation troops that Zu Dashou had put together.

As he neared Changyi, he witnessed a parade of Jianzhou bandit captives. There were about fifty genuine Jianzhou barbarians and several dozen bondservant captives. Word was that after the parade, they would be escorted to the capital. The common folk lining the roadside all cursed bitterly. Wu Xiang also joined the excitement and threw a clod of mud.

He kept records all along the way. Past Changyi, there were no more forts. Everything reverted to the look he knew so well: the desolate winter wilderness, the dilapidated villages. The only difference was the many refugees on the road, moving in groups toward Dengzhou and Laizhou.

Wu Xiang was a commander of troops himself, and he was stationed on the front lines. Whether or not they went to retake Liaodong, making the army stronger was ultimately a good thing. Just like Zu Dashou at Jinzhou — if not for the considerable fighting strength of the Liaozhen veterans under his command, Huang Taiji might well have assaulted the city directly, rather than bothering to besiege it for so long. In Wu Xiang's view, Chen Xin was also a warlord. The Four Seas Trading Company actually belonged to Chen Xin; he made his own money and trained his own troops. From the private trade he conducted and the way he swapped heads, it was clear that Chen Xin had never taken the imperial court seriously. He was just better at pretending to be a good man than Zu Dashou.

After reaching Qingzhou Prefecture, Wu Xiang found lodging inside the city. That evening, he sorted through the things he had recorded. The Dengzhou Garrison had already given Wu Xiang too many surprises; now, nothing strange he encountered seemed strange anymore. But as Wu Xiang looked over his organized notes, he realized that some things seemed simple but were actually very difficult to implement in practice. Take building waterwheels and canals, for example — without enough silver, it couldn't be done. And even with money, it still depended on whether the commanding officers were willing to spend it. Guanning had no shortage of people; there were plenty of refugees inside the pass, ready manpower available. Which officer would be willing to spend that much silver on waterwheels and canals? The same went for the military uniforms. Even he himself doubted whether those fine-looking clothes were actually useful.

Wu Xiang mulled things over one by one. Suddenly, there was an urgent clanging of gongs outside. Someone on the street was shouting loudly, "Fire! Prepare the water vats, hemp beaters, and fire hooks!" The several retainers next door quickly came to stand guard at Wu Xiang's door. Wu Xiang was staying on the second floor; he immediately pushed open the window and saw a great blaze raging somewhere in the eastern part of Qingzhou.

The flames still seemed far off, but Wu Xiang dared not be careless. Back then, the great Ningyuan fire had burned down over six thousand houses, leaving hundreds dead or injured. He stayed by the window watching, ready to flee the moment it began to spread.

Then, many people on the street were running about in panic. Amid the din, Wu Xiang faintly heard them shouting, "... It's the main shop of the Dong Family Bookstore that's on fire, half the street is burning..." (To be continued.)

PS: Requesting monthly tickets.