My life skills in Daming Liver

Su Ze thought for a while and said, "Eunuch Hu, can I arrange some students to help you here?"

"Help? Learning weaving and dyeing?"

Su Ze nodded and said, "I want the children in the guard to learn some crafts."

Eunuch Hu said indifferently: "What's so difficult about this, even if Su Xianggong sends someone over, the miscellaneous family will not hide their secrets and teach them all!"

Su Ze talked with Eunuch Hu again about the method of extracting dyes. Both of them felt that they were not satisfied, and they made an appointment to talk about it next time.

It was not safe to travel at night with the child Lin Liangjun, so Su Ze stayed in the mine supervisor for another night and sent Lin Liangjun back to the guard the next day.

These days, Lin Cainiang has taken on the work of the family temple.

Ninth Auntie, like the old grandfather, gets tired easily when she gets older. Lin Cainiang has already learned the rituals of temple celebrations, and now Lin Cainiang can handle all large-scale ceremonies except for the ancestral hall sacrifices and other large-scale ceremonies.

But what is strange is that since Su Ze came to Changning Guard, the guard has become richer day by day, and after winning several battles, the number of guards coming to the family temple has decreased day by day.

Ninth Auntie is not surprised by this, the more difficult the days are, the more people come to the family temple.

Now life in the guard is getting better, who has nothing to come to the family temple to pray.

Children from every household take advantage of the good weather to dry salt on the beach, and as long as there is a clear sky, the beach is full of people.

Lin Liangjun, the little radish head, has become the general contractor of the salt drying business. He distributed the marked shells to the children participating in the salt drying to calculate their contribution in the salt drying. Shell cents.

Even these shells have become the currency of circulation among the children of Changningwei.

The scale of the weaving workshop managed by Lu's is getting bigger and bigger, not only the widows in the guard, some old women also participated in the weaving workshop.

Lu suggested that Su Ze place another loom in an abandoned barn, and let the nearby women go to work in the barn. Su Ze asked the craftsmen of the shipyard to make a few more looms.

Su Ze soon discovered that Lin Xianyang's sister-in-law is really handy. Although she doesn't understand the principles of mechanics, she is self-taught without a teacher and has been able to repair most of the faults in the loom. Su Ze can only feel that this is the wisdom of the working people ah.

Cotton from Beishan Village has already started to supply Changningwei. Since Jianxi was dredged, Su Ze planned several new irrigation facilities for Beishan Village, and added tens of mu of paddy fields to the Chen family.

Su Ze also improved the irrigation method. Cotton does not need a lot of water in all growth cycles. Su Ze re-planned Beishan Village and designed movable sluices, which only open the sluices for irrigation when water is most needed. Back mountain village saves irrigation water.

After the Changningwei pacified the mine bandits, the Beishan Chen family was firmly tied to the Changningwei chariot.

These days, nothing is more important than a sense of security.

Sun Dianshi's Zhuangzi also sent someone to ask Su Ze to help them sort out the water conservancy settings. Su Ze looked at the water conservancy skill Lv4, 380/400 experience value, and decided to go to Sun Dianshi's farm to brush up the experience when he came back from the county this time.

The crew of the New World has been quarantined. Except for some crew members with bad deeds who were left on the island by Su Ze, the rest of the crew can live ashore under the supervision of the residents of the guard.

Su Ze has promised that as long as the Japanese invasion is over and the sea area is no longer blocked, they will be allowed to leave.

This kind of commitment has made most of the crew settle down. Those who have gone to sea to fight hard these years are adventurers at best, but they cannot survive on land at worst.

Malacca is not their hometown. Anyway, they can eat enough in Changningwei, and no one is clamoring to go home.

Lin Mojun became interested in manipulating the Manila galleon, so she hired a few crew members who could speak Chinese and asked them for advice on how to steer the Xiyi sailboat.

The engraving craftsman Yao Chun went to the county seat, while his wife and children stayed in Changningwei.

Since Yao Chun left, Xiong Wu has been at leisure again.

For some reason, this guy got mixed up with Father Pierre. One of them speaks French and the other speaks Chinese, and they can still communicate. He didn't spread that theory in Changningwei, and Su Ze didn't bother to care about him.

Captain Alfonso also understood that if the Shinsekai would not come back, after much consideration, he decided to start writing, to learn from his idol Marco Polo, and to record his experiences in the East. By publishing travel notes, you may be able to enjoy your old age comfortably.

With such an idea in mind, Captain Alfonso wandered around Changning Guard all day long with his nautical diary.

He also fell in love with charcoal pens, which he thought were easier to write on. Captain Alfonso talked to people in the guard when he had nothing to do, and he found that the name that appeared the most in his notebook was Su Ze.

