Chapter 269: The Salted Fish Soaks In; Grass Bends Before the Wind

After the banquet ended, the Laoting gentry broke into small knots of two or three, clustering by marriage ties and old acquaintance for private meetings of their own.

And what, then, was County Magistrate Lu — the man mentioned so often in those little meetings — doing at that very moment?

He was mending a window…

"No good! Paper and paste won't hold it! Go find a couple of planks!"

Li Liye answered with a grunt, dropped the paste and paper on the spot, threw open the door, and dashed out.

When Lu Zhenfei left the banquet, he had originally arranged to meet his two private secretaries in the study to align their understanding of Laoting's present state and the direction of his governance.

But the three of them had barely sat down, and the various registers and charts had only just been spread out, when the paper window blew in. A gale instantly sent every light brush, ink-stick, paperweight, and inkstone flying all over the room.

Clink… clatter…

After a flurry of frantic scrambling, the drafty window was finally sealed shut with several planks nailed up every which way.

The three men's handiwork was hideous beyond belief, but at least it kept the gale outside.

Lu Zhenfei leaned back against the wall, let out a long breath, and dusted off his robes with a rueful laugh. "In all my days as a county magistrate… I never imagined my first task would be a carpenter's."

Li Liye, having caught his breath by now, could not hold back a curse.

"That previous county magistrate — the man's greed was truly something vicious! This study leaks wind on all four sides, and he never even bothered to fix it? Did he never use the place?" "He was fifty-nine," Secretary Wang said, sorting the scattered documents and shaking his head with a sigh. "A man with one foot already in the coffin — who would expect him to love the people under his charge? Of course he'd grab every last bit he could, as fast as he could, to leave his sons and grandsons a mountain of gold and silver."

Lu Zhenfei gave a bitter laugh. "I knew he was corrupt. I never imagined he'd even pocket the twenty-five taels of silver allotted for a new magistrate to repair the residence on taking office. Truly… it leaves one speechless with wonder."

"Speaking of which," Li Liye's eyes lit up, and he leaned in closer. "When we left the capital, wasn't there talk that His Majesty had overturned the original verdict against that fellow? You stayed on in the capital several extra days, sir — did you hear any fresh news?"

At the whiff of gossip, Secretary Wang's hands slowed at his task; though he did not turn around, his ears pricked up.

Lu Zhenfei gave a low cough and could not resist glancing left and right.

They were, quite plainly, in the rear courtyard of his own county yamen, and at this moment no one else was present but the three of them — yet Lu Zhenfei still instinctively lowered his voice. "That predecessor of mine came up through the annual tribute route. Before this, he'd served as a constable, an assistant county magistrate, a registrar — he slaved away his whole life just to rise to county magistrate." "I hear that during his interview, the old wretch deliberately played dumb. Asked about the local strongmen, he pleaded ignorance across the board. Asked about the actual acreage and registered population, he said only that there was no room for growth. As for any new policies or methods, it was nothing but 'soothe the people,' 'pacify the people' — pure fobbing off."

"And so, after receiving a zero-circle evaluation twice," Lu Zhenfei gave a cold laugh, "he was directly handed an impeachment by that 'Qi Official Slayer' and sent on to the committee." "The very next day, the committee coordinated for a censor and a secretary to join the interview together. He was confirmed on the spot as muddle-headed and incompetent, and seized on the spot! Sent to the Three Judicial Offices for sentencing, and they fixed the penalty as dismissal and being sent home — which is how I got my lucky break into the new policy."

"All that we already know. What came after? What did they change the sentence to?" Li Liye pressed.

Lu Zhenfei clicked his tongue and shook his head.

"The old creature must have lost his wits. At the Three Judicial Offices' joint hearing, he actually had the gall to spout off, spouting nonsense like 'this is no time to shake the foundations of the state,' 'one must not act with undue haste,' 'disturbing the countryside harms the natural harmony' — that sort of rubbish — to defend himself."

"Guess what happened?" Lu Zhenfei teased, drawing out the suspense.

Li Liye, who normally loved leaving his sentences half-finished, was now so tantalized he was scratching his ears and cheeks. He hastily lifted the teapot and refilled Lu Zhenfei's cup: "Grandfather, my own dear grandfather! Out with it, quickly!"

Lu Zhenfei was too worked up by his own tale to spare a moment for tea.

"The sentence the Three Judicial Offices originally drafted was indeed dismissal and being sent home."

"And since the memorial and case file involved the dismissal of a county magistrate, it naturally had to be submitted to His Majesty."

"But by the Grand Secretariat's current rating standards, this matter was really no more than a Grade C case — not necessarily something the Emperor would even see."

