Chapter 1030: The Crisis of the Shun Empire

The stars wheeled and the sun and moon flew like a shuttle. Time always passes swiftly, and the moment you try to seize it, it spins away at full speed.

For the Great Ming Empire, which had already set out on the fiery road of no return that was capitalism, more and more people were beginning to feel that there was simply not enough time.

Time is money!

Time is a new continent!

Building ships, training sailors, recruiting settlers, preparing supplies, and sailing east all took time — and all of it could generate the profits that capitalists loved most. This was perhaps the most wicked thing about capitalism: it could link nearly every human activity to commercial profit, and then use profit to drive human greed, sending people into a frenzy of pursuit.

And Zhu Cilang's financial methods could magnify capital, profit, and human greed again and again. Thus, from the tenth year of Hongxing onward, the United States of New Continent had become the most eye-catching wealth hotspot of all — so much so that people living in the rich and prosperous southeast of the Great Ming had almost forgotten that their homeland had not actually achieved true unification. Even nominal unification had not yet been achieved.

For in the southwestern corner of the Celestial Empire's lands, there still existed a Shun Empire that openly defied the Great Ming Empire and likewise claimed to be the Celestial Empire!

The Shun was now a colonial empire as well!

For she too possessed colonies of her own.

After the successful surprise attack on Ava, the Shun court had established the Governor-General's Office of Ava and the Governor-General's Office of Syriam to administer Upper and Lower Burma respectively. And after breaking through the city of Ayutthaya, the Shun court had conveniently set up a Governor-General's Office of Ayutthaya to govern the Siamese lands they had conquered.

Because the Shun had used a surprise attack to swallow Burma, a tributary state that depended on it, it had effectively torn up the Treaty of Suzerainty and Tributary with its own hands. Thus, even as it expanded its territory, it had also destroyed its own Celestial Empire system. So after seizing Upper and Lower Burma and part of the Siamese lands, the Shun court had to find a different method of rule.

At first, Li Guo, Li Laiheng, and others wanted to transplant the Shun's fubing land-grant system to Upper and Lower Burma. But later they discovered that this approach was simply not workable!

The reason the fubing system failed to take root in Upper and Lower Burma was that there was no way to make the fubing put down roots in Burma!

The fubing system had to be rooted in the countryside — the Shun's fubing were essentially small-landlord soldiers. After receiving a grant of one or two hundred mu of land, a fubing would rent the land out to farming households and use the collected rent to support himself and his family while bearing the costs of military service.

But fubing households relocated to Burma from Sichuan, Shaanxi (Hanzhong, Gongchang), and Huguang (Yunyang) found that they simply could not put down roots. For the Burmese were not, after all, Han farmers like those of Sichuan or Yunnan. The latter, though there was some friction between them and the Shaanxi people, could still manage to communicate. Moreover, while promoting the fubing system, the Shun court had also carried out a policy of equal land distribution by headcount to win hearts, so poor peasants had benefited as well, and the fubing system had been established quite smoothly.

But in Burma, the situation was entirely different.

Han fubing simply could not communicate with Burmese farming households, and without communication there was of course no question of putting down roots. Moreover, Burma had no sharpened land conflicts at home, nor did it have the concept of equality that the Han people of the Central Plains had gradually developed since the Warring States period — the Burmese were thoroughly accustomed to servitude under their own nobility and had no need whatsoever for the Shun's heavenly soldiers to liberate them.

Furthermore, Burma was a land of miasma and pestilence. Fubing relocated from Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Huguang easily fell ill and died. If they lived in the more developed cities it was somewhat better, but if they were scattered into the countryside, the chances of contracting disease were even greater.

Among the "Northern Expedition Army" that had followed Li Laiheng and Li Dingguo south, the number who died of epidemic disease was several times greater than the number who died on the battlefield.

Since there was no way to go down into the countryside and put down roots, the Shun's rule in Upper and Lower Burma could only center on the cities and aim at extracting economic profit — the purpose of the Shun's surprise attack on Burma had never been limited to opening up territory; it had also included gaining a southern outlet to the sea in order to obtain Western firearms technology and, at the same time, to secure an export channel for the Shu brocade produced by the government-run handicraft workshops.

