Chapter 143: The Middle Class

After a simple midday meal at the imperial estate, Chongzhen and his party returned to the palace at the end of the shen hour, and Er Ya was escorted home to the northern city by guards.

As the incomes of the artisan households climbed steadily, their formerly destitute living conditions underwent earth-shaking changes, which in turn triggered a series of changes all around them.

Once many artisan households had money in hand, they naturally first hired masons to renovate their old houses, replacing broken tables and rickety chairs with newly made furniture. Thatched roofs were swapped for tiled ones, gate towers were rebuilt taller, and low earthen courtyard walls were replaced with new walls of brick and stone.

Previously, being able to eat a full meal—whether of coarse grains or white rice and white flour—was a luxury for this group. Ragged clothing and empty stomachs were the truest portrayal of their lives back then.

Now that they suddenly had sustained, stable high incomes, most artisan households who had been terrified of poverty chose to save their silver and hide it in secret places, or convert it into enough grain to store away against future need.

But as the silver in hand grew ever greater, and as they saw this state of affairs becoming the norm, people's spending attitudes gradually began to change.

Not only in daily necessities like firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea, but also in footwear, hats, clothing, and furniture, their consumption habits gradually drew closer to those of the wealthy classes in the capital.

The base wage for an ordinary artisan household was now one tael of silver, and the Armory Directorate also provided two meals a day. Due to the restrictions of artisan status, every adult male in a household had to work in the Armory Directorate. If all the main laborers of a family ate at the workshops, leaving only women, children, and the elderly at home, expenses were invisibly reduced by a good deal. Add to that the silver received each month, and the hard times suddenly vanished without a trace.

With the piece-rate incentive system in place, there was no craftsman who took only the one-tael base wage. If someone's monthly take was only the base wage, he wouldn't dare speak of it—it would be too shameful to admit. Taking home little money only meant you were a lazy man. In this era, poverty earned no one contempt, but lazy people were despised by all. Often, if a family produced one lazy man, the whole household would be pointed at and mocked behind their backs.

Most craftsmen, while ensuring the quality of their weapons, voluntarily worked overtime and extra hours, laboring desperately to earn more silver to improve their family's circumstances.

Take Liu Er of the firearm workshop, for example. Liu Er, past fifty, and his three sons all labored in the workshop that made firearms.

Liu Er's craft was inherited from his forebears. He himself was highly skilled, and his three sons were all experts in the trade as well. The gun barrels they rolled were fine and tight, clearly sturdy, durable goods of top quality at a glance.

Liu Er had once boasted that the gun barrels his family forged could fire three hundred shots without bursting. The actual result could never be verified, because since the new-style firearms entered the Yongwei Camp, no one had yet managed to fire three hundred rounds. The Yongwei Camp's daily drills were also based on the principle of simulated firing to speed up reloading; live-fire practice was held only once every five days, with three rounds per man per session. After all, on the battlefield, what leisure time would a gunner have to calmly fire more than three shots?

Liu Er's monthly income was over five taels, and his three sons earned nearly the same. The four of them together took in around twenty taels of silver each month—a quite substantial income for that time.

Of the three Liu sons, only the eldest had married. The other two, though both in their twenties, had never wed, for one reason only—poverty.

Who would be willing to marry into a poor family that didn't know where its next meal was coming from? Among the many artisan households, Liu Er's family could be called utterly destitute. His wife had passed away many years ago, leaving four bachelors in the house. With no woman to manage the household, the home could only be described as bare-walled and filthy.

After the eldest son came of age, Liu Er borrowed from all directions, ultimately draining the family's savings and spending nearly two taels of silver to finally get him a wife—a girl from another artisan household.

For the Liu family as it stood now, a mere two taels of silver was nothing—wasn't it just a few days' wages for a few people? That didn't even count as a problem.

But for the Liu family back then, when even putting food on the table was a problem, that was a huge debt that pressed down on the whole family until they could hardly breathe.

At that time, the Armory Directorate each month issued only some sorghum mixed with sand and moldy pickled vegetables to the artisan households—no silver and no copper coins at all. The military pay and provisions allocated by the court were embezzled and divided up by the director and his ilk, and the grain was resold and replaced with inferior coarse grains.

Liu Er could only slip out during rest days to take odd jobs for extra income on the side. It took him several years to pay off the debt, and he truly had no surplus strength left to find wives for the second and third sons.

Now the Liu family had become a famous wealthy household. Liu Er, who used to be gloomy all day, now had a ruddy, glowing face. After finishing work and returning home, he would change into a brand-new robe and strut about showing off everywhere.

Liu Er had built two new houses on the vacant land beside the old residence, knocked through the courtyard walls while keeping the original gate. The second and third sons had both married in succession, and the family's days were truly thriving. Besides the eldest son's wife having given him a pair of grandsons, the second and third sons' wives were also pregnant in turn. On the verge of having children and grandchildren all around him, Liu Er went about all day with a grin he couldn't contain—the life he had now was something he'd never even dreamed of.

