Chapter 650: Taking from the Wanting to Give to the Having

This winery had already become a familiar haunt for the Nanjing Brocade Guard. It was no surprise that Feng Qi was a regular; a few of the wine addicts practically wished they could soak in the place every day.

"Brother Li, you're truly resourceful. On this trip to Xuzhou, the Big Brother gave special orders: don't be afraid to spend silver, don't be afraid to kill or die, but we must get to the bottom of what those barbarians are up to. I was still wondering how to go about it on the way here, and you, old brother, have already roped someone in. That's really something!" Lei Cai said, utterly convinced.

Lei Cai had originally been worried that Li Dajin was just going through the motions here, but he never imagined that while he was away reporting to Zhao Jin, Li Dajin had already won over a Brocade Guard barbarian in Nanjing.

Spending several hundred taels of silver was no small sum, but for the Zhao Character Camp, especially when it involved a major matter concerning the Brocade Guard, a few hundred taels was honestly not much at all.

And the methods of a seasoned old hand were different after all. That Feng Qi thought he was working for the Scent-Smelling Sect and even left leverage in Li Dajin's hands, never suspecting that the ones pulling the strings behind the scenes were the Zhao Character Camp.

"Master Lei flatters me. These kinds of things are only difficult at the start. Once you pry open a crack, the rest comes easy. These barbarians are nothing more than runners; they're just as money-grubbing and just as afraid of death," Li Dajin said with a smile.

But after saying this, Li Dajin's expression grew much more serious as he added, "However, we need to be careful now. If Feng Qi turns out to be stubbornly loyal and truly flips on us by reporting this, this winery will be in trouble. It's possible we could all be taken down right here. Master Lei and I could manage, but the underlings below might not be able to hold out."

Lei Cai nodded. After a moment of silence, a cold sneer surfaced on his face. He spoke, "I've already sent men to keep an eye on the Feng household. I refuse to believe that Feng boy won't care about his mother and his wife."

Yang Hao's crushing defeat in Liaodong, though it had little direct connection to the current Zhao Character Camp, nevertheless filled Zhao Jin and his companions with a sense of urgency.

"... The most important thing is self-strengthening. It's inconvenient for the Zhao Character Camp to expand, but there are still the local militias, and the tenant farmers and manor guards on the estates. All these people need to be inspected and trained. Before, it was said that training them for no reason would invite suspicion, but now we can say the border is unstable, the Tatar slaves are eyeing us, and we must train braves for self-defense..."

Over in Qingjiangpu, orders from the Zhao Character Camp were issued one after another. Zhao Jin greeted all the local parties in Qingjiangpu, especially the major merchants connected to the great market, instructing each of their shops to take on five or ten guards.

At first, the merchants of Qingjiangpu thought this was just the Zhao Character Camp's method of fleecing them and collecting taxes. Since the Zhao Character Camp had arrived, they had conducted legitimate business, but holding such a dominant position, they ought to be doing something overbearing like collecting protection money. Otherwise, what was the point of the daily expenses for the over a thousand able-bodied young men "practicing martial arts" in those two martial clubs? Wouldn't that be a loss?

Having been in business for a long time, everyone was naturally shrewd in their calculations and could all guess Zhao Jin's intent behind this move. Each shop taking on guards—the guards themselves certainly wouldn't be provided, but the costs for food, clothing, shelter, and transport, along with the price of weapons and horses, these couldn't be avoided. All these expenses and consumables, converted into ready silver, would flow into the Zhao Character Camp's pockets.

Although five or ten men per shop wasn't much silver, considering the vast scale of Qingjiangpu, when pooled together, it amounted to a very large sum. This was likely just the first levy; who knew what other tricks would be used in the future.

Grumbling in their hearts was one thing, but no one voiced any objections. In the eyes of everyone in Qingjiangpu, squeezing the land for money was the proper way of things. The previous approach of just doing business was the strange one. Several thousand men had come and left a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood; if it was all just for peaceful business, wouldn't their brains be broken?

