Chapter 47: The Wine Shop

Outside the county office, the sky was gradually darkening.

Seeing Liu Chengzong come out, Chengyun, who had been waiting outside, jogged over to greet him, his face full of festive cheer as he asked, "Brother, how did it go?"

"Clerk Zhang can put his seal on it, but there's a new order from the prefectural office — if you buy a hundred mu of land, you have to take registered refugees from outside the city back as tenant farmers. I never thought we'd still end up having to figure out how to get grain."

"It's too late to leave the city today. I arranged with Clerk Zhang that tomorrow morning an office runner will take us outside the city to pick refugees." As he spoke, Liu Chengzong noticed Chengyun stamping his feet from the cold and asked, "You've been waiting out here for me the whole time?"

Chengyun shook his head repeatedly at this and said, "Brother, you don't know — while you were inside the office, I covered the entire north street of the west city."

"After you went into the county office, a few of us talked it over. Traveling tonight would mean sleeping out in the wilds, so we figured we'd find a place to stay in the city. Who knew that with bandits popping up everywhere outside the city lately, merchants traveling north and south don't dare take the roads and are all holed up in the city. Every sleepable room in the west city inns is booked — even the pleasure houses have no empty rooms."

As he spoke, he turned and pointed to a street corner not far away. "The official rooms are all gone, and the regular rooms are booked too. The manager of that Watchtower Inn is my father-in-law's godson, so he managed to free up a communal bunk room. Right now Brother Cao and the others are drinking at the straight-wine shop across the way. We don't need to go anywhere else tonight — we'll just sleep there."

In the Ming dynasty, wine shops and guesthouses were broadly divided into four types: restaurants, straight-wine shops, inns, and pleasure houses.

Restaurants need no explanation — they were eateries that served wine and sold cooked food. Straight-wine shops sold only loose wine, similar to modern bars or small taverns. Inns were for sleeping, and pleasure houses were wine shops that specialized in particular services.

Official rooms, regular rooms, and communal bunks all referred to guest-room standards. Because Ming officials traveling on official business mostly stayed in the best rooms, innkeepers came to call their finest rooms "official rooms."

Regular rooms could also be called humble chambers — that is, ordinary rooms. As for communal bunks, they were the lowest grade of guest room, offering nothing more than bed planks for people to sleep on.

You could really just think of them as luxury suites, standard rooms, and dormitory rooms.

In Yan'an Prefecture, however, the price differences between the three types of rooms were not large, because even the official rooms were not particularly luxurious.

Wealthy merchants who truly had both the need and the money generally chose to rent residences long-term in the places where they regularly did business, furnishing and decorating them to personal taste and hiring servants to clean.

This was because housing prices in the Ming dynasty were cheap, rental costs were not high, and the law imposed many restrictions on outsiders buying property — the buying and selling of houses was not free.

In fact, the costs of furnishing, decorating, and staffing to maintain a house were often far greater than the cost of renting.

Buying a house was like buying land — neither was something you could do just by having money. Under Ming law, both were treated as matters of inheritance and required asking all four neighbors.

When a homeowner wanted to sell a house, he first had to ask his father's generation, his own generation, and the younger generation of relatives. Only if none of them wanted it could he ask the neighbors. Only after asking everyone and finding no takers could it be sold to an outsider.

For someone like Liu Chengzong, who was used to sleeping in desolate wilderness and military encampments, a good place to sleep was naturally comfortable, but a bad place didn't matter either — it couldn't be worse than a heated sand pit, anyway. He smiled as he walked along and said, "A communal bunk is good, communal bunks are warm... How much silver did you give that gatekeeper?"

Chengyun said, "A mace of broken silver, just a little bean. When we set out, Big Brother gave me a fair amount of poor-quality silver."

Liu Chengzong knew that silver — it had all been taken from White Eagle. But even though that money had come easily, it still made him pause and say thoughtfully, "That's quite a bit. What's the silver-to-cash exchange rate in the prefectural city right now?"

A mace is a unit of weight, equal to 3.75 grams. Ten cash make one fen, ten fen make one mace, ten mace make one tael, and sixteen taels make one catty.

The currency commonly circulating among the people was copper cash. One tael of silver was always officially exchanged at a rate of one to one thousand, but in practice it was very hard to get that many copper cash. Among the people, one tael of silver typically exchanged for six or seven hundred copper cash.

