Chapter 688: Rice Buckets and Face

Sage Zhang's journey toward Liangzhou was still moving at great speed, for he had to reach the prefectural seat of Liangzhou before the fifteenth of the eighth month, so he could spend the Mid-Autumn Festival with his innermost circle.

The Mid-Autumn Festival did not actually yet exist in the late Tang and Five Dynasties, but at least as early as the Wei and Jin periods, or even the middle and late Later Han, there was already a custom of viewing the moon on the fifteenth of the eighth month, and the Tang called it the "Upright Moon."

After all, with a moon so big, so round, and so dazzlingly bright hanging in the sky, it was hard for people not to notice it.

By the time Zhang Zhou founded the dynasty, the Mid-Autumn Festival could be considered a holiday that Zhang Zhao pushed with all his might; he even personally went into the kitchen and made several "dark mooncakes" — some so sweet they made one's head spin, and some salty egg yolk with big chunks of fatty meat, salty enough to pucker the mouth.

Well, to call them "dark" is from the perspective of later generations; this sort of high-oil, high-sugar, high-salt food is practically a health killer, and most people would tremble three times just at the sight of it, let alone eat it.

But in the present day, this was supreme delicacy, even in official and noble households; apart from the very top powerful families, no one would find large amounts of sugar, oil, and salt cloying.

From this angle, an ordinary person of later generations earning a few thousand a month — in food, clothing, shelter, and transport, one can't say for the rest, but in the matter of eating alone, they eat better than the high officials and nobles of this time.

Never mind rare delicacies from mountain and sea; an ordinary person of later generations can still eat rare delicacies from mountain and sea by spending a few hundred or a thousand or so.

But at this time, even someone of Zhang Zhao's rank, if he wanted to eat big lobster, big crab, or big abalone, could only spend a month or so traveling to the seaside to eat them himself.

Of course, certain top-grade mountain delicacies could still be enjoyed freely; when Zhang Zhao reached Fengxiang Prefecture, the Prefect of Fengxiang, Li Congzhao, presented him with bear paws — not just one, but three, long since cured and preserved.

One was steamed with honey and preserved fruit, one braised with Sichuan pepper and zhuyu, and one roasted with pepper and cumin.

Zhang Zhao took only one bite and understood why the ancients loved this thing — because there is too much fat on a bear paw; one bite is all a mingled sensation of fat and collagen.

For the ancients, who lacked fat intake, this thing was indeed a great tonic; its fattening and weight-gaining effect was far fiercer than big chunks of fatty meat, so of course it was very nourishing!

At the same time, the flavor of bear paw lies somewhere between beef tendon and pig's trotter, and when properly cooked it is truly delicious.

But in later generations, never mind that eating bear paw is illegal, even in terms of effect, what person of later times would need five fingers' thickness of fat to nourish the body!

After two bites, Zhang Zhao could eat no more, but the others around him — Guo Rong, Zhang Fei, Pan Mei, Cao Bin, as well as the three little ones Zhang Xiancun, Zhang Xianyu, and Zhang Liechao — swept it all away like wind scattering clouds and still weren't satisfied, and the group egged on the little black bear Zhang Liechao to go ask Li Congzhao for a big fat sheep to roast and eat.

What a bunch of rice buckets! Sage Zhang was quite speechless.

These seven fellows not only ate up all the rare delicacies from mountain and sea that Li Congzhao had specially prepared, they also ate a huge fat sheep of one hundred twenty or thirty jin before they stopped.

Although that one hundred twenty or thirty jin was the live weight of the sheep, after slaughtering and removing the innards, bones, and so on, it would still yield about seventy jin of meat.

Good heavens, that's ten jin of meat per person, not even counting the food eaten before and the one or two jin of wine per person.

It looked very crude, but Li Congzhao at the side was not the least bit embarrassed; instead he looked on with envy and said flatteringly to Zhang Zhao.

"With such bear-and-tiger generals, worthy of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, the unification of all within the four seas and the restoration of the unbroken golden bowl are right before our eyes!"

This Li Congzhao was none other than the son of Li Maozhen, of the Li family of Fengxiang Prefecture.