Liu Er's situation was highly representative among the craftsmen. The stability and long-term nature of their income had brought enormous benefits to everyone in this group, injecting new vitality into the northern city, where the poor had gathered.

A small market gradually formed in the artisan settlement. It began with itinerant peddlers carrying shoulder poles of needles and thread setting up stalls on vacant ground, then more and more peddlers joined in one after another, and the variety of goods grew increasingly rich.

Finally, sharp-nosed merchants from the capital began building houses and shops on nearby vacant land, establishing storefronts to replace the small-capital itinerant peddlers, until the peddlers were completely squeezed out of this new market.

The poor residents around also benefited from this. As shops rose one after another, each shop had to take on apprentices. Children of appropriate age from nearby families who were clever and sensible naturally became clerks at the new establishments.

There was no wage payment for the time being, but the shops provided two meals a day—which was as good as having someone else raise your child for you. Those who did well would naturally become full clerks later, with monthly wages to collect. With one more person's income, the family's circumstances would improve considerably.

Chongzhen never imagined that his casual act—born initially of sympathy for the poor, and more out of a desire to stimulate their labor enthusiasm—was nurturing a batch of consumers similar to those in prosperous Jiangnan: the middle class.

Calling it a middle class might be a bit of a stretch, but the income of these artisan households already far exceeded that of ordinary families that were merely well-fed and clothed.

Calculated by average income, the Armory Directorate had over five hundred artisan households, with a per-capita monthly income of around three taels. These five hundred people came from roughly two hundred families. If other family members had no income, each household's annual income would be nearly forty taels—far exceeding the total annual income of ordinary commoner families.

One should know that for commoner households in the capital, a stable annual income of twenty taels of silver meant life could be quite comfortable.

In that era, there were none of the dazzling array of goods and commodities of later generations. An ordinary person running a household needed nothing more than clothing and food. Houses didn't need to be bought, travel didn't require buying horses or carriages, there were no more entertainment activities, and prices were low—food and clothing became the mainstay of consumption.

Facts proved that the middle class was the main body of social consumption and the most important class for driving domestic demand.

Those high officials and nobles also consumed enormously each day, but mainly in food. Other goods were gifts from people seeking favors. For the Ming, which was severely short of grain, the consumption of these people was also waste, doing little to drive the capital's economy.

The artisan households' purchases of various goods correspondingly drove the development of other trades. For example, making a new set of clothes for each family member required large quantities of cloth, needles, and thread.

Merchants dealing in these goods would increase their procurement of cloth; the owners and hired workers of weaving workshops benefited from good product sales, so they would buy cotton yarn in large quantities, giving spinning workshops and households more profit. Goods all needed transport, so cart and horse firms and the owners of merchant ships profited as well. And on their journeys trading south and north, they would stop at inns for meals and lodging, so restaurants and taverns benefited in turn.

When Chongzhen saw this item in the intelligence gathered daily by the Embroidered Uniform Guard, he was secretly pleased, yet at the same time felt a faint regret.

The middle class he had inadvertently created was far too small in number.

With just over two hundred households and a total population of only about a thousand, relative to the capital's million-strong population, the consumption they could drive was pitifully small.

Unless the population of this class reached fifty thousand or a hundred thousand—only then would it invisibly drive the entire capital's consumption demand, thereby spurring economic development in the surrounding regions.

But this model had a huge flaw: it could not serve as a pillar industry.

Military equipment could only be supplied to the specific group that was the army. It was only because the situation within the Ming's borders was currently turbulent, with military equipment consumption extremely high, that a small group of high-wage earners had emerged.

If in a few years all the internal and external slave-bandits were pacified and wiped out, the demand for military equipment would plummet sharply, and the spending power of these artisan households would rapidly shrink as well. These were all obvious outcomes—unless, like some great power of later generations, one stirred up wars everywhere and then sold weapons for exorbitant profits.

As for establishing pillar industries with sustainable development capacity, Chongzhen had no leads yet. In his previous life he had neither been in business nor held office, and he lacked understanding in this area.

Matters of the future could be dealt with later. Each person's wisdom was limited; at some point a genius would inevitably appear out of nowhere to solve these problems that currently seemed so thorny.

What Chongzhen needed to do now was this: since he had seen the benefits of the middle class, he should find ways to expand the scale of this group and let more people benefit from it.

Consumption was to be driven by investment. As for the source of funds—only Chongzhen's privy purse would do. Those great houses and wealthy families all hid their silver in cellars, only to benefit others in the end.

The main channel of consumption for these people was the brothels. Even restaurants couldn't earn their silver—their own chefs were better than those of the big establishments, so there was no need to spend money at restaurants.

At the imperial estate, Wang Cheng'en reported to Chongzhen the various situations discovered by the Eastern Depot's seated recorders assigned to each government office.

One item was that many mid- and lower-ranking officials in the various offices, as well as the clerks, attendants, and scribes in the yamen, lived lives that were far from satisfactory. Many people harbored considerable resentment toward the court, and the consequence was a slackening attitude in handling the government affairs for which they were individually responsible.

The main reason for this was that the court had no money.

Then where had the money gone?