Chapter 1090: Tang Ruowang's Letter (3)

... This scene greatly exceeded our guide's expectations. Being Chinese, he was even more shocked by these sights than I was. He kept pestering our escorts with questions, not even afraid of provoking their displeasure. I once asked him why he cared so much about matters here. He told me he was already deeply moved by what he saw, and had even decided that once he gained his freedom, he would immediately return to his hometown and bring his entire family here, so they too could enjoy life in this place — even if that life was brought about by a rebel against the Ming Empire, it didn't matter.

I could understand his thinking, but I still kindly reminded him that relocation is no simple matter. No matter how prosperous this place might be, if he brought his family here without any means of making a living, it would likely be a more terrible ordeal for them than staying in their hometown.

My guide, however, said he was not worried about this, because he had already made inquiries and learned that this place actually suffers from a severe labor shortage. Zhao Jin's forces intend to develop agriculture in this region on a massive scale, and have even established a specialized agency for this purpose — the Agricultural Reclamation Office. Under this office's unified planning and direction, agricultural production in the surrounding area is developing on an enormous scale.

And this requires a great deal of labor. Therefore, Xuzhou has in fact been recruiting workers continuously and distributing them to their various farmsteads. My guide said that Zhao Jin's forces do not take much of the farmers' output — at the very least, far less than the rents and taxes they must bear back home. As long as he and his family work hard, they can keep a great deal of grain, and they need not bear the various terrible taxes imposed by the imperial court.

At this point, I knew his mind was made up, and I had no intention of persuading him otherwise. I merely blessed him in the Lord's name.

Compared to my guide, who merely wanted a better life for his family, my thoughts ran somewhat deeper.

In my view, what Zhao Jin's forces are doing is no different from having already replaced the imperial court and achieved effective rule over this region — they have re-planned the land, undertaken construction work, and have even completely replaced the court's power to collect taxes. One could say that in this area, they are the government, merely continuing to nominally submit to the rule of the Ming imperial court.

This situation, where a feudal lord holds all ruling power over his territory and submits to the supreme ruler only in name, is commonplace in our Europe. But in the Ming Empire, apart from the remote frontiers, it is almost never seen — indeed, it is unheard of. When we studied Chinese history in Macau, we all knew that nearly two thousand years ago, a great emperor had already replaced the Zhou Dynasty, unified China, and then stripped away these feudal lords' privileges.

What kind of person could actually accomplish such a feat?

I could not help but become filled with interest in that man named Zhao Jin.

With this interest, I began conversing with our escorts with a purpose, subtly drawing information out of them.

Fortunately, these men all greatly revered Zhao Jin, so I obtained a great deal of information without much effort.

According to them, their leader is still very young — not even thirty years old.

For such a grand enterprise, this age is excessively young. So much so that some of the Chinese we encountered even privately spread rumors, attaching a mystical aura to their faction's meteoric rise — for instance, that at the time of his birth, a magical animal or a mysterious natural phenomenon appeared, and so on.

However, from my observations, the rapid rise of this faction is not particularly mystical, but has a traceable logic — he is, in fact, China's first factional group driven primarily by industry and commerce.

Before it, China had some merchant groups, a few even wealthy enough to rival nations, but there had never before appeared such an industrial and commercial group that simultaneously achieved control over land, mines, workshops, agriculture, and capital.

This young man called Zhao Jin, in a very short time, established a vast industrial and commercial network centered on Xuzhou, from which he has extracted enormous profits, and used these profits to support his political interests, even raising an army — just like the Medici family, he used commercial wealth to obtain everything he wanted, and the scale and speed of it, in my view, are even more astonishing than the Medici.

This is the result of effort and talent, not some mystical cause.

And in my view, effort is more worthy of admiration than miracles.

As we traveled northward, the closer we drew to the core territory of Zhao Jin's forces, the more we could feel this region's extraordinary prosperity. Compared to the increasingly withered villages elsewhere, the country folk here clearly possessed more wealth and means of livelihood, and thus their standard of living far exceeded that of other places.