When Zhang Zhao first entered Guanzhong, Li Congzhao had followed his elder brother Li Congyan in gathering fifty thousand troops, intending to intercept and teach Zhang Zhao a lesson; of course, in the end the two brothers were soundly thrashed by Zhang Zhao.

The ways of the world are so strange; some people, if you don't beat them once, they'll never know that ramming a southern wall will split their head open, and that when they reach the Wu River they ought to cut their own throat.

But once you've beaten them into submission, the speed with which they accept the role of the defeated can astonish even the victor.

The brothers Li Congyan and Li Congzhao were exactly like this; after being beaten to tears below Mawei Slope, the speed of the two brothers' groveling surrender was even faster than Kang Fu's.

Kang Fu had not yet left his post as Military Governor of the Xiongwu Army in Qinzhou when Li Congyan began slacking off and currying favor.

By the time Zhang Zhao entered Guanzhong, he was still planning to use the Li Congyan brothers to kill a chicken to warn the monkeys, yet the moment he entered Chang'an, the first person he saw was Li Congyan.

Before Zhang Zhao could even open his mouth to ask, Li Congyan had already offered up his entire family fortune, even presenting the gold-and-jade belt with pendant straps that his father Li Shouzhen had once used, keeping only three to five hundred mu of land so the whole family could go farm.

This in turn made Zhang Zhao feel too embarrassed to accept; after taking the jewels, classics, paintings and calligraphy, porcelain, and other items that Li Congyan offered — things Li Shouzhen had once gathered from the Great Tang palace — he returned property worth more than fifty thousand strings of cash to Li Congyan.

Immediately Li Congyan seized the opportunity, at once setting himself up as the first man to welcome the new lord, shamelessly pulling connections everywhere.

And don't say it didn't work — it was actually quite useful!

After all, the Li Congyan family was a family that had been regional overlords for decades, and many of the clan's sons were talented and learned.

Originally they had been worthless because they relied on ancestral glory and were arrogant and conceited; once they were beaten into the mud, as long as their thinking could change, a few genuine talents did emerge.

Even Li Congzhao, who was no longer young, started as a County Deputy of the Chang'an capital county, and had now been promoted by Zhang Zhao to his old home base of Fengxiang Prefecture, serving as Prefect with the concurrent title of Guanzhong Province Administrator.

And the reason Zhang Zhao promoted Li Congzhao so, even going so far as to place him in a sensitive area like Fengxiang Prefecture, was actually because Li Congzhao turned out to be quite knowledgeable in agronomy.

Together with the Vice Minister of Works and agronomist Han E, and Han E's son Han Cheng — also a famous agronomist and Director of Military Farms in the Ministry of Works — he built waterworks in Guanzhong and promoted new intercropping methods.

And in accordance with Zhang Zhao's requirements, he restored to cultivation the fields in Guanzhong abandoned due to war, and also prohibited reckless deforestation and the enclosing of rivers and lakes to create farmland, preserving a certain degree of the ecological environment.

Especially in Fengxiang Prefecture, Li Congzhao was very good at reading his superior's intent; he forcibly inserted into the prefectural school a college specifically teaching how to treat livestock diseases and breed livestock, and now it could even steadily send out dozens of qualified veterinarians every year.

And thanks to Li Congzhao and Han E's years of supervision in Guanzhong, production in the Guanzhong region had recovered enormously.

Guanzhong's agronomy erudites were spread throughout every township and village, and the role they played was even greater than that of the agronomy erudites in Hexi and Longyou, ranking first in all under heaven.

With such ability, never mind that he had once backstabbed Zhang Zhao and ended up trying to steal a chicken only to lose the rice; even if the backstab had truly succeeded, Zhang Zhao could forgive him without the slightest hesitation.

Li Congzhao exchanged a few words with Zhang Zhao, then took out a memorial he had long prepared, and looked at Zhang Zhao hopefully as he said.

"This is the census of households and farmland in Guanzhong, which your servant compiled by order of Chief Minister Lord Cao."

Zhang Zhao accepted the memorial but did not look at it; instead he looked at Li Congzhao and smiled: "Just from your expression, I can tell it must be good news. I won't read it — you tell me."

