Chapter 1253: Beware, Money Is Poison!

Li Jicheng rode a tall Indian Marwari horse, dressed in a gleaming blue silk robe, and beside him was a Hu dancer also riding a Marwari horse — the daughter of "General Singh," whom he had acquired in Paradeep in India's Odisha province, named Aishwarya. The Hu dancer wore a light, graceful red sari, a midriff-baring style, barefoot, with gold ornaments on her hair, neck, and wrists — truly eye-catching. Following Li Jicheng and Aishwarya was a large group of blue-clad warriors on horseback, all in shining silk robes, carrying flintlock muskets on their backs and Indian-made sabers at their waists, riding tall Marwari horses.

Fine clothes, spirited horses, and a Hu beauty at his side! This Li Jicheng was blatantly flaunting his wealth, afraid no one would know he had struck it rich in India, with not the slightest idea of what discretion meant.

But at his current station he could not afford to be discreet — he was the Shun's Imperial Grandson-heir, with a visible chance of being promoted to Crown Prince. Yet whether that visible chance could actually be realized was rather uncertain — his father Li Laiheng had many sons, and the current Crown Princess was not his birth mother!

So Li Jicheng had to flaunt his wealth! He had to let the second and third generations in Kunming know that he had made a fortune in India, and that anyone who wanted to get rich too should come and pledge themselves to this Grandson-heir!

Kunming's layout was unlike the ward-and-market cities of Sichuan, which looked forbidding and felt stifling to live in. It had no chessboard pattern — that is, using high walls and streets to divide the city into square little towns, so that from above it looked like a chessboard. Cities with that layout were extremely hard to attack: even if the outer walls were breached, each ward inside still had to be taken one by one before one could break through to the inner city and palace city.

Kunming had no "chessboard." Its main streets and alleys all connected, forming vast stretches of bustling prosperity. At first there had been a curfew, but it was abolished in the tenth year of the Joint Rule, pushing Kunming's prosperity even further.

Of course, Kunming's prosperity was not only due to the abolition of wards and markets and the lack of a curfew. The greatest difference between this city and Chongqing and Chengdu to the north was that it sat on land with vast room for development.

Before the Shun occupied Yunnan, all of vast Yunnan had less than 1.8 million mu of registered farmland — less than a single decent prefecture in the southeast. Although this was partly due to incomplete government registration and the large amount of autonomous tusi territory, it also fully demonstrated that Yunnan still had enormous living space that could be exploited.

After the Shun conquered Burma, Yunnan became connected with northern Burma, and the living space grew even larger!

As the number of the Shun's fubing households grew, land in Sichuan became relatively tighter and tighter, and the drive to open up Yunnan and Burma naturally grew stronger and stronger.

While the Shun worked hard to develop agriculture in Yunnan and northern Burma (northern Burma is mostly highland, with a climate somewhat cooler than southern Burma and fewer tropical epidemics), large deposits of copper and tin were also discovered in the lands of Yunnan and northern Burma. Copper and tin were strategic materials for minting coins and casting cannons, and they could also be used to mint coins — because the copper coins minted by the Shun in Kunming were of very high purity, they were extremely popular with the treacherous merchants of the Ming dynasty!

In the smuggling trade between the Ming and the Shun (after large-scale war broke out, the border-market trade ceased to exist and was replaced by smuggling), the Shun's Gongzhi Tongbao coins could be exchanged with Ming merchants for large quantities of cloth, grain, livestock, and salt, which not only powerfully supported the Shun army's operations but also alleviated the Shun's domestic shortages of goods.

Of course, the behavior of those Ming treacherous merchants was actually legal on the Ming side, because the Great Ming's arsenals also needed copper from Yunnan and Burma to cast cannons — in the historical Qing dynasty, Yunnan copper production accounted for over 95% of the nation's total copper output.

And since the Shun could not possibly export copper directly to the Great Ming, the Ming could only obtain Yunnan copper through this method.

