Chapter 934: The Second Richest Man of the Great Ming (Seeking Subscriptions)

"One hundred million taels is certainly no small sum," Luo Dagong said, stroking his beard and doing some mental arithmetic. "But it's no longer an earth-shattering amount either."

"What?" Song Shilie's old eyes nearly popped out of his head. Was that any way for a man to talk? Was that any way for a Ming Prefect to talk?

If one hundred million taels was no earth-shattering amount... then how much had this Shanghai Prefecture of yours been squeezing out for the Zhu family's emperor in a single year?

As if he knew exactly what Song Shilie was turning over in his mind, Luo Dagong counted it off on his own fingers: "The Shanghai Prefecture under this humble official's administration collected over one million taels in agricultural taxes and military grain rents last year, plus over one million taels in commercial taxes, plus over one million taels in port land taxes and ground rents. Beyond that, there were more than five million shi of customs grain... and that customs grain sold for over six million taels in total! Add it all together, and it comes to nearly ten million taels! So tell me, Master Song, does one hundred million still sound like a lot?"

How—how was that possible?!

Song Shilie was truly stunned, to the point where he could barely tell reality from a dream.

A single prefecture squeezing out ten million taels... though over six million of it was really customs revenue, the remaining three or four million was solid, hard cash!

And how many prefectures did the Great Ming have now? Surely several of them couldn't be far behind Shanghai? Yingtian Prefecture, Yangzhou Prefecture, Suzhou Prefecture, Guangzhou Prefecture, Wuhan Prefecture, Raozhou Prefecture, Hangzhou Prefecture... one hundred million — maybe they really could squeeze it out!

But then Song Shilie thought again, and something didn't add up.

"Brother Dagong, isn't the Great Ming at war with the eastern barbarians? Three years of campaigning, with wealth squandered beyond all reckoning!"

Luo Dagong shook his head. "Not just the eastern barbarians. There's another war in the west, against something called the Yarkent Khanate! And on top of that, we've been fighting the Spanish at sea for several years now — it's just that neither side has said so openly. We fly the Japanese flag, and they fly the flag of the Great Mongol State. Neither side tears off the mask, and neither side fights all-out, but we're still fighting."

Three wars at the same time!

And they hadn't been fought into poverty?

Song Shilie couldn't believe it.

In truth, Luo Dagong didn't fully understand what had happened either. He shook his head and said, "By all logic, such reckless militarism ought to have impoverished us. But the thing is, everywhere in the southeast these past three years has been dripping with wealth — the more we fight, the richer we get... Right now every trade is booming and the common people are prosperous. I served as County Magistrate and then Prefect in Shanghai for over ten years, and these last two or three years have been the best I've ever seen — whatever business you're in, you make money. And it's not just Shanghai Prefecture. From what I know, every prefecture in Jiangnan Province is thriving!

One hundred million in war funds is no small sum, but given the current state of the Ming southeast, it shouldn't be a problem."

What was happening in the Ming southeast right now was, in fact, a "war boom" — a very common economic phenomenon of the capitalist era!

Luo Dagong had naturally never heard of it, but Zhu Cilang certainly had!

Although he had hardly returned to Nanjing in the past two or three years, he had long since grasped the war-boom phenomenon emerging in the Ming southeast.

For the Ming southeast as it now stood, this economic phenomenon was actually only to be expected!

Because the Ming southeast was a handicraft manufacturing center of enormous scale, capable of producing vast quantities of silk, porcelain, cotton cloth, ironware, ships, vehicles, leather goods, woodenware, munitions, armor, carts, gunpowder, salt, medicines — everything the front lines needed.

Every handicraft item needed by the hundreds of thousands of troops fighting at the front, the Ming southeast could produce in both quality and quantity — and it could also organize a vast and highly efficient logistics apparatus to transport everything to the front by land and water.

If it had only possessed a developed handicraft industry, the Ming court would still have been trapped by its finances. But the Ming realm did not actually lack so-called "money." After all, the handicraft prosperity of the Ming southeast was not a matter of just a year or two — ever since the middle and late Tang dynasty, the southeast's handicraft industry had been highly developed. By the middle and late Ming, riding the east wind of the Age of Discovery, the Ming southeast's handicraft industry had, in just over a hundred years, earned the Great Ming several hundred million taels of silver — forcibly transforming China from a silver-starved land into a "Silver Empire" that could use silver as currency.