The smile on Li Congzhao's face grew even wider; he raised his voice slightly and said: "Since the Sage Son of Heaven entered Guanzhong and quelled the chaos of the Hu, your servants, by the Sage's decree, have given the people of Guanzhong Province rest and encouraged farming and weaving.

Today Guanzhong Province has 370,000 households, a population of 2,047,000, and more than 11,700,000 mu of cultivated land."

At this time, Zhang Zhou's Guanzhong Province was not equal to the later Shaanxi Province; compared to later Shaanxi, in the south of Guanzhong Province there was only Shangluo Prefecture, that is, Shangluo City, while Hanzhong was in Sichuan and Ankang was in Hubei.

In the north, half belonged to Ningxia Province, and the greater part of the rest belonged to Shuofang Province; Guanzhong Province had only one or two counties or even just townships.

Of course, there were also additions: Pingliang and Qingyang, which in later times belonged to Gansu, and Guyuan City, which belonged to Ningxia, were part of Guanzhong Province.

Zhang Zhao let out a long breath of relief; from the data, with a little more than five mu per person, the people of Guanzhong could finally feed themselves.

One must know that in a family, supposing there were six people, children and the elderly would make up about three of them, and they could not finish the produce of more than five mu of land, not to mention the supplement of hunting, fishing, and raising livestock.

Even more so, Guanzhong Province was essentially all within Guanzhong, where as long as the waterworks kept up, it was not the sort of barren frontier that yielded little grain.

Five mu of land per person, even at present, could let a family live quite well.

Of course, this land could not all have been evenly distributed; some families might have several hundred mu, while some might not even have one mu per person.

But correspondingly, not everyone was purely agricultural population.

In any case, the problem of grain self-sufficiency in Guanzhong was, for the time being, guaranteed.

For Zhang Zhao, this was very good news.

Because he had established his rule under the banner of reviving the Great Tang, and before entering the Central Plains he had repeatedly shown favor in Guanzhong, which made the people of Guanzhong very well-disposed toward Zhang Zhao.

Moreover, Zhang Zhao's great-grandfather Zhang Yichao had lived in Chang'an for over a decade and was ultimately buried in Xianyang.

Many people in Guanzhong therefore simply believed that Zhang Zhao's native place should follow his great-grandfather's, making him a true son of Guanzhong.

In any case, no matter what others said, the people of Guanzhong were convinced that Sage Zhang was a man of Guanzhong.

With this foundation of popular sentiment, Guanzhong was in effect Zhang Zhao's floor.

With a secure Guanzhong, plus his base of Hexi and Longyou, even if a major problem arose, Zhang Zhou could still emerge in the form of a large-scale, stronger Qin.

Even if he were to die young as suddenly as Guo Rong, Cao Yanxi could still protect Zhang Xianjing and retreat to Guanzhong to avoid disaster.

Or, thinking on a grander scale, they could directly let Murong Xinzhang or Zhang Xiancun take the throne, then continue to use Guanzhong, Hexi, and Longyou as their base, and they would not immediately perish and see the state destroyed.

"This is all your great achievement!" Zhang Zhao exclaimed with genuine admiration.

When he had entered the Central Plains, Guanzhong in fact had only a little under 1.3 million people left, and its cultivated land was only about three or four million mu.

In just three or four short years, Guanzhong had undergone such great change. Although the population growth was partly due to return migration and Zhang Zhao's resettlement of Hexi meritorious officials, the increase of six or seven million mu of cultivated land was solid, undeniable achievement.

Of course, the terrifying increase in farmland was also because a large part of it was recultivated land, or land that had been confiscated after being concealed by the great clans.

But if someone else had been put in charge, let alone recultivation, which still demanded enormous effort, even digging out the property hidden by the great clans was something ordinary people could not accomplish.

Add to that the need to build the matching irrigation works and so on, and the sheer amount of blood and sweat poured in by Cao Yuanzhong, Li Congzhao, Han E, Han Cheng, and the others was almost unimaginable.

Suddenly, Zhang Zhao abruptly thought of who should fill the last of the three consort positions for Zhang Xiancun — one empress and two consorts.

Now Zhang Xiancun had Li Siyuan's youngest daughter, Princess Yong'an, to win over the frustrated warriors of Daibei and Hedong to go pacify the Kingdom of Dali.

