Chapter 659: Dare We Ask Where the Food Is?

Since the era when the Chongzhen Retired Emperor held power, the foremost family under heaven had kept its meals simple and home-style. They rarely served a great table piled with delicacies too much to eat; usually it was three or four platters of fresh, tender green vegetables, plus one small meat dish and one large meat dish, and a big bowl of soup made from fresh fish, fat mutton, or an old hen. By royal standards, such fare was not in the least extravagant, yet every small dish was prepared with care, and was delicious and refined.

And after Zhu Cilang took power, although the family's circumstances improved considerably, the days still had to be lived with careful budgeting!

So the spread laid out today in the Hall of Martial Valor was still in the style of an ordinary family banquet. Because guests had been invited — Wu Xiang, Wu Sanfeng, Zheng Zhilong, Zheng Sen, Zheng Jiangong, Zhu Yousong, and Zhu Changfang — a few extra dishes had been added.

Among them were, reportedly, French fries hand-made by Wu Sanmei, served with chili fried chicken... The golden-fried fries were crisp outside and soft within, and the fried chicken pieces tossed with dried chili powder gave Zhu Cilang a taste of home, though the spice was still not quite enough — the heat lacked punch!

"These yellow strips are quite good. What are they?" The fat Prince of Fu also liked the fries; he had eaten a good dozen or more and still felt unsatisfied, but was too embarrassed to polish off the whole platter, so he asked about them.

"Your Highness, these are fried potato strips." It was Wu Xiang who answered him.

Although it was a family banquet, the men's and women's tables still had to be separated. The women's table was set in the west warm chamber of the Hall of Martial Valor; besides Zhu Cilang's consorts, there were also the Retired Empress Zhou, Empress Zhang, Princess Kunxing, and Princess Zhaoren, so only Wu Xiang could come over to pass on the secret technique of the fried potato strips.

"Fried potato strips?" The fat Prince of Fu pressed on. "You mean sweet potato strips?"

Roasted sweet potatoes were also quite tasty; the fat Prince of Fu liked them too, and he had even tried fried sweet potato.

"They are foreign potato strips," Wu Xiang explained. "The foreign potato is what Fujian people call it; Jiangnan folk call it the earth taro, and northerners call it the ground bean. It is a crop that came over from some New World in the West. There is not much of it on the market; these were grown on my family's estate." He set down his chopsticks and formed an oval with his two palms. "About this big, somewhat like a taro, buried in the ground, with the look of flowers and grass above the soil."

"What is the yield of this thing? Can it fill the belly?" the Chongzhen Retired Emperor asked out of habit.

"Retired Emperor, the yield of this earth taro is not low. It is said the yield per mu can reach two thousand catties. My family planted it for the first time and got one thousand catties," Wu Xiang said. "It is also very simple to plant: cut the earth taro into egg-sized pieces at the eyes, and place them in warm, moist soil, and that is all."

"Then it is not as good as the sweet potato." The Chongzhen Retired Emperor also knew about Zhu Cilang's military-farm sweet potato planting in Shandong.

"The yield is indeed not as good as the sweet potato," Wu Xiang said with a smile, "but this thing staves off hunger better than the sweet potato... though not as well as rice and wheat flour, it is far better than the sweet potato."

Chongzhen said, "A thousand catties is as much as eight shi; if it could reach two thousand catties, that would be even better. If planted on a large scale, could it not relieve the grain shortage in the southeast?"

"Retired Emperor, the foreign potato is not very drought-tolerant, nor very heat-tolerant," Zheng Zhilong took up the topic. "The foreign potato is fairly resistant to cold, but cannot endure drought and heat. If planted in northern places where water is not lacking, it could be grown on a large scale... The foreign potato can be harvested in a hundred days. Even in the cold lands of the north, sow in the third month and harvest in the seventh. After harvest it can be processed into potato flour, which can then be stored for a long time."

Zhu Cilang had finished a chicken leg and turned to look at Zheng Zhilong. "My venerable father-in-law also understands farming?"

Zheng Zhilong smiled. "Farming I cannot do, but my family has opened land in Taiwan and hired many old farmers well versed in agriculture. I often talk with them, so I know a little about farming. This foreign potato and the sweet potato, so long as they are planted in the right places, can both keep people alive."