Stimulated by this special Yunnan copper trade, the mining industry of Yunnan and northern Burma developed, and mining and commerce are inseparable. Even though the Shun's copper and tin mines were mainly government mines, there was still a host of contractors underneath making fortunes — the Shun was, after all, a feudal dynasty, and could not eliminate the private component of the economy, only suppress it as much as possible. Because feudal land ownership was nominally state-owned (only land enfeoffed by the monarch to subjects, which could not be bought or sold, was feudal ownership; what was bought on the market did not count as feudal), in practice it was still privately held and privately managed, not a true state-owned economy.

Therefore the Shun's economic foundation was still private! Under such circumstances, the private economy would always gradually grow stronger and erode the Shun's government-run industry and commerce.

And the development of the copper and tin industries in Yunnan and northern Burma, along with the rise of Kunming's coin-minting industry, required large amounts of labor, which greatly stimulated the commercial prosperity of Yunnan, especially Kunming.

On the way to the Crown Prince's Palace on Wuhua Mountain, Li Jicheng noticed that Kunming was even more prosperous than when he had left several years ago. The streets were full of shops — restaurants and wine houses, silk sellers, jewelers, sellers of books and paintings, sellers of all kinds of Western goods, sellers of swords and armor (swords and armor could not be bought by just anyone; only fubing households could purchase them), and livestock dealers.

In addition, the streets were full of peddlers selling snacks and small foods, calling out their wares in high and low voices along the streets — a scene of extreme bustle and liveliness. Such a sight could absolutely never be seen in Chongqing or Chengdu, because those cities had strict household registration and forbade people from pursuing two occupations: artisans could not trade, merchants could not manufacture, and the peasants outside the cities were firmly bound to the land.

"Why are there so many merchants in Kunming now?" Li Jicheng casually asked.

Niu Ben, one of Niu Jinxing's sons, was also accompanying Li Jicheng. Hearing his question, he answered: "Grandson-heir, many of the peasants here in Kunming came from Sichuan through the land equalization. They hold land certificates issued by various places in Sichuan, but lack the means to go reclaim land in northern Burma and various parts of Yunnan, so they can only be put to work in the copper mines or allowed to do a little trading. People have to be allowed to survive!"

Yunnan has many mountains and little flat land, so the value of reclamation is not very high. Burma, on the other hand, has much flat land, but the cost of reclamation is not low either. Migrants not only have to face the threat of malaria, but what they can get is all forested land — just cutting trees, digging out roots, and building irrigation works costs a large sum of capital.

So most of the Sichuan peasants who were allotted land in Burma could only remain in their home villages as tenant farmers or work and trade in Yunnan.

And the Shun court was helpless to do anything about it.

Li Jicheng sighed and said: "It seems we still have to go to India to find more money!"

Niu Ben nodded and smiled: "The Crown Prince often says the same. We can't keep battering away at Shaanxi. We need to shift southward — there's money in the south!"

Li Jicheng nodded. At first he had wanted to get some money in India, then buy more flintlocks from the Dutch to attack Shaanxi.

But once he got to India, he discovered that it was far better than Shaanxi — gold was everywhere! And there was no endless supply of Ming troops to fight.

"What does Grandfather say?" Li Jicheng asked again.

Niu Ben shook his head and said in a low voice: "The Old Emperor does not approve of us launching a large-scale push south."

Li Jicheng sighed and said: "Grandfather is old. Perhaps he misses his old home in Shaanxi!"

"You are muddled, you are a muddled Crown Prince, all you know is money, money, money — money is poison!"

Inside Wuhua Palace, the Shun's Son of Heaven, Li Guo, was by now so ill that he was somewhat delirious, talking nonsense.

And the one listening to his nonsense was the Crown Prince, Li Laiheng. Because the Shun was governed by the joint rule of eight kings plus the Crown Prince overseeing the army, the Emperor's power was not very great, and with Li Guo gravely ill, there was of course no way to stop everyone from going south to make money.

But he could still talk nonsense!

Li Guo coughed several times, then continued: "For a state and a family, the concern is not scarcity but inequality, not poverty but instability. My Great Shun may be poor and bitter, but it is equal, and that is why we can share hardship and stand together against the Zhu Ming. That wretch Jicheng doesn't understand — how can you be muddled too? He plundered so much gold, silver, and treasure from India. Who knows how many people will get rich along with him? Can my Great Shun still be equal? Can it still be stable?"

(End of Chapter)