He had the daughter of An Shuqian to motivate An Shuqian and his people to raise funds for him in the Central Plains financial markets.

Now, if he married Li Congzhao's youngest daughter, he could immediately pull in a large batch of agricultural experts who understood farming, as well as the veterinarians the southwest most desperately lacked.

Hmm, actually, veterinarians could treat people too — far more reliable than having the common folk find shamans to perform spirit dances.

With the support of these three — military, finance, and agriculture — plus the family fortune his mother, his young aunt Li Ruoliu, had accumulated for him over more than a decade, and the retired military officers the Khotan Li family could pull from the army, Zhang Zhao believed Zhang Xiancun could crush the Duan-ruled Kingdom of Dali in every respect.

Moreover, Zhang Zhao's requirement for Zhang Xiancun was not merely that he go and become King of Dali.

He should shoulder the heavy responsibility of bringing the advanced productive forces and advanced culture of the Central Plains to the Yunnan-Guizhou region where the Kingdom of Dali lay.

Zhang Xiancun should become the third great figure, after the Chu general Zhuang Qiao entered Dian and the Shu Han's Marquis Zhuge managed Nanzhong, to play a key role in the great development of the Yunnan-Guizhou region.

Having thought through the responsibility Zhang Xiancun should bear, Zhang Zhao became even more certain of his decision to have Zhang Xiancun marry Li Congzhao's youngest daughter.

However, as his father, he could not possibly go in person to arrange the match for his son.

So Zhang Zhao, while sending someone to summon Li Congyan, said with a smile to Li Congzhao, "You and your kin have rendered meritorious service. We will certainly not mistreat meritorious officials."

Zhang Zhao also knew what Li Congzhao, who was looking at him with hopeful eyes, wanted: he wanted a hereditary title that would never be downgraded.

For a family like Li Congzhao's, although they did not dare hope to recover his father Li Shouzhen's princely title, having no title to pass down through the generations was, for their family, a kind of disgrace.

But although Li Congzhao's achievements were not small, one could not simply grant a title of nobility for that alone.

Er, it was not that it could not be granted. Those titles with only a small stipend and that were downgraded each generation could be granted, but Li Congzhao clearly did not want one.

The two exchanged a few more lukewarm pleasantries, and then Li Congyan hurried over.

Toward Li Congyan, Zhang Zhao was not as accommodating as he was toward Li Congzhao.

That scene back in Guanzhong, when he had nearly caused the fledgling Zhang Zhao to "flip over," was still a recent memory. Zhang Zhao had at the time barely held on with his last breath of resolve before he managed to persevere.

Of course, the biggest reason was that Li Congyan was already very old. Apart from eating, drinking, and amusement, he had no other talents, and his sons were all mediocre as well. He had absolutely no value for me, Sage Zhang, to exploit.

Li Congyan came running, panting heavily. He still had to thank Zhang Zhao, because historically he would have been long dead by now — and he had died of sheer anxiety.

At that time, the Central Plains was in turmoil and had no attention to spare for the west. Meng Chang sent Sun Hanshao to fiercely attack Guanzhong, besieging Fengxiang from all eight sides. Li Congyan cried to heaven and got no answer, cried to earth and got no response, and died of a stroke in a rage in the so-called Prince of Qin's mansion.

But in this timeline, Li Congyan, completely stripped of power, ate well and slept well. Though he should have died two years ago, he had instead grown increasingly vigorous.

Once he learned from Director Dong of the Palace Domestic Service why Sage Zhang had summoned him, he immediately realized this was the best chance their Li family had to turn things around.

Heaven have mercy — because his father Li Maozhen, in the late Tang period, was a heavyweight who could compete with Zhu Quanzhong over who treated the court worse.

Li Congyan, in this Zhang Zhou that flew the banner of restoring the Great Tang, had used every trick he had and thrown away all face just to avoid a fatal disaster.

Now that such a good opportunity had appeared, he had to seize it at once!

Li Congyan even asked Director Dong without the slightest hesitation whether, following the ancient rites of the Zhou, he could send his own daughter along as a concubine accompanying the bride.

This sheer shamelessness left even Director Dong, who had thought his own skin was quite thick, utterly embarrassed.

(End of Chapter)

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