Chapter 685: Consumables

Salt is a matter of great state policy.

And in the northwest, tea carries equally immense significance.

After appointing Sun Zhensheng as Salt-Circuit Inspector to investigate salt administration, Liu Chengzong soon received word that another Sanyuan salt merchant, Liang Xing, had arrived in Xi'an.

This man, following his meeting with Liu Chengzong, went through practically the same process — appointed as Tea-Circuit Inspector and assigned to the same government office as Sun Zhensheng.

Both of these merchants were utterly stunned by the official posts Liu Chengzong had dropped on them.

They were completely powerless to refuse.

This had nothing to do with Liu Chengzong's authority or the rank of the offices granted.

It all came down to the positions themselves.

Throughout history, the greatest wish of a merchant who has made his fortune has always been for his descendants to study and pass the civil examinations to win scholarly honors. Why?

Because commerce leaves one at the mercy of others.

Small trades are at the mercy of market officials; great merchants are at the mercy of policy. This powerful relationship of managing and being managed is the underlying logic behind "when business excels, pursue office."

The posts Liu Chengzong offered turned the managed into the managers, even into policy-makers — how could Sun Zhensheng and Liang Xing possibly refuse?

No posts could be more perfectly suited.

If there were any, it would be giving those posts to their sons, while the old men merely played the fox borrowing the tiger's might.

Of course, Liu the Lion had indeed considered this, but Sun Zhiwei was only fifteen — never mind holding office, he couldn't even serve as a soldier outside the Children's Battalion.

Toward these two officials of merchant origin, Liu Chengzong made no excessive demands; he merely gave them one parting line.

"Since you are scholar-merchants, among loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, and righteousness, you must at least embody one."

This was both encouragement and a warning.

That said, Liu Chengzong did hold considerable expectations for the work these two would do.

As far as salt law was concerned, private salt was equally fatal to the Marshal's Mansion.

Although Qing salt was inexhaustible and guarded by the Mongol tribes of the sea, the region and environment could largely prevent private salt at the source.

But if private salt were truly so easy to resolve, it would never have been a great problem across dynasty after dynasty.

This comes down to the definition: what is private salt?

The largest salt field within Shaanxi lay at Huamachi, currently still in an abandoned state, and it was also the present source of private salt in Shaanxi. Although its salt reserves were less than one percent of the many salt lakes in Qinghai, its early development and large salt-consuming population meant its annual output still exceeded that of Qing salt.

In the past, during the Zhengde reign, that area produced fifty-four million jin of official salt annually, sold as far as Xi'an, Yan'an, Ningxia, and Yulin.

Even after the salt-certificate system underwent several changes — from six to eight dan per certificate down to two hundred jin of salt per certificate — it still maintained an annual output of sixteen million jin.

In fact, the number of salt certificates alone already revealed the early signs of the salt-law collapse in the late Ming.

Fifty-four million jin of salt, supplying the people of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia, for curing meat and feeding livestock, was a roughly sufficient quantity.

Under the rationing system of the Hongwu reign, one adult male received only three jin of salt per year, with women and children further reduced proportionally; but that was the early founding period of the Great Ming. By the Yongle reign, it had changed to one jin per month for adults and half a jin per month for children.

From the Zhengde reign onward, the population of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia had not significantly declined all the way into the Tianqi reign, yet Huamachi, as the main official salt production site, saw its annual output plummet to sixteen million jin.

Where did the rest of the salt go?

Part of it was drawn from salt certificates at Xiechi in Shanxi; the other part was squeezed out by private salt.

The private salt problem was actually not that complicated, and private salt dealers were by no means some murderous thugs with massive armed escorts trafficking salt by force.

That's far too low-level.

Throughout history, private salt dealers have been prone to rebel and become ringleaders not because they possessed great armed force, but because the salt bosses had connections and influence with the troops guarding the salt pools, the regions where private salt was sold, and the government offices supervising salt administration.

To put it bluntly, where did private salt come from?

If someone hid in the mountains organizing over a hundred men to mine rock salt, or gathered a few dozen poor folk squatting on alkaline land to bitterly boil earth-salt — those were not salt bosses.

