Chapter One Thousand Four Hundred and Seventy Seven: White Mountains, Black Waters, Forests, Northeast China, a Peaceful Home
"Ancestors! Ancestor Shaman, can you get a lot of salt? Let me try it... Hey! This salt is not bitter at all. It is a good salt that is better than official salt?!..."
"That's right! Ali, we can get a lot of this kind of sea salt from the east. It's calculated in hundreds of pounds. How about this kind of sea salt? Will the tribes in the west accept such goods? What kind of price can we offer?..."
"Accept it! Definitely accept it! There is no tribe along the river that is not short of salt! It is estimated that a few dozen kilograms of salt can be exchanged for a good big horse from the 'forest people'! Not only the forest people,
Various Jurchen tribes, even Liaodong in the Ming Dynasty in the south, and those guard posts and fortresses inside and outside the border walls, are very short of salt! Well... I should say it is not a lack of salt, but they are very poor and cannot afford the high price of official salt..."
Harman Chief Ali opened his eyes wide and looked at the shiny salt in the bag in front of him, as if he was seeing the real hard currency in this northeastern mountain forest!
In the Northeast of this era, whether it was the savage Jurchens who came south from the north, the nomadic people stationed along the river, the Hercynian Jurchens farming in the south, or even the guard villages in the border fortresses of the Ming Dynasty... regardless of Mongolian, Han, or Jurchen
, there is no one who is not short of salt!
Of course, the reasons for this salt shortage are actually different for each ethnic group. The hunting Jurchens and the herding Mongolian tribes cannot produce salt themselves, or the manpower and fuel costs for producing salt are too high, which exceeds the productivity and technology of the tribes.
level. Therefore, they can only look for bitter salt brine as a substitute for daily life. The lack of salt in the border forts of the Ming Dynasty is entirely due to human factors and the result of official salt policy regulation.
"Witness the Lord God! The government of the Ming Dynasty strictly prohibited the private sale of salt. Anyone caught would be punished with a rod, exiled or beheaded. In the border forts of Liaodong, the price of a pound of official salt was more than ten cents, which was higher than the price of pork! It is said that the imperial court
In order to allow merchants to transport grain to the border areas, they were promised salt leads to receive salt, and then sold salt at a high price to make up for the losses in transporting grain..."
"Perhaps, in the salt-producing areas in the south, there is a lot of private salt, and the price of salt is not that high... But in Liaodong, not many Han people can afford ten yuan a pound of salt. They don't even eat meat all year round.
After a few times, I couldn’t save dozens or even hundreds of coins! So much so that the guards at those border forts even asked for bitter salt brine from each tribe to eat from the Jurchen tribe who came to pay tribute..."
"As for our Jurchen tribes, we can only get a few bags of decent official salt by bribing the guarding officials when we pay tribute to Kaiyuan, and take them out of the border wall as rewards..."
Speaking of this, Ali, the chief of Harman, sighed again. It is said that during the Yuan Dynasty more than a hundred years ago, the Yuan court did not care about the salt and iron trade at all. No matter in the grassland or Liaodong, there was no shortage of salt in all departments.
There was no shortage of iron. After the founding of the Ming Dynasty, they began to implement a salt and iron monopoly and completely controlled the salt and iron trade in the north. However, when Emperor Taizong was still alive, he rewarded the Mongolian and Jurchen tribes who followed him generously, and the iron tools and salt needed by each tribe were also provided.
It can flow out from Han Dynasty.
After Yongle, the imperial court increasingly used "salt and iron" goods as an invisible "weapon" to kill people, and imposed a severe embargo and blockade on thousands of miles of northern Xinjiang. Under this policy, even the Han people in the Liaodong border fortress
The common people can't afford salt, let alone the poor Jurchen tribe...
"Ali, you just said that in the Ming Dynasty and Liaodong Kingdom in the south, a pound of salt costs more than ten cents? How much is a pound? How many taels of gold is a pound of salt worth? Do the math and let me see this 'salt product'
, is there any value in reselling it to the southern Ming Dynasty..."
"Uh... Zu Shaman, selling private salt in the Ming Dynasty is a serious crime that requires beheading! As for a pound of salt, how many taels of gold is it worth? This!... One tael of gold can be exchanged for 67 taels of silver in Liaodong. One tael of silver can be exchanged for 67 taels of silver.
One thousand renminbi. More than 10 renminbi for a pound of salt...that's five to six hundred pounds of salt, exchange it for one tael of gold!..."
"What! Hundreds of kilograms of salt are worth just one tael of gold? Is salt so cheap?! It seems that if you want to transport salt to the Ming Dynasty and sell it, you might as well just take the gold there..."
Hearing this, Zuvalo shook his head in disappointment. The "grand blueprint" of the "Liaodong private salt dealer" was completely aborted before it was even launched. Counting the inventory in Huatai Port, he still had 1,500 yuan left in his hand.
