Chapter 499: To Throw Oneself into the River and Die?

No one knows when it began, but the towns of the realm came to have a saying about the "Four Great Gatherings" — four metropolis-towns that gathered together the people, wealth, and goods of an entire region. The four towns stood in the four directions of the realm: in the north, the capital; in the south, Foshan; in the east, Suzhou; in the west, Hankou.

That is to say, Hankou Town — which was not even a county seat — had once been prosperous enough to compare with famous capitals and great metropolises like Beijing and Suzhou. And at this time, the prosperity of Hankou Town was centered on Hanzheng Street, which lay near the Han River docks. In the tiny area of just two or three square kilometers between the Han River docks and Lord Yuan's Embankment, more than seventy streets and lanes were packed together. At its busiest, a hundred thousand merchants came and went here every day, and the deals struck could amount to hundreds of thousands of taels.

Yet such a place — where gold poured in daily and wealth rolled in like a river — now presented a scene of the end times. Every shop in the entire commercial port had been looted empty, and quite a few of them had been set alight and were now blazing fiercely.

Those treacherous merchants of vast wealth, and the gentry and landlords who had fled here from the neighboring prefectures of Xiangyang, Yunyang, De'an, and Chengtian — so long as they had not managed to escape — were all seized by the wolf-like, tiger-fierce soldiers of the Shun army and penned up on Hanzheng Street. There were also some wretches who merely looked respectable but whose coffers had long been empty, and because they lodged in Hankou Town, they too were herded together onto Hanzheng Street, which was surrounded on all sides by Shun warriors in full armor with weapons at the ready. They all looked no different from lambs awaiting the slaughter!

Because they had been betrayed by the Shanxi merchants and the scholars of Shanxi during the Shanxi campaign, the Shun army from top to bottom was no longer as courteous to merchants and scholars as it had been before!

In the eyes of many "Old Camp warriors," not one of these scholars in square caps and Daoist robes, nor any of these treacherous merchants in their wealthy-merchant garb, was any good — every last one of them deserved to die!

Only by killing off these two kinds of people could the realm of the Great Shun be at peace. So many "Old Camp warriors" had already drawn their daggers and gripped their sharp blades, waiting only for a single command from the Imperial Lord Li Zicheng before they set to work.

And those penned up had sensed that something was wrong. Wails and shouts mingled together, growing ever more clamorous, and from time to time the shouts and curses of the "Old Camp warriors" rang out — truly a din and racket at its very extreme.

A dark-faced, powerfully built man in his thirties, dressed in plain hempen clothes and clutching a large, utterly empty back-basket, was also squeezed among the crowd. But he seemed to be one who did not fear death. While everyone else pressed inward, trying to get farther away from those fiendish "Old Camp warriors," he struggled outward, and as he pushed his way through he muttered to himself, "No point living, no point living — everything's gone, so what's the point of going on?"

Behind him, a woman with a dirt-smeared face was tugging at him like mad, wailing, "Husband, husband, you can't die! If you die, how are the three of us — me and the children — supposed to live?"

"What's there to live for, what's there to live for — live just to starve to death?" The man was too big and strong; his wife could not hold him back at all, and instead was dragged along by him out of the crowd.

A gray-bearded "Old Camp warrior" squad leader brought men over to block his way and barked, "Who goes there? Have you no wish to live?"

At these words the man burst into wild laughter, looking as though he had gone mad. "No wish to live, no wish to live! I am Ye Jiaxin of Jingshan — you wretches have ruined me until nothing is left, so what's there to live for? Come on, come on, you old thief, hurry up and kill me!"

This man was originally a rich peasant from a small county called Jingshan under Chengtian Prefecture — and of course there were rich peasants among the peasantry! Although the overall agricultural climate of the late Ming was dreadful — war and chaos aside, there was also a host of gentry and landlords pursuing the feudal route of "sheltering registration," constantly disrupting the normal order of the market.

But there were still some peasants who grew rich, or at least temporarily rich. This man named Ye Jiaxin was a peasant who, even amid the chaos of the late Ming, could farm his way to wealth. He was strong and able-bodied, sharp of mind, had a bit of inherited advantage from his forebears, and had an uncle in the family who had passed the juren examination and had always looked after him. Moreover, he had married a wife who was extremely capable at managing a household. So by the time the Shun heavenly troops reached his home of Jingshan, he had gradually grown rich and become a rich peasant.

He himself owned twenty mu of paddy fields, all registered under the name of his juren uncle. In addition, he rented thirty mu of paddy fields, and the rent he paid was not high, so there was a certain margin of profit — the level of rent, in fact, had to do with the strength of the tenant. A rich peasant like Ye Jiaxin, who had the means to guarantee rent paid on time, could of course lease land at a lower cost.

Fifty mu of paddy fields he certainly could not farm alone, so he hired men to work the land. Although he also took part in labor, his main responsibility was management. Besides managing fifty mu of paddy fields, he also dealt in rice trading, purchasing white rice in Jingshan County on behalf of Yao Daqiao, a great grain merchant of Hankou.

In addition, he was engaged in the business of usury — in his own words: not for the sake of making money, but simply to help out his fellow villagers — an act of accumulating virtue and doing good!

