Chapter 1279: How to Become a Loyal Martyr Welcoming the Ming King

The road south from Dasan Pass to Feng County was treacherous, but the distance was not great — thirty or forty li in all. Yet for Wu Sangui and the officers and men under his command, it was like passing from one country into another. This stretch of land was at once familiar and strange to them, and it was a land full of challenges and surprises.

And the first thing that appeared before them was a surprise beyond all expectation!

When the main body of the Anxi Army under Wu Guogui's command had cautiously made its way along the cliff road built against the mountainside — a road of extreme peril — and arrived outside Huangniu Pu, a town in Feng County where the terrain opened out somewhat, what appeared on both sides of the official road was not the fully armed Shun prefectural troops, but thousands of common folk under Shun rule who had appeared from nowhere, all prostrating themselves along both sides of the road, weeping, shouting, and singing to welcome the royal army — no, to welcome the Ming King!

"Eat his mother, wear his mother, open wide the gates and welcome the Ming King. When the Ming King comes, no grain tax; when the Ming King comes, no corvée; when the Ming King comes, no tribute cloth; when the Ming King comes, the examinations open; when the Ming King comes, the land is divided."

The old man Wang Youwen, whose ancestral home was Huayang County in Chengdu Prefecture, was the organizer of this "Welcoming the Ming King" affair. He had experience in such matters!

Huayang County's jurisdiction lay within the city of Chengdu itself. Wang Youwen was a native-born old Chengdu man. His ancestors had been guards of the Shu Prince's mansion, but by Wang Youwen's generation the family had long since had nothing to do with the princely establishment, having switched to running a restaurant. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been cooks for three generations, and they enjoyed a modest reputation within the city of Chengdu. He himself, however, had not learned the culinary trade, but had taken the path of study and advancement, hoping to earn an official degree. Unfortunately, he was not cut out for book learning. He began sitting for the xiucai examination at the age of sixteen, and by the time Zhang Xianzhong fought his way into Chengdu in his twenty-seventh year, he still had not passed.

It was in that very year that he experienced for the first time the great event of welcoming a royal army — welcoming Zhang Xianzhong, the King of the Xi!

But he was still fairly lucky. This time, before Zhang Xianzhong had gone completely mad, Li Guo's entry into Sichuan had prompted him to choose to march north into Shaanxi. Once Zhang Xianzhong was gone, Ma Shiying, Zeng Ying, and Yang Zhan recovered Chengdu. Wang Youwen took part in welcoming a royal army for the second time. On that occasion it was a case of "baskets of food and pots of drink to welcome the royal army" — one could say the sincerity was complete. The people of Chengdu had learned firsthand of Zhang Xianzhong's madness and had begun to miss the Great Ming dynasty!

But the Great Ming dynasty disappointed them once again. Before Ma Shiying could gain a firm foothold in Chengdu, the Shun and the Xi joined forces at Yangping Pass, and the peasant army entered Chengdu Prefecture once more and drove Ma Shiying out.

Wang Youwen had no choice but to join the crowd in welcoming a royal army for the third time. This time the requirements were higher: baskets of food and pots of drink alone would not do; they were also required to sing — to sing the song "Welcoming the Roving King" and usher the army of Li Zicheng, the Roving King who was still playing at being alive, into the city of Chengdu.

Because of the cautionary example of Zhang Xianzhong, everyone sang sweetly with their mouths, but their hearts were all hanging in suspense!

Heaven at last still had its eyes open. The newly arrived Roving Bandit was far more normal than the previous Xian Bandit. Not only did he refrain from killing people at random, but his discipline was strict. Wherever his great army passed, it could be said they did not touch so much as an autumn hair — far more orderly than the Ming troops of Ma Shiying and Zeng Ying.

But this Roving Bandit also had things that dissatisfied Wang Youcai. These Roving Bandits were too much like country bumpkins, and they meddled far too much!

After pacifying Sichuan, they began to emphasize agriculture and suppress commerce, forbidding the people from engaging in two occupations at once, and they also wanted to greatly reduce the populations of the towns and cities throughout Sichuan. In the political ideals of Li Guo, Sun Kewang, Niu Jinxing, and the others, commercial activity within the Shun realm should be reduced to a minimum, the number of people engaged in it should be cut to the smallest possible figure, and it should all be placed under the strict control of the Shun Ministry of Revenue and the various regional military governors' offices!

Furthermore, handicrafts and agriculture should be separated from commerce as far as possible. Peasants and handicraft workers could sell their products only in areas designated by the authorities, at prices below the official price ceilings. And at any time they had to accept the government's "compulsory purchase orders" — that is, selling their products to the Shun authorities at low prices.