"How much wasteland has your family opened in Taiwan?" Zhu Cilang asked.

The Dutch had by now withdrawn from Taiwan, and the Zheng family had become the masters of Taiwan — Taiwan would later be called the Treasure Island, but in the seventeenth century it was still a wild and savage place, and with the "Black Water Ocean" blocking the way, unless one belonged to a pirate clan like the Zheng family, getting in and out of Taiwan was not easy.

So developing Taiwan was, for the Ming court, practically a bottomless pit. One could not pour the people's blood and fat into it; better to entrust the development to the Zheng family.

"In reply to Your Majesty," Zheng Zhilong said, "my family has staked our very blood on Taiwan these past two years, opening as much as three hundred thousand mu of wasteland. Half is planted with sugarcane, and the remainder with taro, sweet potato, rice, and various fruits and vegetables.

Sugarcane can be boiled into sugar, which sells for a good deal of money. Rice can feed people, but the yield is not high, so some sweet potato must be planted to make up the shortfall. As for taro, it can be fed to people and also to pigs."

"Taiwan's rice yield is not high?" Zhu Cilang asked. "Why is that? Taiwan's climate is humid and warm; two rice harvests a year should be no problem, should it? Two harvests added together, the yield per mu should be three or four shi of white rice no matter what, right?"

Zheng Zhilong shook his head repeatedly. "It is not that good. If it were really that good, would Taiwan have lain waste until now? Your Majesty may not know, but Taiwan is windy. Every summer brings gust after gust of fierce wind, which often flattens rice that has grown halfway. All the common folk who go to the island to open land must plant sweet potato and taro as well, so as to guarantee the grain supply without worry."

In later ages Taiwan would be rich in rice, but that was built on generation after generation of improved rice strains and wind-resistant hybrid rice. In the seventeenth century, what could be planted on Taiwan were the rice strains brought over from Fujian, easily flattened by typhoons, with unstable yields. So it was necessary to plant famine-reserve sweet potato and taro alongside, to ensure the food supply without worry.

As for cane sugar, it was a specialty the Dutch had introduced to Taiwan, and together with deerskin, it was the island's source of profit.

After Zheng Zhilong took Taiwan from the Dutch, he too poured huge capital into the sugar industry.

But what he put down was not his own lifeblood — it was mortgage lending. The Maritime Merchant Bank issued high-interest loans to Fujian farm households bold enough to try their luck on Taiwan, with the farms the households developed on the island as collateral. At the same time, the Zheng family's Taiwan Sugar Firm would sign sugarcane purchase agreements with the Fujian farm households who went to the island to seek their fortune, buying up their sugarcane.

The loan interest rates and the sugarcane purchase prices were both carefully calculated by the Zheng family's crafty merchants. On one hand, farm households who worked hard and had decent luck could earn "big money"; on the other hand, the risks of developing Taiwan were shifted outward to the greatest possible degree.

The farm households who earned big money were merely the wealth effect that the Zheng family displayed to those Fujian peasants who came empty-handed and dreamed of getting rich.

Behind one farm household that struck it rich, there were at least four households that had toiled in vain, or even lost their lives on Taiwan — the unlucky ones... a perfect 80/20 effect!

And the Zheng family, in this adventure of developing Taiwan, sat secure on the fishing platform.

The twenty percent of farm households who made money could repay their loans and supply sugarcane to the Zheng family's sugar mills in an endless stream. And the eighty percent who lost everything, so long as they did not die, had to work for the Zheng family to earn money and pay off debts — otherwise where would the proletariat on Taiwan come from?

Moreover, the farms they had toiled to open would be bought up by the Zheng family, then resold to newcomers arriving from Fujian to take over... So long as there was a wealth effect, people would keep coming to the island in waves to chase the dream.

Who could blame them? Fujian was eight parts mountain, one part water, one part field; since ancient times it had little land and many people, and never lacked poor folk bold enough to go to sea in search of a living. Zheng Zhilong himself, in his early years, had been one of them!

"Are the people now going to sea to seek a way out in Taiwan all poor folk from Fujian?" Zhu Cilang continued to ask about going to sea to make a living. Of course he wanted to plant the Ming banner across the whole world, but he also knew such a thing was not easy. The present Ming dynasty could not be saddled with one bottomless-pit colony after another, so he needed to listen more to the experts' opinions.