In the end, his "goodness" was repaid with evil!

As soon as the Shun heavenly troops arrived, notices of "land equalization by headcount, debt and interest forgiveness" were immediately posted in the county seat of Jingshan and in every township and village.

The land equalization by headcount did not frighten him much. He himself had only twenty mu of land, two mouths — himself and his wife — plus two children, making five mu per head. Here in Huguang the fields were broad, and the average arable land per person was about that figure. At most, the thirty mu of rented land would be taken back and equalized, and that had little to do with him.

But the "debt and interest forgiveness" drove him to desperation. The "debts" he had out on loan were not few, and if they were all forgiven, then all his years of work would have been for nothing!

Moreover, lending money to poor households and having them repay in rice was also Rich Peasant Ye's method of purchasing rice. Once "debt and interest forgiveness" was proclaimed, his rice-purchasing business could no longer continue.

So he developed a heart of resistance toward the Great Shun dynasty, and after being incited by his juren uncle of the same clan, he took his wife and children and the silver he had accumulated over many years and fled to Hankou. He had originally intended to change trades and do some business, but no sooner had he arrived than Li Zicheng's great army followed right behind.

And what was more, they robbed him clean!

Now he had practically nothing left — so what was the point of living?

The gray-bearded "Old Camp warrior" saw that he truly sought death, and so was no longer angry. But he did not cut him down with one stroke either — at the same time as enclosing land and distributing fields, Li Zicheng was also tightening military discipline. The discipline of the Shun army was now growing stricter by the day; one could not cut people down at will, nor rob people at will.

The earlier looting in Hankou had been under orders! Li Zicheng's purpose in doing so was not to gain money, but to strike the gentry and the merchant-industrial class to the greatest possible extent. The feudalization of the Great Shun was to be achieved in two steps: first, enclosing land and granting fields, to create "feudal warriors"; second, equalizing land by headcount and forgiving debts and interest, to strike the gentry and merchants while helping the lower peasantry.

What Li Zicheng needed was a relatively simple feudal society: at the top, himself as Emperor; above, the Shun's ennobled high officials; in the middle, the warriors granted land; at the bottom, the peasants with equalized land. Only thus could the hierarchy be strict and all benefit flow from a single source.

The gray-bearded Old Camp soldier shouted, "Someone come here and tie him up! When the time comes to kill, he'll be the first!"

"Aye!"

Several Shun soldiers had long been waiting nearby. With a loud "Aye!" they pounced, bound him with hemp rope, and detained him to one side, to be the first killed when the order came down.

The gray-beard also had under him a small, simple-looking fellow who probably had not yet taken a wife. He went and grabbed hold of Ye Jiaxin's wailing, grief-stricken wife — though he did nothing improper — and merely tried to console her: "Sister, stop crying. After your man is killed, you can come live with me. I've got sixty mu of good land in Yunyang Prefecture, and a big house too — just no wife. If you follow me, I guarantee you won't suffer."

At these words, Ye Jiaxin's wife wept even more bitterly. And the gentry and treacherous merchants watching nearby were infected by her grief and wept in a great chorus.

While they were weeping, someone roared out: "His Lordship the Marquis of Ru has arrived!"

Then a dozen or so riders were seen galloping over from the direction of Lord Yuan's Embankment, and all along the road the Shun soldiers stood at solemn attention to greet them.

It was Liu Zongmin, come to relay Li Zicheng's orders.

"Wang Laoshun!" Liu Zongmin recognized the gray-beard, and so raised his horsewhip, pointing at Ye Jiaxin, who was bound on the ground, and asked, "Who is this man? What crime has he committed?"

Then he also caught sight of Ye Jiaxin's wife. "And what's going on with that woman? This looks like forcibly seizing a commoner's wife! That's forbidden now!"

"Not seizing, not seizing!" Liu Zongmin's words gave the simple-minded Old Camp soldier a fright, and he hastily shoved Ye Jiaxin's wife away, stammering in his defense, "Marquis of Ru, don't misunderstand — this humble one is not seizing her, it's, it's, it's—"

It's what? How was he supposed to say it? Proposing marriage to a prospective widow?

"My Lord Marquis," the Shun "Old warrior" named Wang Laoshun stepped forward to explain, "this stout fellow is a treacherous merchant. He was stripped of his property by us and no longer wishes to live, so I had men seize him, to be the first beheaded when the order comes. The woman is his wife. Er'lengzi took a fancy to her and wants to take her as his wife after she's widowed — it truly isn't forcibly seizing a commoner's wife."

"So that's how it is," Liu Zongmin shook his head and said, "Then this matter is going to fall through!

The Imperial Lord has decreed: the treacherous merchants and wicked gentry penned on Hanzheng Street are not to be killed after all. Drive them all to Wuchang Prefecture to feast on the great household of the Zhu family's little Crown Prince!"

Wang Laoshun was stunned. "My Lord Marquis, release them all? Here there are more than ten thousand men who are heads of households alone, and with wives and children, thirty or forty thousand. Send them all to Wuchang to feast on the great household?"

"That's right!" Liu Zongmin laughed. "The Imperial Lord wants this lot of good-for-nothings — who can eat but not fight — to go and eat the Zhu family's little Crown Prince into poverty!"