Chapter 665: The Creditor Doesn't Cry—There Will Come a Day When the Feudatory Is Withdrawn

"My Lord Duke, you—you must be jesting with this humble one, right?"

Jia Bushi stared at Wu Sangui in astonishment.

Wu Sangui sighed. "To be honest with you, this Prince Who Pacifies the West has been run into the red... Not only has my entire old fortune been sunk into it, I've also racked up a mountain of high-interest debt! What's the point of it all? Tell me, what am I even after? My sister is the Empress, my brother and father are both Dukes, and I'm a Duke myself. On top of that, I have the merits of defeating the roving bandits and delivering Gansu and Shaanxi. Once I hand over military power and enter the court, do I have anything to fear about lacking wealth and rank? Why should I keep pouring money into this bottomless pit in Gansu and Shaanxi?"

He truly wanted to run off to Nanjing... The debts were too many, simply impossible to pay off! And the three hundred and thirty Chiliarchs under him were too hard to serve—every last one of them acted like his ancestor. When he had defected back to the Great Ming earlier, Wu Sangui had already taken on a pile of high-interest loans to cover the shortfalls of the Chiliarchs under him.

But this year there was another drought, and quite a few Chiliarchs reported total crop failure! Once again it fell to him, the great warlord, to find a way to provide relief... And what way could Wu Sangui possibly have? Wasn't it just to keep borrowing at high interest?

Watching his debts pile higher and higher, Wu Sangui truly felt exhausted in body and spirit, and even thought of running off to Nanjing.

Oh, it couldn't really be called running away, either. His act of returning the registers and maps was simply handing over all the territory and population in his hands to the court!

That way, the high-interest debts he carried could be transferred out along with them. His high-interest debts had not been incurred through personal extravagance or gambling; they had all been incurred for the sake of being this damned King of the Northwest. They were "feudatory debts," not personal debts.

He figured that as long as he handed over the feudatory, the feudatory debts would naturally be handed over too.

Even if he left "with nothing but the clothes on his back," after going to Nanjing was there any fear of lacking wealth and rank? He was a meritorious official of the Great Ming! Without him opening Shanhai Pass and letting the Qing troops pour in, Zhu Cilang would have been doomed even with three heads and six arms—without the Qing troops pouring in, Li Zicheng would have sat securely on the dragon throne in Beijing!

By then, plenty of people would have wanted to chop off Zhu Cilang's head and present it to Li Zicheng for reward...

And now he had brought the territory of Gansu and Shaanxi back in defection to the Great Ming!

With two great merits added together, was there any fear of lacking wealth and rank?

His demands weren't high, either. As long as Zhu Cilang would grant him a grand mansion, give him a few tens of thousands of mu of land, bestow a hundred or two hundred thousand taels of silver, and give him a high office with a salary but no work, he would be satisfied!

Then he could eat, drink, and amuse himself with Chen Yuanyuan, do a bit of business, and live comfortably—wouldn't that be fine?

Listening to Wu Sangui's words and watching his expression, Jia Bushi also felt that this Lord Duke truly intended to withdraw—this was a once-in-a-thousand-years opportunity! As long as His Majesty firmly refused to shoulder his high-interest debts, he could force Wu Sangui into becoming a wealthy, honored Duke. Then most of the Shaanxi-Gansu territory would return to the court's hands...

The news that Wu Sangui was attempting to evade and repudiate his debts and dump the financial black hole of Gansu-Shaanxi onto the Great Ming court was quickly delivered via the Embroidered Uniform Guard's network into the hands of Zhu Cilang, who was preparing to leave Nanjing and head west to Wuhan.

"Your Majesty, wonderful news! The Duke of Jin is willing to return the registers and maps!"

The news was personally brought by a beaming Zhu Chunjie to the Eastern Warm Pavilion of the Hall of Venerating Heaven. When he arrived at the Eastern Warm Pavilion, Zhu Cilang was in the middle of discussing the great Yellow River and Huai River works with the key ministers of the two offices.

The great Yellow River and Huai River works had been proposed by Fang Gongyue, the Governor-General of River Works. The specific approach was "abolish the grain transport, control the Yellow River, protect the Huai River"—the governance projects for the Yellow, Huai, and Grand Canal were in fact one integrated whole. After the Yellow River shifted south and seized the Huai's course, both the Ming and Qing dynasties had faced the dilemma of "protecting the grain transport" versus "protecting the Huai."

To protect the grain transport, one could not artificially dig a channel for the Yellow River to enter the sea north of the Huai River, nor could one even dig flood-diversion channels on the east bank of the Yellow River, for fear that the Yellow River's waters would wash away and destroy the canal. Under the "grain transport first" approach to Yellow River control, the Huai River was inevitably sacrificed—the Yellow River's waters, carrying vast amounts of silt, could only be forced into the Huai! Moreover, when the Yellow River's flood peak and the Huai River's flood peak arrived simultaneously, they could only grit their teeth and force the water into the Huai, protecting the grain transport at all costs. And after the Ming dynasty moved its capital to Beijing, because the grain transport had to be protected at all costs, the frequency of Huai River flooding increased markedly—roughly once every two or three years!

