Chapter 312: Construction

Weishan Island sits in the central-eastern part of Weishan Lake. Its area is not especially large, but because it lies within the boundless expanse of Weishan Lake, its natural conditions are quite favorable—a suitable place for living and dwelling.

Weishan Island was originally a mountain rather than an island. Later, the Yellow River repeatedly breached its dikes and flooded southward, seizing the Si River's course to enter the sea via the Huai, causing the Si River to drain poorly and silt up with accumulated water, so that a lake-marsh formed at the foot of this peak—and only then did today's Weishan Island come into being.

The island originally had several dozen households and a hundred-odd people. These families relied on a few hundred mu of reclaimed wasteland to grow some grain rations, raised some chickens and ducks and other fowl, and then, after netting fish, turtles, shrimp, and crabs from the lake and picking some lotus seeds and lotus roots, would row boats to Xia Town several li away to barter for daily necessities such as oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and needles and thread. Though their lives were not exactly prosperous, at least they could eat, and being far from the mainland was all the safer.

Weishan Island fell under the jurisdiction of Weishan County in Jining Prefecture. Since the island's population was sparse and its fields few, the county yamen selected the household with the most members on the island to serve as village head, and collecting a few qian of silver each year counted as receiving the land tax. Ordinarily, almost no government personnel came to disturb them, so the island's residents lived their days in peace.

But this quiet and harmonious atmosphere was thoroughly shattered in the latter half of the ninth year of Chongzhen.

First, the Ministry of Works dispatched over a hundred officials, clerks, and scribes of various ranks to Jining Prefecture to survey and plan the overall layout of reclaimed wasteland, population, and villages. Following them came the earliest well-digging teams, established in the eighth year of Chongzhen with the imperial estates, who began prospecting for water sources and seeking suitable places to dig wells for the disaster victims to drink from.

The Jining Prefecture and county governments, having received imperial directives, hired large numbers of able-bodied laborers locally under the supervision and urging of large contingents of the Embroidered Uniform Guard and inspecting Censors. Under the guidance of officials from the Ministry of Works' Bureau of Waterways and Bureau of Construction, they began building houses, constructing roads, and digging open ditches and covered drains, giving shape to the rudiments of a great many villages.

Only after consulting the hydrological records preserved by the local government, visiting old farmers in the villages, and surveying on site the traces left by the great floods of past rainy seasons would the Ministry of Works officials decide where to build villages, so as to avoid having them soaked and destroyed by the floodwaters that each year's rainy season brought.

In accordance with the imperial edict, two million shi of grain rice and large quantities of salt, successively intercepted from grain transport, were transferred from the canal boats to several large waterside granaries along the canal in Jining Prefecture, and then, once the scattered small granaries were completed, transported onward to them, to supply food for the disaster victims.

Immediately after, vast quantities of building materials—slaked lime, timber, stone, thatch, and the like—were shipped from local sources or from boats on the Grand Canal to the villages under construction, for building houses and granaries. This infrastructure-building frenzy also drove the great prosperity of related industries in the locality and the surrounding prefectures. From gentry who possessed all manner of resources down to boatmen, porters, cart companies, and able-bodied laborers, countless people became beneficiaries of this massive investment.

The reason was simple: Zhu Youjian had successively taken two million taels of silver from the privy purse and poured it into this great procurement. All purchases of materials were settled entirely in ready silver. Officials dispatched by the Ministry of Revenue, with the cooperation of the local government's household clerks, drew up budgets, then settled accounts on the spot with sellers on a cash-on-delivery basis. This enormous investment also drove the vigorous development of related industries and directly and indirectly increased the people's incomes.

The laborers hired by the various counties of Jining Prefecture were also paid daily wages per head, with silver and copper cash distributed the same day under the strict supervision of the Embroidered Uniform Guard.

People in those days had not yet learned to shirk and cheat in their labor. Under the twin incentives of wages settled in ready silver and two meals provided each day, the progress of all projects advanced rapidly, and dozens to a hundred villages took on their initial form within two months' time.

These dwellings for the disaster victims were all built of yellow earth and adobe. For victims suffering hunger and cold, having a shelter that kept out wind and rain was already a blessing granted by heaven—how could they complain that the dwellings were not built of timber houses or hard stone?

