Chapter 542: Stunned, Weren't You!

On the twelfth day of the fifth month in the nineteenth year of Chongzhen of the Great Ming, inside the Grand Secretariat compound (the Ministry of Personnel) before the Fengtian Gate of the imperial city in Nanjing, the central hall was packed with the high civil and military officials remaining in Nanjing. There were not only the heads of the two offices (the Grand Secretariat and the Grand Marshal's Office), but also the prince who spoke for the Imperial Clan Court, the Prefect of Yingtian Prefecture Li Mingrui, the chief managers in Nanjing of the ten great imperial merchants, and even the two great eunuchs of the Directorate of Ceremonial and the Directorate of the Imperial Horses, Huang Dabao and Qiu Zhizhong—all of them had crowded in. The central hall of the Grand Secretariat, which had never been spacious to begin with, was now nearly bursting at the seams. Yet when it came time to deliberate, these civil and military officials who had squeezed in all hemmed and hawed and said nothing; apart from fanning themselves, they did nothing but drink cup after cup of tea.

The matter that had turned all these great officials into mutes was, naturally, the rice-seizing incident that had occurred yesterday morning on Longjiang Rice Lane!

More than ten thousand "righteous people" and military dependents living in Nanjing had mobbed and looted the twelve rice shops on Longjiang Rice Lane, carrying off roughly four to five thousand shi of white rice, brown rice, and flour, along with other goods worth tens of thousands of taels, smashing several dozen houses, and injuring over a hundred people—fortunately, no one had died.

After receiving the report, the Yingtian Prefecture office immediately dispatched its three shifts of runners to Longjiang Rice Lane to make arrests, while at the same time reporting the matter up to the Grand Secretariat.

After Zhu Cilang took power in Nanjing, he had begun a series of reforms, one focus of which was the reform of the two levels of local government—the prefecture (directly administered department) and the county (subordinate department). The key points of local government reform were "devolving authority," "clarifying responsibility," "linking interests," and "eliminating the lowest performers."

What was meant by "devolving authority" was strengthening the administrative and fiscal authority of the two levels of local government—the prefecture (directly administered department) and the county (subordinate department). It established the principle of dividing fiscal revenue between local and central government! That is, the wealth and fat of the people that the localities squeezed out no longer had to be handed over in full to the Ministry of Revenue, but could be retained in proportion.

In principle, public fields could be divided at twenty percent, while commercial taxes (excluding checkpoint transit taxes, maritime customs taxes, and salt taxes), mining taxes, tea taxes, wine taxes, and so on could be divided at up to eighty percent to the two levels of prefecture (directly administered department) and county (subordinate department). The land tax had not yet been levied, so there was no need to mention it.

Yingtian Prefecture was a fat prefecture dripping with wealth; its commercial, tea, and wine taxes were enormous. Even after remitting fifty percent (for these tax categories the localities could keep at least half), the amount left in hand was still quite considerable. So the number of runners in the three shifts of Yingtian Prefecture was also quite considerable—as many as three or four thousand, almost all of them natives whose families had been registered in Nanjing for generations, and many of them connected to the fallen Nanjing meritorious noble families and hereditary military officer families.

Needless to say, on ordinary days these men got angry at the very sight of northerners, but for the sake of keeping their jobs they did not dare vent their anger recklessly, so they had no choice but to bottle it up.

Now that they had encountered northern "rice bandits" causing trouble, could they possibly be polite? They immediately mobilized in force, and upon arriving on the scene they brought their clubs smashing down on heads and faces, beating many of the "rice bandits" until their heads were split and bleeding, and arresting over a hundred people.

Originally the matter would have ended there, but Chief Grand Secretary Wei Zaode, upon receiving the report from below, feared that Yingtian Prefecture would not be able to settle the matter, and after discussing it with Wu Xiang and Cao Youyi, jointly issued an order to dispatch the Xiaoling Guard New Army to Longjiang Rice Lane to enforce martial law.

The Xiaoling Guard New Army was now a "starting point" for the sons of the imperial clan who had fallen on hard times and the sons of the hardship-enduring meritorious nobles—first they had to enlist and train in the Xiaoling Guard New Army, and then they would go on to study at the Military Academy or the Tax Officers' School.

These clansmen and sons of hardship-enduring meritorious nobles were not necessarily all northerners, but basically none of them were natives of Jinling, and they were not of the same stripe as the fallen Jinling meritorious nobles and military officers. They were also relatively sympathetic to the northern refugees—after all, these people were basically "refugees" themselves, having come to Nanjing with empty hands!

No one knew which bastard son of a bitch had started it, but in any case, after the Xiaoling Guard New Army arrived at Longjiang Rice Lane, they clashed with the runners of Yingtian Prefecture.

The two sides exchanged blows with wooden clubs (the New Army had not brought lethal weapons, only clubs), and it actually resulted in deaths!

Naturally, it was the Yingtian Prefecture runners, whose organization and training were a notch inferior, who came out worse—six dead and eighteen seriously wounded. Meanwhile, the "rice bandits" who had been arrested by the Yingtian Prefecture runners took the opportunity to slip away, and every last one of them vanished without a trace!