"Yet by sheer coincidence, it happened! Of the twenty memorials His Majesty randomly selects each day for personal review, this old wretch's case file was right there among them!" Secretary Wang now gave up all pretense of work and turned straight around to look. Li Liye was still holding the teapot aloft, forgetting to set it down, the tea overflowing and spreading across the table without his noticing.

"And then?! (×2)"

Lu Zhenfei cleared his throat softly and said: "His Majesty read that defense and spoke only a single line."

"'Only now do We understand that the realm holds such a worthy minister. Truly, Our eyes have been opened.'"

"'So righteous and stern in speech — plainly his sincere heart is devoted to the state. Let no official, by any means, wrongfully accuse a pillar of the nation such as this!'"

"Huh?!" Li Liye and Secretary Wang both looked utterly incredulous. At this reaction, Lu Zhenfei burst out laughing, doubling over, and it was a long while before he straightened up again.

"The rescript was, of course, longer than that! His Majesty added one final line —"

"'Go and investigate the customary fees he has handled over the years. Let Us see clearly whether he is another Hai Gangfeng, or just an old salted fish.'"

"'A Hai Gangfeng shall have a Hai Gangfeng's glory. An old salted fish shall naturally have an old salted fish's end.'"

"His Majesty then sent the case file back to the Three Judicial Offices for re-sentencing. This time, the charges fixed were no longer just dismissal."

"They added ten counts of aggravated corruption, stripped him of his examination honors, dismissed him and sent him home — and assessed a fine of two thousand taels for illicit gains!"

Only then did Wang and Li nod in comprehension.

…This sort of caustic, utterly merciless style toward corrupt fools — that was the Yongchang Emperor they knew.

The lenient, benevolent manner that had come before, placed in this scene, seemed almost as if he had been possessed by some demon.

The gossip now heard, the three men set about tidying the scattered books and papers once more.

But as he tidied, Secretary Wang suddenly paused and asked, "What is a 'salted fish'?"

Lu Zhenfei of course knew what Secretary Wang was asking. He shook his head.

"This new term — His Majesty's explanation has not yet been circulated. But colleagues in the capital privately speculate that it probably means 'corrupt to the point of death'?" Lu Zhenfei pointed at the white porcelain teacup on the table. "Look — illicit silver, gleaming white, is it not just like using salt of the same color to cure fish?"

"Cure it long enough in salt, and the flavor soaks in. Cure it long enough in silver, and surely the flavor soaks in too."

"Salt…ed…" Wang and Li turned the word over in their minds, and the more they thought about it, the more profoundly meaningful it seemed. Both nodded in approval of this exquisite interpretation. Secretary Wang straightened a few booklets and spoke.

"This affair, I feel, may perhaps have some further implications."

"After all, the matter of customary fees is inherently difficult to clean up."

"That His Majesty has never drawn a clear line is, I suspect, much like the Donglin case — he means to let the matter slide for now, and then tackle it in earnest a year or two later."

"This time, hauling out that old county magistrate as a public example serves, on the one hand, to send a warning signal, and on the other, may genuinely be because that fool angered him." Li Liye, wringing out his soaked trouser cuffs, said worriedly:

"What I fear is that this might end up as 'beating the grass to startle the snake,' making the county magistrates all across Northern Zhili too afraid to accept customary fees at all."

"If that happens, for us to stand out here will be all the harder."

Lu Zhenfei slapped the last stack of documents heavily onto the desk and shook his head.

"Let us not trouble ourselves over that for now. Fools will not change because of this, and clever men will always find a clever man's way. We need only do our own work well." Once the three were seated again, the mood shifted from the earlier gossip to the business at hand.

"Sir, most of Laoting's figures have been sorted out." Li Liye pointed at a huge chart on the table. "Leaving aside the private rot — the fraudulent registrations, the scattered tax entries, the graft — all the open Yellow Registers, documents, and revolving account books have been handed over and checked off one by one, clarified and verified." Lu Zhenfei's gaze fell upon it.

The candle flame danced, illuminating the densely packed chart, which laid out the entire patrimony of Laoting County.

His eyes swept rapidly over several key figures, and his brow gradually furrowed.

Laoting's condition was, just as he had imagined before coming, dire — and in fact, even worse.

But however bad it was, the New Policies that belonged to Lu Zhenfei could only start from this mess.

Lu Zhenfei drew a deep breath and said heavily, "Come, let's go through the figures one by one. We'll discuss plans after."

The two advisors showed no discomfort with this "New-Policy-ish" way of speaking and simply nodded.

Li Liye spoke first, his finger tapping the very top of the table:

"First, the population. According to the registers, Leting County currently has 3,179 registered households, with a population of 77,112."