But Qingjiangpu had never accurately guessed what the Zhao Character Camp intended to do, and this time was no different. Each household, following the Zhao Character Camp's instructions, reported their need for guards, which was then registered and recorded at the government office. Before, the office had no such rule; the reason it existed now was entirely the Zhao Character Camp's arrangement.

The county and prefectural offices were indifferent to it. Registering was just registering; there was no fixed statute or imperial law against it anyway. It was just that the Zhao Character Camp provided some compensation for the trouble, so everyone was willing to put in the extra work.

As the registrations proceeded one by one, each household instructed their accounting offices to prepare the silver, ready to hand it over when the time came. Those wealthy merchants even prepared generous sums of money and supplies, all intended as rewards to show their willingness and, in passing, to draw their mutual relationships closer.

However, the matter seemed to end there. The Zhao Character Camp made no mention of expenses at all, leaving everyone baffled. But since saving a bit was saving a bit, no one was eager to bring it up.

With Zhao Jin in Qingjiangpu, letters and documents from Xuzhou had to be forwarded here, and the same went for correspondence from the Wang family. Although the Zhao Character Camp had already assigned quite a few riders as couriers specifically for Wang Youshan in the capital, the number of letters the Wang family sent to Xuzhou during this period was simply too many. The courier riders were once again insufficient.

But Zhao Jin did not find it troublesome, because the content of these letters was now so rich. The disastrous defeat of Yang Hao's Liaodong expedition had put the entire Great Ming on edge. From the imperial court down to the localities, everyone, top to bottom, began to accelerate—some for military affairs, others for factional struggles.

"... Your younger brother has fallen from the roster. That Sun Chuanting from Daizhou in Shanxi passed the exam, though his ranking was not high; he will likely be sent out to serve as a county magistrate. By the way, that Yu Zhiyuan, who will be visiting in a few days, also did not pass this time..."

After the metropolitan examination, the rankings came out very quickly, but Wang Zhaojing paid no attention at all, or rather, did not wish to bring it up. He had set out on his return journey immediately after the exam ended, and it had already been nearly three months. Only now did he mention that he had not passed. Zhao Jin was equally unconcerned by this.

Passing the exam in the same year was a connection that could be leveraged and utilized later on. Moreover, the presented scholars of the Great Ming were the candidates for the highest echelons of the bureaucracy. Just like in past metropolitan and palace examinations, the presented scholars of this cohort would, in ten or twenty years, occupy all the top positions in the Great Ming's officialdom, governing the realm.

For this reason, Wang Youshan had taken the trouble to copy out a list of all the successful candidates' names and send it over. But Wang Zhaojing merely picked out a few he cared about to mention, such as Sun Chuanting, whom he had met once, and Yu Zhiyuan, whose ties with the Zhao Character Camp were growing ever closer.

"... The Prince of Hui and the Prince of Gui, born of Noble Consort Li, are to be married in the seventh or eighth month of this year. At the time, the Ministry of Revenue set the wedding expenses at seventy thousand taels per person, but His Majesty felt this was too little. After arguing until now, a conclusion has finally been reached: it is to be doubled, one hundred forty thousand taels per person..." Wang Zhaojing read indifferently. Such matters were truly unsurprising. Back when the Prince of Fu was leaving for his fief, the Wanli Emperor's posture made it seem as if he wanted to hand over the entire national treasury to the Prince of Fu. This was just a hundred-some thousand taels; no one cared.

What was to be said next, however, brought a cold sneer to Wang Zhaojing's face.

"... Due to the imposition of the Liaodong levy, a special Vice Minister of the Ministry of Revenue has been appointed, stationed in Tianjin to oversee this matter. Li Changgeng, the Grand Coordinator of Shandong, is to assume this post..."

At that time, the relevant offices had agreed to annually transport to Liaodong: 1.8 million shi of rice, 900,000 shi of beans, 21.6 million bundles of straw, and 3.24 million taels of silver. The Ministry of Revenue's Grand Treasury ran a deficit year after year, while the Inner Treasury, reserved for the emperor's personal use, was piled high with silver and overflowing with goods and grain. Thus, Li Changgeng requested to retain the gold flower silver and redirect tax levies to supply the Liaodong military funds.