And that was not the end of it, because the trouble on Longjiang Rice Lane had become impossible to settle. Today the rice merchants in the city of Yingtian Prefecture did not dare open their doors for business—what if they were smashed up again? One after another, they hung out signs reading "This Shop Has No Rice" and closed up shop!

This was not even the most headache-inducing part. What most troubled the great figures gathered today in the central hall of the Grand Secretariat was that among the millions—up to ten million—northern refugees wandering the southeast, at least half truly faced severe hardship in their lives—the main hardship being that they had no food to eat!

At least two or three million people had no food to eat!

And this did not even count the problem of feeding the urban poor and household slaves of the southeast itself!

Farmers who tilled the land at least had something to eat—either they planted some sweet potatoes to tide them over (by this time the southeastern provinces had already begun planting sweet potatoes widely), or they simply resisted rent and debts—after all, the authority of the southeastern gentry had declined, and their ability to press for rent and collect debts had weakened.

But urban handicraft workers and the household slaves of some fallen gentry faced the same predicament of having no food to eat as the northern refugees!

Many cities in the late-Ming southeast had already entered the embryonic stage of capitalism, and therefore had large numbers of wage laborers. The rise in grain prices naturally dealt them a heavy blow.

Moreover, the Ming gentry and nobles were very fond of keeping slaves, most of them household slaves. When the gentry and meritorious nobles had money and power, the household slaves, though they had no human rights, could at least eat their fill. But now that many meritorious nobles and gentry had fallen on hard times, the treatment of household slaves had declined accordingly—not only did they have no human rights, even their right to survive had become a problem. How could they not make trouble?

These two groups, plus the northern refugees who could not eat their fill—well, that was at least five or six million people with no food to eat!

What on earth was to be done!

If they all rose up together, that would be another roving uprising! And if by chance Li Zicheng exploited it (Li Zicheng was still pretending to be a decent man), would that not be disastrous?

The atmosphere in the central hall grew more and more oppressive, while the temperature rose higher and higher. Finally, a fat man, the Prince of Fu, could not stand it any longer. He cleared his throat and said to Chief Grand Secretary Wei Zaode, "Minister Wei, the Crown Prince is always comparing you to Zhuge Liang, so hurry up and think of a brilliant plan to resolve the predicament before us!"

Wei Zaode rolled his eyes. What Zhuge Liang? That was something for future histories to boast about; he had not yet reached the point of being written into the histories, had he? How could he be as miraculous as Zhuge Liang?

But since he was Chief Grand Secretary, he could not remain silent, so he glanced at Wu Xiang: "Duke Who Protects the State, how much grain is still in the warehouses of the Military Land Office?"

Wu Xiang spread his hands. "Less than a million shi, and we still have to hold out for several more months!"

"How can there be so little?"

Wu Xiang smiled bitterly. "In total we only collected sixteen million shi. Some went to army rations, some to relief, and some had to be sent as grain to those few up north—and so it's gone!"

"The Ministry of Revenue—what about the Ministry of Revenue?" Wei Zaode asked. "How much silver can still be squeezed out?"

"At most five million taels," said Chen Rui, Minister of Revenue. "That is being kept for the Crown Prince to reward the military merits in Huguang and for the advance into Sichuan."

"Has it already been shipped to Wuchang?"

Chen Rui said, "The Ministry of Revenue has already sent documents to the two banks, ordering them to open branches in Wuchang and prepare five million taels in ready silver for withdrawal."

At present the Ministry of Revenue did not maintain a silver treasury; all tax silver was deposited in the two banks to earn interest. Wherever money was needed, the two banks were ordered to open branches and prepare ready silver for use.

In addition, the Ministry of Revenue's books looked far better than the grain warehouses of the Military Land Office, because the salt taxes of Lianghuai, Zhejiang, Shandong, and Fujian could now finally be collected normally (all were tax-farmed), the customs duties of the three ports of Shanghai, Ningbo, and Guangzhou could also bring in some revenue, and the tax-farming of Quanzhou Prefecture and the northern and southern seas could also be remitted on time. The transit taxes at the tax checkpoints throughout the southeast had also collected quite a bit. Many cities had also paid their divided taxes (commercial taxes) to the Ministry of Revenue. Adding up all the odds and ends, there was always an annual income of seventeen or eighteen million taels.

Compared with the years when the Chongzhen Emperor was in power, the Ministry of Revenue's books truly looked far better!

However, Zhu Cilang was now expanding the army, fighting wars, building fortresses everywhere, and incidentally also had to manage the Huai River and the lower Yellow River, and there was also a profligate and muddleheaded ruler, Chongzhen, to support—so expenditures were also enormous.

The five million taels that Chen Rui had now prepared for Zhu Cilang had not been squeezed out of this year's revenue and expenditure budget, but rather came from the silver obtained earlier from confiscating the family properties of the southeastern meritorious nobles.

(End of Chapter)