Moving by night and hiding by day, working diligently and conscientiously, risking beheading to produce a few thousand jin of crude, impure earth-salt, then hauling it out through endless hardship to sell — and still possibly finding no customers because official salt had squeezed them out.

What kind of hardworking rural entrepreneur getting rich through diligence was this?

Indeed, enormous profit lay within it: a few dozen men, in two or three nights, could earn what others made in a year or two.

But these chemists who lived by brute labor — their mode of production posed limited threat to the state and society; the court couldn't even be bothered to arrest them.

The salt bosses' largest supplier was the government itself.

Private salt was official salt.

It was the officials managing salt affairs, the troops guarding the salt pools, the imperial relatives disrupting salt law — with a single flimsy slip of paper, they bypassed all the toil of producing and gathering salt.

Millions of jin of official salt were transported out, distributed by salt bosses acting as their clean-hands front men.

Those people needed no armed escorts; everything followed official salt procedures. The salt-pool troops dispatched a garrison, the local government mobilized corvée labor, and the salt was hauled to official salt sales regions and sold to official salt distributors.

The money from these sales of official salt went into private pockets — that's why it was called private salt.

As for those salt merchants who boiled earth-salt themselves, official salt had no fear of competing with them. Official salt controlled the best raw-material production sites: fence off a salt pool, scoop with an iron ladle, and you'd get a purity that others couldn't achieve even after refining several times over.

Even if they all boiled earth-salt together, the government could mobilize corvée labor at zero cost and also possessed superior refining techniques.

Your private salt has low prices and poor quality? My official salt has good quality and even lower prices — I'll squeeze you to death.

The problem was, they took the exact same official salt as yours, used the exact same channels as yours, sold in the exact same regions as yours, at the exact same price as yours — how do you fight that?

This was the reason the court had to crack down on private salt.

Because those higher up could not be touched, they could only hammer down hard on the private salt dealers.

As long as the Marshal's Mansion had people, it faced this same risk.

But that was a matter for a far later time. As for the current problem of private salt everywhere in Shaanxi, Liu Chengzong had no intention of dealing with it at all.

Shaanxi had fallen into such a godforsaken state these past few years — people couldn't get official salt, so the common folk boiled a bit of earth-salt from their own alkaline land to eat. What's the big deal?

It's only human.

Once he straightened out salt affairs and established the salt-certificate price and the official fixed salt price, he would naturally be able to smash all those private salt-boiling workshops in one blow.

In fact, at this moment, there were no large-scale private salt workshops anyway — after all, the biggest gang that boiled private salt and refined earth-saltpeter had just been taken under his command before the new year.

That was Zhou Qing, known as Sky Full of Stars, and Hui Dengxiang, known as Mixed Stars, who operated in the Hengshan region.

These two were old subordinates of Wang Jiayin from the border army, and they seemed to have a tradition of local banditry — back in Wang Jiayin's day they'd already entrenched themselves in Hequ and kept attacking Fugu County.

Zhou Qing and Hui Dengxiang were the same: they withdrew into the Hengshan mountains, linked up with the local bandits, and quickly transformed from rebels into a regional gang.

Living off the mountains, every large unit under them built stockades in the hills — boiling salt, refining saltpeter, felling timber to sell, making firecrackers, kidnapping for ransom and smashing kilns, opening up mountain land for farming, hunting in drives and gathering herbs, plundering merchant caravans, seizing military supplies… they did every kind of work there was.

The crude salt and saltpeter they boiled and refined not only met their own needs, they also sold it into Yansui Garrison and Yan'an Prefecture — their business was huge.

The only problem was they had no credit with Yansui Garrison. One day one large unit would come sell a few things, the next day another large unit would come and pillage the fort.

No rules at all.

Right now the common folk of the Hengshan mountains are being registered into households with their help, in preparation for being incorporated into Yan'an Prefecture.

As for the two men's troops, the Marshal's Manor has also dispatched Tiger Guard officers and Feathered Forest Cadets, escorting a batch of captured Ming army standard-issue equipment.

The objective is to pare down the forces, weed out the old and weak, and reorganize them into two independent Thousand-Commander divisions.