Captain Alfonso was even more curious about Su Ze, a language genius. When he heard that Su Ze could repair and monitor water conservancy facilities, and saw the Jianxi that Su Ze had managed, Alfonso was extremely surprised.

Is this the scholar of the Ming Dynasty? Alfonso heard that Su Ze could write plays, but it was a pity that his Chinese level was limited to spoken language, and he could not understand Chinese characters, so he could not appreciate Su Ze's excellent works.

Alfonso sighed again, were all the scholars in the Ming Dynasty so powerful? This Su Ze is simply the Leonardo da Vinci of the Ming Dynasty. Such a person is actually the lowest level of scholar in the Ming Dynasty?

Now Alfonso began to believe what Marco Polo said, maybe the capital of the Ming Dynasty was really a city full of gold!

Su Ze didn't know that his reputation in Alfonso's heart had been raised from respect to reverence.

In mid-August, it was the time for Su Ze to go to the city to study again.

But this time the road to the county was very busy, and there were people pushing carts everywhere.

At the gate of the city, Su Ze met Lin Qingyuan, an official of the house, and then remembered that August was the day of summer grain collection in the Ming Dynasty.

The grain collected by the Ming Dynasty was divided into two seasons, the summer grain collection in August and the autumn grain collection in October.

Before Zhang Juzheng's whipping method, the collection was mainly based on the nature, that is, the agricultural tax was levied in kind. Fujian harvested wheat for summer grain and rice for autumn grain.

Changningwei is the military guard of the army, so there is no need to collect summer grain from the county government. Instead, some of the summer grain collected by the county government will be sent to Changningwei. So these days, the farmers in Changningwei are busy in the fields, but Su Ze doesn't know The collection of summer grain.

Tax collection has been the top priority of assessing local officials since ancient times. Although the southeast region is under the threat of the Japanese invasion, as long as the imperial court does not issue an exemption, the collection of summer grain cannot be stopped.

As soon as he met Lin Qingyuan, he poured out bitter water.

"Su Xianggong, I don't know why I am so unlucky. I drew lots to collect taxes from those villages in the south of the city."

The land around Nanping County has the densest water network in the south, and the fields are naturally the best.

In Nanping County, there is a saying that the south is expensive and the east is rich, while the north is poor and the west is cheap. The owner of the southern land was either rich or noble, that's why Lin Qingyuan looked distressed.

Su Ze understood what he was thinking, and wanted Su Ze to go to the county government to talk about it.

However, Su Ze is not going to get involved in the issue of grain requisition, which is a bottomless problem in Daming.

But to understand the conflicts among the people in Nanping County today, Su Ze still asked: "How difficult is it for the Zhuangzi over there to harvest food?"

"Not only is it difficult to collect, last year's autumn grain was not collected!"

Su Ze saw the tea shop next to the city gate, and dragged Lin Qingyuan to the tea shop to explain in detail.

The doctor of tea at the tea shop brought cold tea, and seeing Lin Qingyuan's soap-colored official clothes, he hid far away outside.

Lin Qingyuan smiled wryly and said: "The common people fear us like a tiger, but I don't know that there are times when we are not as good as dogs."

Lin Qingyuan poured out bitter water: "Besides Mr. Cai in the south of the city, his family has the most land in Zhuangzi, and his family's food is also the most difficult to obtain."

Su Ze listened quietly while holding tea, Lin Qingyuan said:

"Cai Yuanwai was appointed by Wailang, a member of the Sixth Department of Southern Zhili, and his family owes the most food."

Many people think that the Ming Dynasty gave preferential treatment to scholars and exempted land taxes under their names, but this is actually wrong.

It is the handyman, not the tax, that officials with meritorious reputation can enjoy.

There are two main burdens on the people of the Ming Dynasty, one is land-based taxes, and the other is labor-based labor.

Taxation is easy to understand, that is, the land produces food and taxes are levied in proportion.

The handyman is based on the obligation shared by the population, sending people to work for the government for free according to the proportion of the population.

These tasks include repairing city walls, repairing water conservancy projects, transporting food, carrying sedan chairs for officials and lords, and so on.

Even working as a servant for the government is actually a kind of handyman.

Miscellaneous labor was very heavy in the Ming Dynasty. Many people put their household registrations into the names of famous scholars in order to avoid miscellaneous labor.

As long as it is land registered by the government, land tax is indispensable.

But land tax is indispensable, but whether it can be collected is hard to say.

For example, Cai Yuanwai used to be a member of the Nanzhili Household Department, Wailang, and made many friends in the officialdom. The government officials couldn't even enter the door of his house, let alone press for the collection of land taxes.

There are many Zhuangzi in the south of the city. When they saw that Cai Yuanwai did not pay the land tax, they followed suit to resist the tax. Every time the tax collectors went to the south of the city to collect taxes, they could not complete the task.

If you can't complete the task, you will be reprimanded by the master in the county, and you will even have to pay the tax owed out of your own pocket.