His basis was the Ministry of Revenue's documentation: annually, the combined total of in-kind and commuted tax payments amounted to over 14.61 million taels of silver. Over 6 million taels entered the Inner Treasury, while the Grand Treasury received, apart from in-kind payments, over 4 million taels in commuted silver. Of the Inner Treasury's 6 million taels, aside from gold flower silver and seed grain, the rest consisted of silk, cotton, cloth, silk fabrics, wax, tea, pigments, and the like, much of which rotted and spoiled over the years. Commuting half of these materials to silver would cause no loss to the throne while benefiting the people below. Other items, such as Shaanxi's cashmere wool and Jiangsu-Zhejiang's textiles, should also be suspended for one year to meet the military and national needs.

"... The Son of Heaven was enraged and issued a verbal decree that the gold flower silver and seed grain were 'the old institutions of the ancestors,' 'the proper quota for internal supply,' and 'must not be borrowed or retained'..."

Wang Youshan had written this section in great detail, and Wang Zhaojing also explained it carefully. But these events were all old news from around the second month. The reason they were brought up now was likely that, at the time, they had seemed merely commonplace. Court officials begging the Son of Heaven to open the Inner Treasury to pay the troops and provide relief, and the Son of Heaven adamantly refusing—this drama had been playing out since the Wanli Emperor's teens. Yet now it needed to be recounted in detail because it contrasted with the defeat in Liaodong, appearing almost like cause and effect. An army of over a hundred thousand had been crushed, the situation was critical, but how had this situation come about? What exactly had all those high ministers in the court been doing before?

"What a joke. It's his family's realm, yet he's unwilling to spend the silver. With this outcome..." Wang Zhaojing remarked with biting sarcasm.

Zhao Jin, however, did not pick up on this statement. Instead, he smiled and asked, "Here in Xuzhou and Qingjiangpu, our foundation rests on the output of the tenant farmers from the estates. But what does our growth rely on? It relies on selling wine and doing business. After all that bitter toil of farming, once you deduct the costs and the grain for their own mouths, how much is left? Yet everyone schemes over this, thinking the money and grain in the hands of the farming households are inexhaustible, that they can produce however much is demanded. But how much profit can trade and commerce actually generate? Here in Qingjiangpu, in Yangzhou, and looking further to Jiangnan, industry and commerce are so thriving, yet who goes to collect taxes there? If that sector were levied the way the farming households are, how much wealth could be collected for the state?"

At Zhao Jin's seemingly off-topic reply, Wang Zhaojing was briefly taken aback before catching on. Seeing his thoughtful expression, Zhao Jin continued, "What you see is the Inner Treasury unwilling to release silver for military funds. What I see is the proposal to suspend the Jiangsu-Zhejiang textiles. There are countless matters in the realm that harass the people. Countless farming households, unable to survive, have their families destroyed and lives lost. Jiangnan is teeming with wealthy merchants and powerful clans; their losing some wealth is always better than the common folk losing their homes. Why does no one speak of levying commercial taxes? Why does no one propose any measures in Jiangnan, yet instead they want to shut down the textile works of Jiangsu and Zhejiang?"

As Zhao Jin questioned him, Wang Zhaojing had already grasped the meaning. He slowly shook his head, the cold sneer on his face deepening as he said, "Taking from the wanting to give to the having. Robbing the poor to enrich the wealthy. Is this not sawing off the very root that sustains them?"

After this single lament, the smile on Wang Zhaojing's face had vanished. He sighed and said, "To pursue scholarly honors, to study and write examination essays, to seek teachers and visit friends—which of these doesn't cost silver? Even households with property struggle to support a scholar, let alone common farmers. When these men pass the exams and become officials, they naturally must look after their families and hometowns. The tax exemptions that come with their scholarly rank are never enough; they'd be happiest if they didn't have to pay a single coin."

It's the middle of the month. Have you all gotten your second monthly ticket yet? Cast it for Great Ming Wufu! Thank you, everyone.