In other words, although the tribute grain shipped to Beijing each year was only a bit over four million shi, the rice lost to Huai River flooding, averaged out per year, was at least several times four million shi...

Now Beijing was no longer in the Great Ming's hands, and Zhu Cilang no longer regarded Beijing as the capital, so naturally there was no need to continue the water-control policy of protecting the grain transport and abandoning the Huai. And there was no way to abandon the Huai anymore either—because the Great Ming now had many people and scarce land, and the food supply was unprecedentedly tight. If the Huai River were to experience a great flood on the scale of the one in the twenty-first year of Wanli, causing Huai'an and Yangzhou, two major grain-producing prefectures, to suffer total crop failure, the trouble would be enormous—at least several tens of millions of shi of white rice would be lost...

By then, even the throne under Emperor Zhu's backside would be shaken!

So once the policy of abolishing the grain transport was set, a plan was proposed to dig a 180-li channel for the Yellow River to enter the sea within the territory of Suqian and Shuyang counties.

This was not a canal, but a great river that would let the Yellow River's waters surge into the sea—it could only be completed by mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people and spending several years of effort.

Now Zhu Cilang had already abolished corvée labor, instead converting corvée into cash and apportioning it into the land tax, so the hundreds of thousands of laborers for digging the river and building the dikes could only be recruited through paid employment. Although according to Fang Gongyue's plan, they intended to hire labor during the agricultural off-season, and to hire from the nearby prefectures of Huai'an, Haizhou, and Yangzhou, which had suffered deeply from Huai River flooding, the total expenditure for the project would still reach as high as several million shi.

The finances of the first year of Hongxing were insufficient to support such a great project, but by the second year of Hongxing, once the five-year tax exemption in the four provinces of Jiangnan, Jiangbei, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang came to an end and over one hundred million mu of private fields began paying the "two-dou rice land tax," the Great Ming court would be able to begin the comprehensive great works for governing the Yellow and Huai Rivers.

In addition to digging the new channel for the Yellow River to enter the sea, there were also the expansion of the Hongze Lake flood-storage area and the raising and reinforcement of its dikes, the relocation of the imperial ancestral tombs, the raising and reinforcement of the Huai River dikes, the raising and reinforcement of the Yellow River dikes in the Xuzhou section, the new channel for the Huai River to enter the sea, and so on.

If all the projects were completed, not only could the safety of the Huai River be guaranteed for decades or even a century to come, but even in the event that the northern Qing artificially diverted the Yellow River to use water to carry troops, it could be guaranteed that the Huai River would not suffer severe flooding.

It was no exaggeration to say that this series of Huai River governance projects was directly tied to the survival and security of the Great Ming—it was the most important state policy!

Before the great Huai River works were completed, Emperor Zhu had no spare financial resources to fill the bottomless pit of Shaanxi and Gansu!

Now, having heard Zhu Chunjie's report, Zhu Cilang merely smiled faintly. "Wu Sangui still wants to dodge his debts... No way! The hole in Shaanxi and Gansu—he and the Prince of Dai had better keep plugging it!"

This was no mere few million in high-interest loans... The hole in Gansu-Shaanxi was enormous! With so many troops and so many meritorious officials under Wu Sangui and the Dai feudatory, if Zhu Cilang had to shoulder all of them, how much money would that take? And in Gansu-Shaanxi, no taxes could be collected at all—not even the official fields and military fields could be recovered. Wasn't it just an unfillable black hole?

If he really shouldered it, how could it possibly work without over ten million a year?

"Your Majesty, the Duke of Jin is willing to return the registers and maps!" Chief Grand Secretary Wei Zaode, thinking Zhu Cilang had not understood Zhu Chunjie's words, hastily added a reminder.

Wu Xiang, the Minister of War, was also stunned. It took him a while to react before he stammered, "Your Majesty, my son—my son is not trying to evade his debts... My son is utterly loyal to the Great Ming and to Your Majesty!"

Zhu Cilang said with a smile, "Venerable Father-in-Law, We know Changbo is a loyal subject... But even a loyal subject cannot just run away from his debts!"

"Your Majesty, Sangui incurred these debts for the country... And he truly cannot repay them!"

Zhu Cilang smiled. "No matter. We have already dispatched Huang Jiang, the Grand Manager of the Maritime Merchants' Bank, and Su Sheng, the Grand Manager of the Salt Merchants' Bank, to Wuhan. They will help Changbo resolve his debt problems."

"As for the Gansu-Shaanxi feudatory... A feudatory need not necessarily be an independent hegemon; it can also be loyal to the court! We trust Changbo and the Prince of Dai, and so We will establish a feudatory in Gansu-Shaanxi to guard the region."