"Cai Yuan has so much land, how did he resist the tax?"

Lin Qingyuan had been arguing with the Cai family a lot during this time, and said wearily: "Cai Yuanwai said that his family has not grown food these years, and cannot pay taxes with food."

Is this reason okay?

Su Ze thought that if he rebelled, he would have to deal with these "village sages". He asked:

"Then what has Mr. Cai grown all these years?"

"The several manors of the Cai family grow woad."

Woad? Isn’t woad is Radix Banlangen?

"Cai Yuanwai is a big weaving and dyeing family in Yanping Prefecture, and basically all the dyeing workshops in the city belong to his family."

It turns out that this guy is good at managing money, and all he grows are cash crops.

Su Ze thought of the project he had done when he was in graduate school. The Ming Dynasty was short of food in both the north and the south, but the reasons for the lack of food in the north and the south were different.

The land yield per mu in the Guangzhou region of Fujian is twice that of the northern region, and Changningwei has widely planted excellent grains such as Champa rice.

Obviously, the yield per mu is double that of the Southern Song Dynasty, but Fujian is still short of food.

Even the military rations that the county government should allocate to Changning Guards and other guards every year are often short of catties, and they are still in arrears from last year.

The reason for the shortage of food in Fujian is very simple. Because of the prosperous trade, the benefits of planting economic crops are far greater than that of grain, so large households are more willing to "change rice into mulberry".

Now is not the worst time, when tobacco was introduced into China at the end of Ming Dynasty, and the profit from planting tobacco was huge, the big households in Fujian dug up their grains and changed to planting tobacco leaves, resulting in a high yield per mu in Fujian, but they could only rely on sweet potatoes to satisfy their hunger.

Su Ze now understood the difficulty of collecting grain in Nanping County.

Large households do not grow food, and they have contacts and the strength to resist the payment of food.

However, when assessing the indicator of grain requisition, prefectures and counties are used as the unit. The test results of Fang Zhifu and Baizhi County are closely related to whether the grain can be collected enough.

If the big households don't pay, the tax collectors can only exploit the small people.

Coupled with the corruption of tax collectors, the burden on self-cultivating farmers has become heavier and heavier.

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, together with miscellaneous labor and various exorbitant taxes, the self-cultivating farmers went bankrupt one after another, forming an army of refugees.

However, the contradictions have not yet reached this point, but the contradictions in grain collection are already very large.

Not to mention that there have been several incidents of Japanese pirates this year, the fields have not been taken care of properly, and the summer grain has already been in short supply.

So the county government issued a death order to the households, and they must get some food from the big households in the south of the city. Those poor people have no oil to squeeze!

It's hard to be a county magistrate, but Baizhi County is also a strong county magistrate. He has superb skills. Su Ze is ready to watch the county magistrate fight against the big family.

Su Ze has no acquaintances in the household, so he can only express his regret to Lin Qingyuan.

Lin Qingyuan also knew that he went to the doctor in a hurry, so he could only ask Su Ze to give Baizhi County a few words of kindness, and he must not be dismissed from his position as an official.

Su Ze entered the city and went directly to the editorial department of "Surprise".

A lot of ragged children gathered in front of the editorial office, led by a short boy.

The child was dressed in tattered clothes, with an neither humble nor overbearing expression. He saluted Chen Chaoyuan, and the children surrounding the editorial office left with him.

"Brother Chen, what happened to those children just now?"

"Brother Su, let's come in and talk."

After entering the door, Chen Chaoyuan said: "Those were the newsboys of our "Surprise" just now."

"Newsboy?"

"That's right, according to Brother Su's intention, we found these street newsboys in the city to sell newspapers, and indeed sold a lot more newspapers."

Chen Chaoyuan sighed and said, "I thought it was a good deed, but I didn't expect to harm these children."

"The Bawang Club in the city is interested in the money from selling newspapers."

Su Ze quickly understood the key points. He didn't like a newspaper to go around the streets and make three coins, but many people liked it.

The Bawang Society is a club gang in Nanping County. They even resell the free medicines from Huimin Pharmacy to make money, so naturally they will not let go of the three-dollar profit of this newspaper.

"It's because I'm not careful." Su Ze said.

Chen Chaoyuan said: "The children of the Bawang Society solved the matter by themselves. The kid I was talking to just now organized a newspaper boy and had fierce conflicts with the Bawang Society several times. They are so ruthless, they unite as one to fight more and fight less, which makes Bawang Society dare not stretch out its hand."

Su Ze was quite surprised. He didn't expect these children to be able to do this.

"Then why is the child still looking for Brother Chen?"

Chen Chaoyuan sighed and said: "Everyone is innocent, but he is guilty. They drove away the Bawang Society, but they attracted people who picked lives and cut off people."