"This data is certainly false, but there is one detail within it worth noting."

"The local population here, as in every other county, feared the apportionment of corvée labor. No matter how the population grew, the figure was always fixed at around forty-five thousand." "But during the Tianqi era, the Liaodong frontier collapsed, and no fewer than a million Liaodong refugees fled into Hebei."

"At the time, the court issued an edict that all these people were to be provided with farmland, seed, plow oxen, and so forth, and all were to be registered as households."

"This is why, after Tianqi, the population figure was forcibly inflated by an extra twenty-two thousand."

"Only because these external migrants were plain as day and impossible to conceal did the Yellow Registers see such an alteration."

Hearing this, Lu Zhenfei could not help but frown and ask,

"How were these Liaodong refugees settled? Were they concentrated in one place?"

Advisor Wang shook his head. "Rest assured, my patron, the court considered that question at the time."

"But what they feared then was the Liaodong refugees banding together to stir up trouble and collude with the Jianzhou barbarians."

"After all, in those days, many great cities like Guangning and Shenyang were taken precisely through the use of spies."

"So these Liaodong refugees were basically broken up and settled in scattered locations."

"I made a simple round of a dozen or so households to talk with them. Most have settled down by now, but the land they were allotted was mostly medium-grade or low-grade, so their lives are fairly mediocre."

Lu Zhenfei nodded, committing this information firmly to memory.

Frontier toughs, bereft of their homeland — if they clustered together, they would be a powder keg ready to blow at any moment.

But conversely, they were certainly living in discontent in a strange land, which in fact was something that could be exploited.

"Next, the farmland." Li Liye continued. "The local assessed fields amount to over eight hundred thousand mu, surveyed during the Wanli era, and that survey was quite thorough." "As for the one hundred fifty thousand mu of wasteland not in the registers that Hanlin Wu mentioned, it can be roughly divided into two parts."

"The first part is the wasteland originally allotted to the Liaodong refugees for military-agricultural settlement, roughly a hundred thousand mu. At the time, it was said that taxation would commence after two years, but in the current registers, taxation still has not commenced on it."

Lu Zhenfei nodded, clearly grasping the subtext.

Commencing taxation meant grading the land into nine classes — upper, middle, and lower — and then levying taxes according to those grades.

The implication of Li Liye's words was that the taxes paid by the Liaodong refugees had, in all likelihood, been diverted to cover the tax obligations that the local gentry and underlings should have borne themselves.

On paper, eight hundred thousand mu paid taxes, but in reality, it was the Liaodong refugees' one hundred thousand mu plus a number of honest local households that bore the entire tax burden.

This sort of thing happened everywhere under heaven; Lu Zhenfei, having served two years as a County Magistrate, understood it the moment he heard it.

"The second part," Li Liye's finger slid toward the bottom of the table, "is the better saline-alkaline land along the coast, roughly fifty thousand mu. This land, however, is not abandoned or concealed — it is land the locals simply do not want."

"They lack the proper cultivation methods. The yield per mu is no more than one or two dou, not even enough to cover the cost of seed and labor. It has always been considered uncultivable. However…"

At this point, a flash of excitement passed through Li Liye's eyes. "We have also read and re-read my patron's 'A Summary of Paddy Field Construction East of the Capital,' and we went out to look in person. It truly closely resembles what the book describes."

"This kind of land — if you simply invite men from Fujian skilled at treating alkaline soil and channel river water to flush it, it can be planted with rice! A yield of two dan per mu is well within reach!" "And with this kind of wasteland, we can do whatever we want with it. There is absolutely no need to secure the consent of the local gentry!"

"Approached this way, the fertility may not match that of land along the rivers, but in terms of potential, it may far surpass it!"

Advisor Wang added, "As for the rice matter, given the climate of North China, sowing must happen by mid-April. The timeline is a little tight."

"We have dispatched two groups. One has gone to the Zhejiang region, offering an annual wage of twelve taels of labor-and-board silver, plus an attached grant of one hundred mu of land, to recruit veteran farm foremen."

"The other group has gone toward Tianjin to see if they can find any farmers who have previously worked on constructing paddy fields."

"In any case, essentially all of them can be in place by the third month at the latest."

The so-called "A Summary of Paddy Field Construction East of the Capital" was a training booklet compiled under the leadership of the Hanlin Academy.

This booklet occupied half a class-hour of the County Magistrates' time, while the other half-class-hour was devoted to "An Outline of the Two-Crop-in-Three-Years Rotation System in Hebei." During the training, the County Magistrates naturally swallowed it whole without much digestion; it was only upon assuming their posts that they would study it in earnest.