To raise the enthusiasm of government officials and clerks for doing their work diligently, Zhu Youjian also produced enormous sums of reward silver to encourage and recompense them. All officials and clerks involved in this vast project received monthly subsidies according to their rank, and those who served diligently received additional rewards besides. This disbursement of silver continued until all disaster victims had been properly settled.

With both the dual supervision of the Embroidered Uniform Guard and the Censors and the lure of generous subsidies, officials and clerks who had always been lazy, arrogant, and dilatory in handling affairs erupted with tremendous zeal for their duties. Nearly everyone threw themselves into the complicated and trivial tasks with high spirits, and many people's characters underwent great changes as a result.

Whether it was Jining Prefecture and its subordinate counties, or the gentry of Yanzhou Prefecture, all benefited greatly from this great project.

For the procurement of all manner of vast quantities of goods, the officials of the Ministry of Revenue and the Ministry of Works adopted a policy of prioritizing nearby sources, placing orders directly with the various shops the gentry maintained in the cities, and then purchasing nearly all the grain stored in the gentry's households at prices above the market rate. The greatest beneficiary of this grain procurement was the Prince of Lu's establishment in Yanzhou Prefecture.

Ministry of Revenue officials purchased nearly three hundred thousand shi of grain from the Prince of Lu's establishment at a price of five qian of silver per shi, and the Prince of Lu's establishment netted a profit of over a hundred thousand taels of silver at a stroke.

Because this grain was rent paid by the prince's tenant farmers, it had almost no cost at all.

As the crude infrastructure was nearing completion, large numbers of disaster victims from the northern border regions arrived in Jining Prefecture organized by county, accompanied by the government clerks and yamen runners of the disaster-stricken areas themselves.

While the vast majority of disaster victims were still pitching hovels near the towns and cities awaiting resettlement, hundreds upon thousands of able-bodied men, divided into several teams under the watch of officials and clerks, took advantage of the autumn winds just rising and the wild grass and trees gradually withering to ignite dozens of fire points. The blazing conflagration, riding the wind, raged through the uninhabited areas around the Southern Four Lakes. Flames several zhang high burned day and night without ceasing, illuminating the night sky as bright as day.

Only after the great fire was extinguished by an autumn rain that lasted for several days—before the sky had fully cleared, and before the ground had completely dried—did countless ragged men and women, able-bodied and young, carrying iron spades, hoes, willow baskets, winnowing fans, and all manner of farm tools on their shoulders and in their hands, step into the wasteland and low-lying ground scorched black by the fire, and begin reclaiming land with desperate intensity.

The scope of this great land reclamation was so extensive that several prefectures and counties around the Southern Four Lakes were all encompassed within it. Every piece of wasteland that the Southern Four Lakes and the surrounding rivers could irrigate was covered by crowds of people, and disaster victims were everywhere across the formerly uninhabited wilderness. These victims were organized by their original counties and townships, laboring under the organization and leadership of the officials of their former jurisdictions. This approach avoided to the greatest extent the chaos that large numbers of people would otherwise have produced.

Weishan Island was included in this great development as well. Around the original small village, over a thousand adobe and thatch houses went up within a little more than a month, several small granaries with stone foundations were completed, and the village's two paths were widened and extended.

With the completion of the houses, under the arrangement and organization of the government, over five hundred households and more than two thousand people moved onto the island one after another. The quiet Weishan Island was suddenly filled with bustle and vitality—but at the same time, the several dozen original residents felt greatly unsettled.

As the newly arrived disaster victims began reclaiming land, tracts of wilderness and forest were quickly turned into fertile fields capable of producing grain. The government continuously shipped all manner of supplies to the island, waterwheels were erected one after another, and the victims worked day and night building irrigation channels to the fields. Under the shadow of several years of continuous drought, these victims were filled with longing and hope for water.

The construction of villages and reclamation of wasteland around the Southern Four Lakes finally came to a temporary halt before the first snow of winter arrived. The former wilderness had become continuous stretches of fields. Large quantities of slaked lime were scattered over the turned soil to kill the various insect eggs in the fields that harmed crop growth. After these fields were aired and dried through the winter, crops could be planted in the spring of the coming year.

And so the ninth year of Chongzhen passed away amid the disaster victims' hopes for a good harvest in the year to come.