The exchange rate between gold and silver was around one to eight.

Chengyun cheerfully patted his waist and grinned. "Today one tael of silver exchanges for nine hundred and ninety-two Tongbao cash. That mace of broken silver I gave the gatekeeper is enough for him to buy three catties of braised lamb's trotters at the market and eat his fill."

As he said this, Chengyun wore a rather smug expression and raised his eyebrows. "This is all stuff I've learned over the years. Normally, giving three fen of silver is enough to get a gatekeeper to run an errand and pass a message. But buying land is a big matter that affects the clan's livelihood — giving an extra seven fen is to make sure he doesn't mess things up."

"But you can't give too much, or you'll stir up greed in a man, and that backfires. Letting him have one good meal is enough."

Silver prices were high in the northwest. Tax collectors would not accept copper cash, only silver, and farming households did not produce silver. As a result, any merchant traveling from the northwest to the southeast had a side business in silver exchange, and they made a fortune doing it.

Now that the world was falling into chaos and trade routes were difficult to travel, silver prices should by all rights have dropped a little. But property-owning households with any wealth now had a need to hedge against risk. Silver and gold — high in value, light in weight, easy to carry — had become treasures no one wanted to part with, and their prices were even higher than before.

A mace of silver was not an outrageous sum, but it was still a lot. The most common households that made up the bulk of the Great Ming population — a typical family of three — had an annual income of only eight to forty taels.

It was like a family with an annual income of forty thousand paying a hundred just as an entry fee to get something done. Not cheap.

In this era, however, with the limited circulation of goods in northern Shaanxi, the value of money in people's minds was far less significant than it would be in later ages.

Liu Chengzong had no eye for money. He neither praised Chengyun for handling things well nor scolded him for being extravagant. He just shook his head and sighed. "To think you can still buy lamb's trotters in the city right now."

Fushi City sat backed against Qingliang Mountain, with the East River and West River flowing past. Its environment was far better than the counties to the north — the drought had minimal impact here. Even with both south and north in utter chaos, inside the city people still had no worries about food and clothing.

But these things were not usually known to the common folk living in remote villages. For an ordinary village family, a single trip to the prefectural city was something the elders would relish talking about for the rest of their lives.

As the two talked, they arrived at the Watchtower Inn. From a distance they could see Cao Yao and Lu Bin in the straight-wine shop, leaning against the counter and pouring themselves drinks. The wine was warm, sweet, thick fermented wine — the kind that in the countryside outside the prefectural city, common folk usually only brewed a little at home during the New Year using surplus grain. It was very good.

The wine was not expensive either — a pot cost only thirty cash.

Lu Bin, visiting the prefectural city for the first time, was already brimming with excitement. Now with thick fermented wine to drink too, he was beside himself with joy.

Cao Yao, on the other hand, was going too far. Perhaps weary from carrying his saber all the time, he had simply unbuckled his leather belt and placed it, together with Liu Chengzong's waist saber, on the counter. This had frightened the poor men who had been standing at the counter drinking into fleeing outside. The two of them occupied the entire huge counter, leaving the manager too afraid to object and too scared to speak.

The manager dared not speak, but the wine-warming boy, bold as a newborn calf, did dare. He had barely grumbled two sentences before the manager slapped him hard across the face and sent him outside. The manager himself bowed and scraped, apologizing profusely to Cao Yao.

This big, burly man with a scarred face looked like a thug at a glance — why provoke him?

When Liu Chengzong walked into the straight-wine shop, he happened to catch the wine-warming boy heading out with a long cloth draped over his arm. The boy was pointing at a few beggars loitering at the door begging for wine and food, cursing them viciously and driving them away. He was taking out the resentment from the manager's slap on the beggars.

But as he turned his head, Liu Chengzong noticed that one of the beggars was wearing clothes that looked very familiar.

It was a mandarin-duck battle jacket.

Note:

The silver-to-cash exchange rate is based on the silver exchange price in Sanyuan County, Xi'an Prefecture, in the second year of the Chongzhen reign.

"On the twenty-fourth day of the intercalary fourth month, used seventy-four taels and eight fen of silver, exchanged for sixty-nine thousand two hundred and seventy-one cash." — Loyal Ruler's Daily Record