In this year's upcoming northern campaign strategy, Liu Chengzong plans to deploy the two of them on the flank connecting Yansui Garrison and Ningxia Garrison, as a vanguard force to infiltrate both garrisons.

Compared to the Marshal's Manor's salt policy, the tea administration was far more troublesome.

After all, Liu Chengzong held the largest green-salt production area, and Shaanxi's Huamachi Salt City lay between the two border walls — at present it was no-man's-land between the Marshal's Manor and Ningxia Garrison.

The problem with the tea administration was that although there were some places in the northwest that grew tea — even producing tea of extremely high quality in Xi'an, Weinan, Baoji, and other places —

the output was simply too small.

For the Marshal's Manor, the quality of the tea was not what mattered; what mattered was the output.

The existing tea supply couldn't even meet the regular army's needs without constant interruptions; it was never able to satisfy daily requirements.

There was no need whatsoever to even consider the Mongol and Tibetan tribes numbering in the millions across Ü-Tsang, Qinghai, the Tianshan range, and the lands south of the Gobi.

Because the Marshal's Army under Liu Chengzong had a dietary structure very close to the nomadic warriors of Han Chinese imagination.

The kind of nomadic nobles who spend all day guzzling mare's milk, with endless cheese, butter, and meat to eat.

In reality, nomadic warriors didn't even have surnames — like cattle, sheep, and horses, they were the private property of feudal nobles.

And property far more valuable than cattle and sheep — property that could not only herd cattle and sheep, but also pick up a lance and go skewer people, a vital component of the assets.

How in the world could property eat property!

The Marshal's Manor's potential tea market even exceeded that of the entire Great Ming.

But the awkward part was precisely here.

Even though Liu Chengzong had moved his headquarters to Xi'an Prefecture and on the surface controlled the northwest's largest tea-processing center, whose specialty was Fu brick tea —

this tea-processing center, it… its most widely planted crops were cotton and grain. It didn't grow a single tea tree.

The man Liu Chengzong appointed as Tea-Inspecting Censor, Liang Xing of Sanyuan, was also a salt merchant.

The difference, however, was that Liang Xing not only had salt dens in Yangzhou, he also had his own tea brand in Jingyang, recruited workers and opened factories — his business was no small affair either.

If Sun Zhensheng was more like a local gentry than a merchant, then Liang Xing was a merchant through and through.

He had no interest in organizing militia to resist the Marshal's Army — he'd donated just ten taels of silver.

And after learning from Ye Ding that the Marshal's Manor wished to summon him to discuss commercial matters, before he even left his house he changed his tea brand's name.

To Liu Dasheng.

What's more, unlike Sun Zhensheng, he didn't come empty-handed. He brought over ten attendants, carrying Shanxi silks and satins, Yaozhou ceramics, deer antler and tiger bone, Jingyang Fu bricks, and even two tiger pelts.

Though to Liu Chengzong these were all common items, among ordinary folk they were still fairly valuable gifts.

When he finally met Liu Chengzong, since Liang Xing was much younger, the Grand Marshal's single word "Elder Brother" nearly made him donate his entire fortune to military funds on the spot.

The Northwest Outlaw-in-Chief calling me good brother — who could withstand that?

With this man, Liu Chengzong didn't ask him about salt, only discussing tea.

Liang Xing repaid Liu Chengzong's respect in kind. Speaking purely as a businessman, he used his professional eye to point out a clear path forward.

Huguang and Hanzhong — the two great tea-producing regions — one of them must be held in hand; only then would the Marshal's Manor have the standing to discuss tea policy.

Otherwise, holding Jingyang, this key tea-processing town, in vain was like casting a bright pearl into darkness — utterly useless.

From Liang Xing, Liu the Lion gained a deeper understanding of Jingyang's handicraft industry.

The raw material for Jingyang Fu tea, in earlier years, was mainly dark-mao tea from Baoning in Sichuan and Hanzhong in Shaanxi.

Because Sichuan tea and Shaanxi tea had low yields and high prices, while Huguang tea had high yields and low prices, merchants began smuggling Huguang tea into Shaanxi.

