Chapter 939: The Great Ming's American Duke (Seeking Subscriptions)

In the Forbidden City of Nanjing, inside the warm chamber of the Hall of Venerating Heaven, Shen Tingyang, Governor-General of the Northern Seas, was reporting to the Zhu Emperor and the senior ministers of both administrations what he had seen and learned in the north.

"…Henan, Hebei, Shanxi, and also the northwest of Shandong and the region around Shuntian Prefecture are truly impoverished! The cities are ruined, the fields lie waste, the river channels are silted up, the roads are cut off, and every trade has withered. Most of the common people of the north cannot fill their bellies or cover their bodies. The weak sell their sons and daughters and beg to stay alive; the strong gather in the hills and forests, defying all law. The prefectures and counties everywhere, faced with this state of affairs, are all utterly at a loss!"

What Shen Tingyang said was essentially true.

The Great Ming's northern expedition to recover the Central Plains had not actually been fought very fiercely. In most places, the war proceeded by the Qing army's voluntary withdrawal and the Ming army's rapid takeover; only in a few regions did intense fighting occur.

But the unscrupulous southern merchants who followed the Great Ming royal army into the northern war zone severely wrecked the smallholder economy of the north, causing large numbers of northern smallholders to go bankrupt. Even those smallholders who had not yet gone bankrupt found their standard of living lower than it had been under the Great Qing's rule.

This sounds unbelievable, but anyone who understands a little economic history knows it was inevitable.

Because no smallholder economy anywhere can withstand the flood-like beast of capitalism when its doors are thrown completely open.

The southeast of the Great Ming has now sprinted into the early stage of capitalism: commerce is developed, finance is newly rising, and handicraft production has reached the level of the late workshop-handicraft period. In particular, the competitiveness of the textile industry, which is intimately bound up with people's livelihoods, is among the best in the world. Once the cotton cloth, silk, porcelain, and ironware produced in the southeast entered the north along with the royal army and the southern merchants, they very easily destroyed the weak private handicraft industry of the north.

And the main body of northern private handicraft industry was not actually the artisans living in the cities, but rather the "women's weaving" that held an important place in the smallholder economy. Men tilling and women weaving together formed the foundation of the Northern Qing economy. The Northern Qing's taxation likewise corresponded to this, in the form of rent, corvée, and cloth levies — the cloth levy being collected in bolts of cloth. And cloth, in the Northern Qing economy, which suffered an extreme shortage of silver and an excess of debased copper cash, played the role of money.

That is to say, the monetary income of the Northern Qing smallholder was the low-quality cloth produced by women's weaving. And the wealthy households among the Northern Qing smallholders had hoarded large quantities of low-quality cloth; this cloth was the capital with which they conducted commercial activity. Although the Northern Qing suppressed commerce, it was not without commerce, and there was likewise wealth and poverty among the Northern Qing smallholders.

Since low-quality cloth possessed a monetary function, its price was of course inflated. Therefore, faced with the cheap and fine Songjiang cloth that came flooding in like a savage beast, the north's low-quality cotton cloth and hemp cloth lost their market entirely overnight.

This meant not only that the women's weaving which formed an important component of the northern smallholder economy could not be maintained, but also that the merchants who had stored up large quantities of low-quality cloth were ruined overnight.

With these small merchants gone, the northern commercial network that had taken more than ten years to slowly build up under Qing rule collapsed completely. Meanwhile, the merchants from the south, backed by abundant capital and the royal army, rapidly established their own sales networks — and all the handicraft goods they sold came from the southeast…

Without the petty handicraft industry providing "monetary" income, the northern economy naturally withered across the board.

In addition, three years of warfare had an extremely adverse effect on agricultural production and public order. Wasted land, rampant banditry, ruined cities, lack of maintenance of water conservancy facilities, and the large-scale paralysis of the grain transport system were all to be expected.

In short, the present condition of the north can be summed up in a single word: poor.

Poor to the point of death.

"The court is poor too!" Zheng Zhilong also began to plead poverty. Old Zheng's face drooped, looking as though he were about to go bankrupt at any moment. "Several hundred thousand troops have still not returned, and military expenditures are shockingly large. The several military governorships in the north still require money to be moved or established. Before our eyes we must also send troops into the steppe. The cities of Beijing and Tianjin both require enormous sums for repair, and the imperial tombs at Tianshou Mountain must also be repaired… Ah yes, and the Yellow River, the Grand Canal, the Daqing River, the Yongding River, and the Wei River all need work. Until they are repaired they cannot be navigated, and from time to time they still flood.

