Chapter 541: Robbing the Rice!

The person who wrote to Liu Kongzhao pouring out his grievances was a distant nephew of his, a xiucai named Liu Yonglong, originally from Chuzhou in Zhejiang but registered as a resident of Jinling. Before the "eunuch faction chaos" in Nanjing, he had lived off the rents from military fields passed down by his ancestors, and his whole large family had been free from want — Liu Yonglong had even had a little spare money to spend along the Qinhuai River.

But after the "eunuch faction chaos," Liu Yonglong's family fortunes had gone into steep decline. First, all the ancestral military fields had been confiscated by "Ji the King of Hell" (Ji Kun) — not even half a mu was left behind. Then the value of Liu Yonglong's xiucai degree had collapsed, and several merchants who had once sheltered under the Liu family's influence turned against him and stopped paying their tribute silver to the Liu household!

Because now there was no longer any such thing as gentry and officials being exempt from commercial taxes. Even the name of Liu Bowen no longer carried any weight!

Many of the tax collectors manning the toll stations in various places were surnamed Zhu! They were of the genuine seed of Zhu Yuanzhang — who would dare compete with them in ancestry? And no one dared beat them up either, for they all carried killing tools in their hands and truly dared to strike to kill, while troublemakers did not dare go that far — to kill a member of the imperial clan was rebellion! It meant the extermination of one's entire family.

Losing the two great sources of income — the military fields and the merchants under his protection — was not even the worst of it. The worst was that Liu Yonglong's family savings had also been drained dry because his father-in-law's family had been exiled to Taiwan (at present they were still on Gulangyu).

Liu Yonglong was a descendant of the Chengyi Bo line, so of course his marriage had to be a match of equal status — he had married a woman of concubine-born stock from the hereditary Wei Duke's household, a family of long-standing friendship. When his father-in-law's family met with disaster and had to go to Taiwan, that miasma-ridden island, could he refrain from giving all he had to help? Besides, at that time Liu Yonglong had not known that Crown Prince Zhu's resolve to investigate military garrison fields and official lands was so great, or his methods so ruthless — he had not even given face to Liu Yonglong's distant uncle Liu Kongzhao!

And a leaking roof usually comes together with continuous night rain — the Liu Yonglong household was no exception! At the same time that the land was lost and the family savings were exhausted, the debt problem came hard on its heels.

The Liu family's debt problem had been triggered by the return of the military fields. Because in these times, tenants had to pay a deposit when renting land, and when the tenancy ended, the deposit had to be returned. After the Liu family lost the land, the rental relationship with the tenants naturally ceased to exist, and the tenants could of course demand the return of their deposits.

If this had happened when the Jinling noble houses were still in power, Liu Yonglong could easily have stiffed the tenants on their deposits. If the yamens in the southeast were still, as in the past, "begging on their knees" before the gentry and powerful families, then even if he were not a descendant of Liu Bowen, with his family's influence and his xiucai degree, he would not have feared a few country bumpkins.

But the problem was that the power of the Jinling noble houses had collapsed! Although Liu Kongzhao was still on the stage, he was a southern noble, not a northern-fu noble, and in the current political arena he stood alone and weak — he had to keep his tail between his legs as an official, so how would he dare protect a distant nephew?

And the government offices in the southeast had also straightened their backs and were doing their jobs — after the military fields were taken back, twenty percent of them became office-lands for the officials! How great an interest was that? How could they allow a wicked gentry like Liu Yonglong to cheat the tenants of their deposits? Moreover, the local officials had two knives pressed against their backs — "last-place elimination" and the "Left Rank Supervising Censors" — so how could they afford not to work hard?

So Liu Yonglong had no choice but to sell off the family house in Jinling to pay the debts. After settling them, a little remained, which he used to rent a place and cover daily expenses. As for himself, he threw himself into bitter study, hoping to pass the provincial examination and then enter official service.

But he had never expected that prices in Jinling would rise day by day — especially the price of rice, which had begun soaring from the winter of the eighteenth year of Chongzhen, and by midsummer of the nineteenth year it had nearly burst through the heavens. A dou of rice had gone past five qian of silver. Rice was the foundation; once the price of rice rose, everything else rose with it!

How was Liu Yonglong supposed to get by? He was not alone in the world. Above him he had five mothers, in the middle four wives and concubines, below him seven children crying to be fed — and besides that, five old servants who had followed the Liu family all their lives.

