In the blink of an eye, it is already the late spring season when the sun is shining brightly and the warblers are flying and the grass is growing.
Suzhou City, Fuchun Street.
This is the most prosperous commercial street in Suzhou city. On both sides of the street, there are various shops, bookstores, stationery stores, antique stores, cloth stores, medicine stores, grocery stores, musical instrument stores, as well as hospitals, restaurants, and calligraphy stores.
Pavilion, golden building, bank...
The streets are crowded with people, and most of them are brightly dressed. Women have gold hairpins and jade hairpins in their heads, and men have jade sachets tied around their waists. At first glance, they come from wealthy families.
This is normal, because most of the items sold in the shops on this street are expensive and cannot be afforded by ordinary people from small households in Dingmen.
However, in this bustling street filled with wealth and prosperity, there are also some disharmonious embellishments.
In some nooks and crannies, there will always be a few beggars kneeling or lying in ragged clothes with sallow faces. They kowtow or bow to the passers-by, say some prayers or flattering words, and look forward to it.
The gentlemen, ladies and ladies who pass by can be kind and give them a couple of coins, or give them a bite to eat.
These people are the poor ones who survived last year’s worst winter!
Last winter, an extremely fierce cold current hit the south of the Yangtze River, covering thousands of miles of ice and thousands of miles of snow!
Even the Qiantang River and the West Lake were frozen. The young ladies from wealthy families had never seen such a spectacle before. They rushed to the Qiantang River or the West Lake to admire the ice scenery, recite poems and write poems, and write ink for entertainment. They were so happy!
Moreover, such a cold winter is honey for rich people, but it is arsenic for ordinary people!
Jiangsu and Zhejiang have more people than land, and because the silk weaving industry here is very prosperous, it is the most important silk production area of the Daning Dynasty. The products are not only popular across the country, but also exported overseas. In order to produce more fabrics, silk merchants earn a lot of money.
In order to gain profits, they aggressively annexed farmers' land and converted rice into mulberry!
Therefore, Jiangsu and Zhejiang are completely unable to produce food on their own and mainly rely on purchases from other provinces.
Since there is a lot of money in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, there is no need to worry about not being able to buy food in normal times.
However, due to the extreme cold this winter, heavy snow blocked roads, canals were blocked by ice, and transportation was severely hampered. Food from other places could not be transported in, resulting in an extreme food shortage!
What is even more despicable is that in order to make huge profits, some large grain merchants deliberately hoard food and do not release grain outside.
Natural disasters coupled with man-made disasters will inevitably lead to skyrocketing food prices!
At its peak, food prices reached five times the usual price, which was simply outrageous!
Faced with such high food prices, even those middle-class families are desperate for food and can only tighten their belts and endure the cold winter!
As for those ordinary families with small families, they even have no way to feed themselves!
In desperation, they had no choice but to sell their fields, sell their sons and daughters, or even exchange their sons for cannibalism!
People are dying of hunger all over the place, it’s too horrible to see!
This is true even in big cities, let alone small mountain villages!
Jiangling County was originally plagued by banditry for many years, causing the people to eat rice bran and swallow vegetables, and there was little food left at home!
Now that we are encountering such a cold winter, coupled with the high price of food, we are looking at the sky and sighing, and want to cry without tears!
Fortunately, Lin Xu had been prepared before the cold wave arrived. He spent tens of thousands of taels of silver to purchase a large amount of grain from other places. Together with the grain stocks obtained from suppressing bandits, he was able to cooperate with the government and open warehouses for disaster relief when the famine came!
In this cold winter, when the whole province was severely affected by disasters, Jiangling County, which originally had a very weak foundation, became the county with the lowest death toll. This chapter has been completed!