Thus Upper and Lower Burma, along with part of the Siamese lands, became dependencies from which the Shun Empire extracted resources and money — in other words, colonies.

Moreover, because there was no way to settle large numbers of fubing in Upper and Lower Burma, the Shun court for the time being had no means of transforming Burma from a colony into a home province.

Therefore, the Shun court could only establish three governor-general districts centered on major cities in the lands of Upper and Lower Burma and Siam, and impose upon them a colonial rule utterly different from that of the Shun homeland.

After completing the establishment of the three governor-general offices, the Crown Prince Li Laiheng, commander of the Shun's Northern Expedition Army, brought his years-long southern sojourn to an end. He handed over the army and territory to the Governor-General of Ava, Li Dingguo (among the Shun's three southern governors-general, the Governor-General of Ava held precedence), and then headed north with a small escort. In the spring of the tenth year of the Shun's joint reign, he returned with a heavy heart to the Shun Empire's northern capital, Chongqing Prefecture.

His heavy heart was not without cause. While in Burma and Siam, he had set up his Army-Pacifying Crown Prince's headquarters at Syriam, the outlet to the sea in Lower Burma. Many people of mixed Portuguese and Burmese descent lived there, and contacts with the outside world were relatively close, so Li Laiheng had also learned that the Great Ming Empire had grown more and more prosperous in recent years.

For the Shun, the Great Ming Empire's thriving days were anything but good news.

After entering the territory of Chongqing Prefecture, Li Laiheng did not ride straight on toward the city of Chongqing. Instead, he first went to the Bishan imperial tomb of the late emperor Li Zicheng. He also had a manor at Bishan, right near the imperial tomb. After paying his respects at the tomb, Li Laiheng, together with his followers and one of his sons — a boy of fourteen or fifteen named Li Jicheng — dismounted and walked slowly and unhurriedly toward his manor.

On both sides of the official road, everything was already a lush green. In the paddy fields, Sichuan farmers in short clothes and bamboo hats were scattered here and there like stars, working while calling back and forth to one another in Sichuan accents, their voices rising and falling in a lively clamor.

Passing a village, crowds of children were playing and chasing one another at the village entrance. When they saw Li Laiheng and his party leading large horses, they all swarmed around, singing and dancing, in perfect harmony.

Li Laiheng stopped, picked up a little boy of six or seven, and asked with a chuckle, "Little one, what's your name, and how old are you?"

The child opened his mouth and out came a Shaanxi accent: "Uncle, my name's Shuanggui, and I'm eight this year!"

"You're from Shaanxi?" Li Laiheng smiled even more broadly. "Where's your father?"

"My father's gone off for his turn of duty. At home there's just me, my mother, my second mother, my two elder brothers and two elder sisters, and a younger sister."

"Ho, a whole big family!" Li Laiheng's smile unconsciously faded a little.

This child's family had one father and two mothers, and among his own generation there were two elder brothers, two elder sisters, and one younger sister — adding himself, that made six children. That seemed a bit too many!

Li Laiheng knew that since the early years of the joint reign, the Shun's rule in Sichuan, Yunnan, and other places had gradually stabilized. And the Ming dynasty had not launched any frenzied attacks either, but had to a certain extent "ignored" the Shun.

Under these circumstances, the Shun's more than two hundred thousand fubing and tens of thousands of official households had nothing to do. Apart from taking their turns on duty, they stayed home making babies for fun.

So among fubing households, it was common for a family to have six or seven children!

The next generation of the two hundred thousand-odd fubing and officials would likely swell to a million people! Even excluding the girls, it would still grow to more than five hundred thousand!

Could the Shun court grant offices and land to these five hundred thousand people? At one hundred mu per person, that would be fifty million mu.

And it was not only fubing households and official households whose populations were multiplying rapidly — the farming households that had received land by headcount were breeding just as desperately.

For under the equal land distribution by headcount, the farmers' incomes and burdens had both been leveled out, making marriage and childbearing easier. And since there was no contraception in those days, with the food supply still fairly ample and the social environment stable to the point of stagnation, the production of population had been greatly accelerated.

(End of Chapter)