It was not purely a matter of agriculture. I carefully observed the soil of this land and found it was no different from the places we had passed along the way. One could even say that, compared to the warmer and more humid south, the climate here is actually harsher for crops. Logically, the agricultural conditions here are clearly inferior to those of the places we traveled through.

Therefore, logically speaking, the prosperity here should be attributed more to the efforts of the Zhao Jin group and the people. The Zhao Jin group provides a relatively stable order, and has lightened the oppression and burdens on the subjects — you should understand why I phrase it this way — allowing these hardworking farmers to enjoy the fruits of their own labor.

Having developed an even greater curiosity about everything in Xuzhou, I resolved to do my utmost to observe this rapidly developing region more deeply.

Most unfortunately, our status as captives restricted our freedom of movement, making it impossible for me to visit the places that interested me and converse with the people here. However, this difficulty was soon resolved by an unexpected turn of events.

As missionaries, we all possess some medical skills, and this knowledge we had painstakingly acquired soon helped me greatly: as we traveled along the way, we passed through the hometown of the patrol captain escorting us. When he passed through, he suddenly heard from his family the terrible news that his younger brother had fallen gravely ill. At his wit's end, we offered to help treat his brother, and because of the care he had shown us along the journey, we would not charge him any fee.

God be praised, our treatment went very smoothly, and his brother's acute illness soon healed completely. The captain was extremely grateful to us, and therefore, for the rest of the journey, the patrol team's restrictions on us were very lax. They even deliberately slowed the pace of travel, allowing us to converse with the locals as much as possible and tour these places.

This laxity was, in a sense, also a display of confidence — they absolutely did not believe that people like us could pose any threat.

Yes, very confident.

Unlike the farmers in other places, who are tormented by famine and taxes into a dazed and numb state, the people here mostly have a cheerful air about them. Clearly, they believe that under the leadership of Zhao Jin and his trusted followers, their lives will get better and better, and that no one can interfere with or obstruct them from achieving this.

Both Zhao Jin's subordinates and the common people possess this peculiar confidence. Even though they are already deep in the heartland of the Ming Empire and have become an independent region only nominally loyal to the Ming court, they are not the least bit worried about the imperial court's potential suppression at any time. The reason for this, I only came to understand not long after.

While the Xuzhou faction has lightened its exploitation of the farmers, I can assure you that the Xuzhou faction's income has not decreased — in fact, it may even have increased. Because they have more reliable means of accumulating wealth.

Along the way, we saw many workshops. These workshops for brewing liquor, making wooden implements, and producing textiles lined the main roads in great abundance. Moreover, these workshops could be discovered without any particularly detailed investigation; it was obvious that most of them were personally owned by Zhao Jin and his trusted followers.

These workshops have all absorbed large numbers of people, continuously producing all kinds of products to supply the people of the Xuzhou region, while at the same time increasing their purchasing power, thus enabling them to live a relatively prosperous life.

If seeing all this was enough to make us marvel at the enormous wealth of Zhao Jin's forces, then what we saw next truly shook us.

When we were escorted to the outskirts of Xuzhou city, we discovered a large cluster of ironware workshops gathered together. Every day, great numbers of freight wagons streamed in and out, so that these workshops daily swallowed vast quantities of ore, smelted it into molten iron, and finally spat out an incalculable number of iron products and farming tools — even armor and weapons. The workshops here have actually formed a very large market town, which the locals even privately call Iron City.

Although we all begged to go inside and take a look, the patrol captain absolutely refused. He said he was under strict orders never to allow any unrelated persons to enter that place, in order to prevent sabotage, or else he would face severe punishment — from this we could also see the degree of importance Zhao Jin places on these workshops.

After our request was denied, our entreaties finally managed to win some concessions from the captain. He allowed us to observe those workshops from a distance, and even to exchange a few words with the workers going on shift — though, of course, all of this had to be under the surveillance of the patrol members.

And so, having obtained the patrol captain's permission, we approached the vicinity of these ironware workshops and began to observe.

In this place where workshops are concentrated, the air is filled day after day with the smell of coal smoke and scorched odors. We found that at times the sky itself even seemed to be rendered somewhat gray and hazy by the dust and fog...

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