Add it all up, and even several hundred million taels of silver thrown in would not be enough! If the court must also return the capital to Beijing, then, then… I cannot go on serving as Minister of Revenue!"

After the great magnate Zheng Zhilong finished pleading poverty, it was the turn of the richest man in the Great Ming, Zhu Cilang, to plead poverty.

The Zhu Emperor likewise wore an unhappy expression — being so poor, how could he be happy?

He sighed first, then said: "Returning the capital is out of the question… To return the capital we would have to restore the Grand Canal, and to restore the canal we would have to ruin the Huai River. We spent so much money on the great Yellow-Huai-Canal works, and with great difficulty turned both banks of the Huai into a granary and a sea of rice. Must we now restore it to the old state of a great flood every two or three years? Jiangnan Province no longer grows grain at all; everywhere there are cotton fields and mulberry trees. Rice and flour all depend on supply from the Two Huai and the Two Lakes. If the Two Huai are ruined, how can the Two Lakes alone supply the demand? Without grain supplies, Jiangnan, that money tree, will also be gone. Then how will the court survive? What will the several hundred thousand troops in the north eat? And with what shall we suppress the roving bandits in the west?"

Before the Yellow River shifted south, there had been no dilemma of protecting the canal versus protecting the Huai, because no matter how much silt the Yellow River carried, it could not flow into the Huai. But after the Yellow River shifted south, there arose the dilemma of whether to let the Yellow River seize the Huai's course or to open a new channel to the sea.

If one chose to let the Yellow River seize the Huai, then the Yellow River's silt would accumulate in the lower reaches of the Huai, so that the Huai's waters could not drain smoothly into the sea. Whenever there was a little too much rain, flooding would be inevitable — how great is the Huai's volume of water! Without an outlet to the sea, how could it not flood?

If one chose to open a new course for the Yellow River to the sea, then the lower Yellow River and the canal would intersect. The lower Yellow River flows gently and silt accumulates quickly; if it intersected the canal, within a few years the riverbed at the intersection would be raised very high, and the canal would be severed. This too was an insoluble problem. It could not even be solved by digging a new canal channel, because the ever-rising Yellow River bed was like a high wall standing in the way of the Grand Canal — with seventeenth-century engineering capability, it simply could not be surmounted.

Therefore it was a choice of one or the other: the canal or the Huai.

And the supply of the Great Ming capital, with its hundreds of thousands or even a million people, absolutely had to be guaranteed without the slightest mishap.

Therefore it could not rely on sea transport alone — in this age, sea transport depends on the winds for its livelihood. If several typhoons came in a summer, the supply of Beijing might well be cut off.

Hence, with the capital at Beijing, the court had to protect the canal and abandon the Huai… and between the protecting and the abandoning lay an average annual loss of grain production in the tens of millions of shi.

For a Great Ming with a population approaching one hundred fifty million, that was a fatal choice.

"Your Majesty," Chief Grand Secretary Wei Zaode quietly reminded him, "the people's hearts now long to return…"

Zhu Cilang cast a sidelong glance at this famous minister "as wise as Zhuge." The famous minister wore a bitter face, utterly at his wits' end.

The Zhu Emperor gave a long sigh and said: "Returning the capital is not feasible, but for the northerners who wish to go home, we should still help them… Yet the north is now ruined and its people destitute. To let them go back just like this, I fear they would simply starve to death. So We have been pondering whether to first invest some money in the north — build waterworks, repair roads, open ports, construct city walls — and wait until the north prospers before organizing the people to return to their homes. Would that be acceptable?"

"It would be good, but does the court not lack money?" Wei Zaode cast a pitiful glance at the great magnate Zheng Zhilong. Zheng Zhilong sighed — poor! Poor to the point of death!

"Then borrow it!" said Zhu Cilang, the richest man in the Great Ming.

"Borrow?" Wei Zaode thought for a moment. "From whom? Was it not said that the northern expedition bonds were not fully subscribed?"

Zhu Cilang looked at Wei Zaode and said: "Minister Wei, do you have money? Can the court borrow from you?"

"Me?" Wei Zaode shuddered at these words — had his bribe-taking been exposed? Surely not; he had not taken that much! Not even five hundred thousand taels. How could it have come to light?