The officials were naturally happy to see this, reasoning that although Huguang tea was bitter, when drunk with butter and milk… sold to the Tartars — anyway, they weren't drinking it themselves, so it was perfect!

Thus, every year six million jin of Huguang tea entered Shaanxi via Longju Fortress in Shangnan, crossed the Wei River, and was transported to Jingyang for processing — Huguang tea became one of the raw materials for Fu tea.

Jingyang relied on the Jing River; the river water was cold by nature and slightly bitter, an alkaline water. Using Jing water to tan leather made it exceptionally supple, and for tea fermentation it was uniquely blessed by nature.

As a result, the area had a huge population of leather workers and tea workers. Every year from the second or third month through the eighth or ninth month, over ten thousand leather workers and over ten thousand tea sorters gathered there, along with several thousand idlers carrying boxes and goods — these people were the foundation of Jingyang's developed handicraft industry.

Relying on the local special processing techniques, the sorted tea was pressed into bricks and shipped to Xining, Gansu, Ningxia, and other places.

But this trade route had been almost entirely cut off in the second year after Liu Chengzong entered Qinghai.

Because those official tea bricks were used to trade for horses on the frontier.

With the horses gone, the tea naturally had nowhere to be traded. Though there were other places that could take it, they simply couldn't absorb the enormous volume of nearly ten million jin of tea bricks, and it couldn't be sold within Shaanxi itself either.

Brick tea was frontier tea — Han people didn't drink brick tea.

A huge backlog of tea bricks piled up, and by the second year the trade route was impassable.

By now, it had also gone through Huguang Miao troops entering Shaanxi, routed troops entering Huguang, Shaanxi peasant armies entering Huguang — all manner of forces rampaging back and forth.

By the time Zhao Zhirui, Vice General of the Guanzhong Brigade, garrisoned Wu Pass, that route was completely severed.

Liang Xing's suggestion was either to reopen this trade route —

or to stabilize order in Hanzhong, increase Hanzhong mao tea production, ship it to Jingyang for processing into Fu tea, make it into tea bricks, and sell it to Qinghai, Ü-Tsang, the lands south of the Gobi, and other places, buying back warhorses.

Liu Chengzong hurriedly cut him off as he listened: "No need to trade everything for horses with tea — trading tea for medicinal herbs works too."

The Marshal's Manor lacked everything except horses.

Although the work at Longju Island on warhorse breeding and improving horse stock had only just begun to show results.

Yet although the front lines had been fighting all along, warhorses had not decreased — on the contrary, spoils of war had made their numbers swell. Meanwhile, the military horse count in the rear had been steadily rising, and the influx came in baffling, muddled fashion.

The Tianshan herdsmen drove horses this way year after year; the Qinghai pasture garrisons produced new foals every year; and the chieftains of Kangning who had not been wiped out, eager to prove the meaning of their existence, sent horses to the coast — you fifty head, I sixty head.

Even on the Heka Grassland battlefield, after two years, several herds of exceptionally fine wild horses had appeared.

Strange to say, Cui Cong of Dragon Colt Monastery had been improving horse breeds on the coast, and the foals he painstakingly bred were precious beyond measure.

A single stud was tended by more than ten men. Take it out for a run, it might step in a grassland snake burrow and go lame; keep it on the coast, let it graze carelessly, and it would get the runs and die of diarrhea.

Yet precisely when the Marshal's command, the Northern Yuan, and the Oirat fought that great three-sided war, the warhorses that were never rounded up turned feral. With no one to tend them, they bred with the local Hequ wild horses and formed a population.

Liu Chengzong had more idle military horses than he had soldiers.

In theory, the more horses the better. From ten civilian horses, five military horses could be selected; from five military horses, after testing, one or two good warhorses could be obtained.

But that was only theory — or rather, it held in an era of normal climate and moderate temperatures, when one could raise three to five million horses and pick the best through rigorous selection.

In this frigid Little Ice Age, Liu Chengzong's choice was to improve the breed, treat them as treasures, and hold them in reserve for the future.

In actual use, warhorses, like donkeys and mules, were merely a kind of tactical equipment.

Used for the performance they could deliver, in the numbers that sufficed.

They bore the duty of expendable matériel.