Under these circumstances, the family of Wang Youwen, who had lived for generations within the county seat of Huayang running a restaurant, had no choice but to leave the city and become peasants. After all, the restaurant trade ranked as second- or third-rate among commercial pursuits, dispensable. Moreover, after the Shun dynasty came to Sichuan, the unscrupulous merchants, landlords, and bureaucrats of Sichuan Province who loved Sichuan cuisine had all been overthrown. The newly installed Shun prefectural troop lords loved to eat meat-stuffed flatbread, water-basin mutton, and the like — dishes the Wang family cooks did not know how to make. So they could only go and farm the land.

Of course, the Wang family had lived within the city of Chengdu for over a hundred years in all; they had long since forgotten how to farm! Even though the Shun court allotted them land, they did not know how to cultivate it.

So in the first few years after moving to the countryside, the Wang family had been living almost entirely on their savings. Had it not been for some household goods accumulated in their restaurant days that they could privately sell off to their fellow villagers, the whole family might well have starved to death before they ever learned to farm.

And Wang Youwen, who had never learned a trade and had set his whole heart on the examination path, still dreamed in his first two years of farming in the countryside of sitting for the Shun dynasty's civil examinations. But in the end even this fond dream turned to bubbles. The Shun dynasty's examinations were open only to prefectural troops!

Not being a prefectural soldier, and having no connections by which to become one, Wang Youwen had no choice but to abandon the pen for the plow and learn farming from scratch.

But his book learning had not been entirely wasted, for his scholarship won him a post as a schoolteacher in the town's prefectural troop academy (without any official establishment, of course — he taught under the name of performing corvée labor). Moreover, he obtained permission to bring his eldest son in with him, to study and practice writing alongside the children of the prefectural troop families. He had not entirely given up; he wanted his son to realize his own dream of becoming a xiucai.

At that time, in his view, the business of "examinations being hereditary" surely could not go on forever, could it?

But once again he was wrong. Up until the first year of the Shun's Dongping Daxing era, the Shun examinations were still open only to prefectural troops!

And the Wang family's circumstances had declined again and again over those dozen or so years. There were three reasons why the family's life grew harder by the day. First, the Wang family's land had been "equalized," and they had sunk from independent farmers to tenant farmers of a prefectural troop household.

Second, the family's population had doubled. Wang Youwen and his elder brother Wang Youcai had both taken wives before the Xi entered Chengdu, and in the first ten years after moving to the countryside their life had still been fairly comfortable, so the two brothers had each produced a brood of children.

The third reason was that Wang Youwen lost his schoolteacher's "corvée post." As long as he held that "corvée post," the Wang family did not have to perform other corvée labor, and the students of the prefectural troop academy would give him a little "tuition" in the way of gifts. But such good days vanished forever as the "second-generation prefectural troops" grew up. Because the second generation had all been to school, and there were many of them, and not every one of them had the chance to become a prefectural soldier, they began crowding into other good positions. The prefectural troop schools everywhere were the first to be hit, all of them taken over by second-generation men who had book learning but could not become prefectural troops.

Having lost his schoolteacher's post, Wang Youwen and his sons had no choice but to bear ever-heavier corvée labor from the fourteenth year of Gongzhi onward.

Later, his eldest son had both legs broken when he was struck by Ming cavalry while serving at the front in the fifteenth year of Gongzhi, and could no longer do heavy work, making an already hard life even harder. And because of his elder brother's disability, the family could not afford the cost of his third son's marriage, so the third son had no choice but to become a live-in son-in-law to another family. Only the second son, who was in poor health, and the young fourth son were left to struggle with the heavy farm work.

As for Wang Youwen himself, although he was advanced in years, his body was still sturdy, and he could read and write and keep accounts and do sums, so he had no choice but to perform corvée labor on the Shaanxi front for long periods. And so it was that while serving, he ran head-on into the fourth welcoming of a royal army in his life!

It turned out that when Li Dingguo's great army retreated, they had abandoned all the civilian laborers along the road from Dasan Pass to Feng County, slipping away with only their own troops and the prefectural troops of Feng County and their families.

Wang Youwen was at that time serving at a transfer station in Feng County, responsible for keeping accounts and tallying numbers. He had a little authority, and could be considered a respected figure among the civilian laborers.

So when he discovered that the Shun heavenly troops had fled and the Ming heavenly troops were in hot pursuit, the quick-witted Wang Youwen immediately organized the civilian laborers left behind in Feng County and went outside the city to Huangniu Pu to sing "Welcoming the Ming King."

Since these civilian laborers were rather poor and had trouble even feeding themselves, they had no baskets of food or pots of drink — they simply sang in Sichuan dialect. As a result, most of the Wu family troops passing by did not stop; no one could understand why a bunch of Sichuan people were kneeling on both sides of the official road singing.

It was not until Wu Sangui's central army reached Huangniu Pu that, because there were staff officers in the army who understood a little Sichuan dialect, they finally figured out that the people before them were actually White Lotus sectarians!

(End of Chapter)