It was just that before Zhu Cilang took over, the Ming southeast's economy still had two enormous defects that prevented it from transitioning to the early stage of capitalism — and therefore prevented the vast quantities of silver from being turned from "dead money" into "living money."

One major defect was that agriculture was insufficient to support the further development of handicraft workshops. The notion that capitalism could break free of agricultural support and sprint into capitalism on the strength of a little metallurgy and metalworking alone was utterly unrealistic.

Because the development of capitalist industry and commerce requires the mass concentration of population. If there are hardly any people, how are you supposed to run industry and commerce? Early industry and commerce were all "human-wave tactics" — opening a mine, forging iron, weaving cloth, all of it depended on manual labor. Without the concentration of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, capitalist industry and commerce could hardly gain sufficient momentum.

And when that many people gather together and stop working in agriculture, how do you solve the problem of feeding them?

So in places where agriculture was underdeveloped, or where sufficient agricultural products could not be obtained through cheap transportation, capitalism simply could not develop at all!

For example, the Ming's original capital, Beijing, could not develop capitalism in the seventeenth century — the hundreds of thousands of residents who sustained the capital's functions all needed four million shi of tribute grain shipped in from the southeast every year just to stay fed. How could you develop capitalist industry and commerce under those conditions? Add another few hundred thousand or a million industrial and commercial residents, and how much grain would you have to import?

Furthermore, early capitalist industry and commerce could seldom do without the support of the textile industry. Whether wool, cotton, or silk, all of it depended on agriculture and animal husbandry for raw materials.

If even the food supply couldn't keep up, where would there be surplus land to produce industrial raw materials?

And the Ming's agriculture was plainly insufficient to support any great development of industry and commerce — one important cause of the late-Ming peasant wars was precisely that agriculture could not provide enough products! Once the scale of cash-crop production kept expanding, the grain supply fell short...

So after Zhu Cilang took charge of the southeast, he did not forcibly launch any "industrialization." Instead, he put his main energy into agriculture. Finding food for over one hundred million people was the urgent priority!

His methods were fourfold. First, abolish the tax-exemption privileges of the scholar-official class, thereby rooting out the backward "commendation system" and making land circulation more market-driven, so that small landlords and rich peasants skilled at farming could acquire more land.

Second, increase imports — through the "customs grain tax" and "clan-vassal expansion," import rice from the warm, humid lands of Southeast Asia.

Third, the great Yellow River–Huai River canal project: by abandoning the canal to save the Huai, the lands along both banks of the Huai, which had suffered floods year after year, were turned back into fertile grain-producing soil.

Fourth, step up the promotion of new crops such as potatoes and sweet potatoes, thereby strengthening agriculture's resistance to natural disasters.

With all four measures applied at once, by the time the great northern expedition war broke out in the sixth year of Hongxing, the Ming southeast's grain supply was already very ample, and grain prices could hold steady at around one tael per shi over the long term. Meanwhile, the output of cash crops — cotton, mulberry leaves, tea, soybeans, and the like — also climbed steadily, enough to support the great development of handicrafts and capitalism.

The other major defect holding back the Ming's transition to the early stage of capitalism was an unsound financial system! The claim that the several hundred million taels of silver were all sunk into land was, frankly, nonsense. Silver doesn't turn into land; silver can only be used to exchange for land. Because the financial system of the mid-seventeenth century was too backward, with no vast banking system to absorb the inflowing silver, the silver became a collectible rather than capital.

And the reason the Zhu emperor had pushed for the establishment of the Salt Merchants' Bank and the Sea Merchants' Bank back in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen was precisely to build a banking system that could set silver in circulation.

Because a banking system can create money through the multiplier effect, once the Ming financial system centered on the two great banks gradually matured, "silver" — from the Ming court's perspective — was no longer ingots sitting in official treasuries, but a string of figures in the accounts of the two banks... An expenditure of one hundred million taels in war funds was nothing more than silver in the Ministry of Revenue's account running over into someone else's account.