The booklet summarized and collated, from the Jiajing era onward, a series of memorials, official documents, and achievements by a host of famous ministers and capable officials who had promoted rice cultivation in Northern Zhili, especially in the eastern part of Northern Zhili.

Qiu Jun, Wang Yingjiao, Dong Yingju, Xu Zhenming, Wan Shide, Zuo Guangdou, Lu Guanxiang, Yuan Huang (the one who wrote the Liaofan Four Lessons), Zhang Shenyan, Xu Guangqi, and countless more heroes too numerous to list — one after another, they strove to spread rice cultivation across the Hebei lands. And the result?

Apart from Tianjin, where it barely survived, everywhere else, the men died and their policies died with them.

One reason for this was that much of the rice promotion relied on military-agricultural colonies to carry it out.

And the military-agricultural colony method was far too dependent on the integrity of the officials. Once a good official left his post, it quickly fell into ruin.

The other reason… was the resistance of the entire Hebei scholar-official class.

Back in the day, after Wang Yingjiao succeeded in constructing the Tianjin paddy fields, he proclaimed that he would extend and expand the effort, constructing five hundred thousand mu of paddy fields in Northern Zhili, with an annual yield of ten million dan. And the result?

He was immediately dismissed from office and sent home, and for nineteen years he was never reappointed.

Why?

Because once per-mu yields rose, the pressure of the four-million-dan grain tribute from the south would be shifted onto the north, and Northern Zhili's tax quotas would rise accordingly. This was touching their cheese, digging up their ancestral graves!

The line in the Wanli Unofficial Gleanings says it piercingly: Thereafter, the scholar-officials of the Central Plains feared deeply for their descendants, their hatred piercing to the marrow, unshakable and unbreakable.

Xu Guangqi went so far as to warn posterity: This is a taboo subject among the men of the northwest. Be cautious, speak not of it. Be cautious, speak not of it.

But now, things were different.

Now there was an Emperor backing the New Policies from behind, and the moral high ground of the struggle over land and people was in hand.

Not raising per-mu yields?

That was opposing the New Policies, that was obstructing the salvation of the nation, that was being a treacherous minister and a rebel!

The scholar-officials of Northern Zhili did not want to do it? There were naturally plenty of southern scholar-officials who did!

The matter of promoting rice cultivation in Northern Zhili had, against the backdrop of the present era, become a new form of political correctness.

Take Lu Zhenfei — a man of Northern Zhili through and through — he still wrote this policy into his New Policies pledge letter.

After all, if he did not plant, the hundred-odd County Magistrates of the Northern Zhili New Policies would, and the remaining hundred-plus County Magistrates from other provinces would plant just the same — they might even plant on a grand scale, plant with reckless abandon, plant beyond all practical sense.

This was precisely the greatest reason why Zhu Youjian, when he first saw the aggregated data from the initial pledge letters, discovered that the land tax had actually doubled to quintupled overall.

Some of this came from cadastral surveys, some from land reclamation, but the largest portion came from planting rice!

Yes — there was no two-harvests-in-three-years system.

Because this concept had only been popularized among County Magistrates during the training phase.

Northern magistrates were unfamiliar with rice, and southern magistrates were equally unfamiliar with North China's two-harvests-in-three-years — they were mutually illiterate on the subject.

But in this situation, His Majesty the Yongchang Emperor was starting to feel numb!

Do you people even know there's going to be a great drought over the next dozen years or so? How dare you push a crop that drinks this much water?

Oh… you really don't know.

The Yongchang Emperor had no choice but to pull the Secretariat and the Academy of Sciences into discussion, and finally, after the county magistrates had already left the capital, urgently appended a restrictive declaration. All in all, the entire Great Ming was thriving, looking better by the day — it almost seemed poised to surpass the Tang and outstrip the Han.

But for Lu Zhenfei, things were not so good.

If the whole Great Ming were dark, then rousing yourself just a little would make you the most dazzling sun.

But what if… every man in the entire realm was striving forward? Even if it were only everyone in Northern Zhili striving forward?

Especially that command headquarters directive he had received yesterday.

It stated that the Academy of Sciences had already taken the lead in compiling the book Several Technical Limitations on Opening Rice Paddies in Hebei, which would be printed and distributed before the first day of the second month.

Any locality wishing to undertake rice cultivation must strictly follow the standards and absolutely must not plant beyond them! Must not plant recklessly!

"Damn…" Lu Zhenfei, reaching this point in his thoughts, finally could not hold back a furious curse.

The book was titled "Limitations," but the moment it was issued, people who originally had no intention of planting rice, and people who had never even thought of planting rice, would surely plant it too!

Now how was he supposed to stand out!