Inside and out, that was twenty-two mouths to feed, and all with good appetites. The household could not get by on one dou of rice a day, and with the miscellaneous expenses of vegetables, oil, firewood, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, cloth, plus the cost of seven children attending elementary school, plus the ever-rising rent, the Liu Yonglong household's daily expenses were fast approaching two taels of silver and could scarcely be held down! And he was an unemployed xiucai with no income — money going out and none coming in. Life had truly become unbearable, and only then had he been forced to seek help from his distant uncle Liu Kongzhao.

But Liu Kongzhao had far too many poor relatives — how much could he help? He had only given twenty taels of silver and a letter of recommendation, telling him to go to Dengzhou in Shandong and seek refuge with the Northern Seas Minister Shen Tingyang.

Liu Kongzhao's letter and silver had not yet arrived, and Liu Yonglong had been forced to pawn several outfits he wore when going out to meet guests, exchanging them for a little silver to buy a cartload of coarse rice (his family was large, so a cartload of rice would not last long). He had no draft animal to pull the cart, so he pulled it himself, while his wife — the daughter of Guard Commander Xu's family — pushed from behind.

The couple had just pushed the cartload of coarse rice out the back door of a rice shop and turned into the lane at the front of the shop when they discovered that the lane was packed with people — all of them ragged, sallow-faced commoners, some dragging wives and children along.

These people did not seem to be natives of Jinling, but spoke with accents from somewhere in the north — clearly they were northern refugees who had drifted to the southeast.

By the time Liu Yonglong and his wife were pushing their cart of rice through the lane, these refugees had already begun to clamor.

"It's gone up again!"

"Damn it all, are they trying to keep people from living?"

"A dou of rice is five qian and five fen!"

"Last month it was still four qian!"

"What the hell kind of world is this?"

"How much pay does my boy get for soldiering under the Crown Prince? Now the family can't even afford five dou of rice!"

"Damn it, push me too far and I'll rob the place!"

"Right! If there's nothing to eat, we rob!"

"Rob, rob, rob!"

"Right, rob the bastards blind!"

It turned out that today was the day the Hard-Striving New Army issued pay and the Ministry of War distributed relief to the northern-fu refugees. Not every household in the Hard-Striving New Army had been granted land — many men had not earned enough merit, and some were naval troops with no land from which to collect rent, so their families had to spend money to buy grain. For these New Army officers and soldiers, if their families lived in Nanjing, the pay was generally given directly to the family, who then took it to buy rice.

In addition, there were many northern-fu refugees in Nanjing — the official term for them was "righteous people," those who had been unwilling to be enslaved by the eastern barbarians and the roving bandits and had followed His Highness the Crown Prince south. Their household registrations were all handled and managed by the Ministry of War. They had priority in enlisting in the army, and if life was hard, they could also receive relief rice from the Ministry of War. However, starting last month, because the Ministry of War no longer had surplus grain, this had been changed to issuing money, letting them buy rice to feed themselves.

And the ever-rising price of rice on the Nanjing market placed enormous pressure on the lives of these two groups of people.

The lane where Liu Yonglong bought rice was near the Longjiangkou docks, so rice firms clustered there — it was something of a distribution market, and buying rice there was a bit cheaper. The only drawback was that entering the inner city required paying a "gate tax," but the families of the northern-fu army and the righteous people mostly lived east of the outer city and could detour around via the outer city, so they did not have to pay this tax.

So soldiers' families and refugees looking for a bargain all came here to buy rice — but today they discovered that the rice here was no longer cheap either. The silver in their hands was no longer enough to buy a month's worth of food for a family!

These soldiers' families and refugees were not like Liu Yonglong — they had all come to the southeast empty-handed, with nothing to pawn or sell. No money to buy rice meant going hungry, and if they did not want to go hungry, the only option was to rob.

Anyway, these people had nothing at all and nothing to fear. The Hard-Striving New Army now garrisoned in Nanjing was made up of their own sons and brothers! If Minister Wu of the Ministry of War would not stand up for them, would he stand up for the profiteering merchants who had driven up the rice price?

So the moment someone shouted "Rob!" the whole lane fell into chaos. The enraged crowd surged like a tide toward the rice firms along the lane. The stunned shop assistants and managers had no time even to put up their door planks, and no one dared resist this mob of starving northern refugees — they all fled with their heads in their hands.

And Liu Yonglong and his wife had the worst luck of all — a whole cartload of coarse rice, all robbed. Scholar Liu even tried to resist, and as a result was struck on the head by a club from no one knew where, and passed out on the spot.

(End of Chapter)