One hundred kilograms of gold can be converted into at least 150,000 taels of silver. Compared with this "huge sum", there are only a few businessmen in Liaodong who can be richer than him, so what kind of private money is there?... But soon, he
I realized something was wrong.
"No! No! Ali, you just said that the price of salt is not cheap. Most of the tribesmen in the Ming Dynasty cannot afford salt... They can't even save a hundred coins all year round? Doesn't that mean that after working for sixty or seventy years, two
You can’t save even a tael of gold in your life?…No way! Such a powerful Ming Dynasty has tens of thousands of legions and iron weapons everywhere. How can the tribesmen be so poor?…”
"Zu Shaman! Ordinary people of the Ming Dynasty have no hunting grounds or forestry, no livestock and mounts, and can't even leave the guard post. They can only cultivate a few acres of fields. They work hard all year long and can pay the land tax required by the court.
Able to avoid the corvee work assigned by the imperial court,
Being able to withstand the tax collector's demands for payment of miscellaneous taxes is already a blessing! As for saving a tael of gold? I am afraid that the vast majority of Han people in Liaodong have never seen a tael of silver in their lives! And for a few taels of silver, even if it is
There are many people who want to kill people and buy goods but have no way..."
"Witness the Lord God! Do you know now that if this bag of one hundred kilograms of gold and ten thousand taels of silver were taken to Liaodong in the south, it would make many guardsmen's eyes red and desperate, right?..."
Ali, the chief of Harman, had a wry smile on his face. This "savage shaman" with "a lot of gold" in his hand obviously had no idea about the powerful tax collection ability of the Ming Dynasty government, and he really knew nothing about the value of this bag of gold. To be honest,
The Ming government's control over the people is not comparable to that of the Mexica Alliance or the Kingdom of the Lake, and even it can't even come close!
For these Jurchen leaders who were entrusted with official positions, no matter how secretly the border troops extorted money, the Ming court at least treated them generously and would not tax them. But for those Han people who had no roots, the court squeezed them, and they were worth a penny.
No matter how much you sell your children, you must pay full taxes and several times the miscellaneous taxes!
At present, among the Jurchen tribes in Haixi, the Jurchen tribes in Jianzhou, and the Mongolian Duoyan Three Guards, where did so many people from Han Dynasty come from? Were they not forced by the imperial court and can no longer survive? No matter how poor the Jurchen tribes are, there is no need.
If you pay taxes to the court, you will not owe money to the court officials! The rapid Chineseization of the various ministries of the Miu Jvzhen and the improvement of village productivity were, to a large extent, influenced by the integration of these Han refugees...
"Blessed by the Lord God! This powerful Ming Dynasty in the south is really like a god in a smoke mirror, changing in an unpredictable way!..."
After the long conversation, Zuvalo shook his head and sighed from the bottom of his heart. At this moment, he did not know that what he was spying on was the largest and most complex ruling machine in this era, and it also ruled the largest machine in the entire world.
country. There is no doubt that this is a truly powerful empire. No matter how many internal hidden dangers there are, the Ming Empire is still in its prosperous period!
And where will the future of the empire go? How much wings will a golden hummingbird from the East China Sea flap, and what impact will it have? At this moment, no one can predict, not even the divinely inspired His Majesty Shulot.
, can’t predict...
"Let's go! Ali! Come with me south to the kingdom's Shenhuatai Port! There is a peaceful and peaceful camp, a port for potatoes and salmon... There will also be a place for all the tribesmen of your Harman Tribe,
Become a brand new home for all the Jiao tribe!"
When the first snow in September fell from the sky in Nuergan, three longships from the kingdom were also loaded with more than a hundred warriors from the kingdom and two hundred mature Jurchen tribesmen, and set foot south to the Huatai Port camp.
route.
On the shore, Maha Aguda was wearing a tiger skin and hanging a stone hammer, watching the brother tribes in the long boat go away. And the tribal priest Kui Huo was wearing a red fox skin and stood next to Aguda, like a fox pretending to be a tiger.
Fox. As for the longboat, Zuvalo wore a feather crown and a new beaver fur sacrificial robe. And the Harman chief Ali wore a roe deer horn hat, wrapped in a roe deer fur coat, and put his hands in his sleeves.
"Hoo! Hoo!..."
The cold north wind blows through the vast forest sea in the outer northeast, from the Waixing'an Mountains in the Beishan Mountains to the Daxingan Mountains in Dajiang. Tigers roar in the mountains and forests, looking for prey for the winter. Foxes follow quietly behind, and a bite can be enough.
The beaver was busy on the river and seaside, building its ever-growing nest. A roe deer also followed cautiously, looking around curiously.
This is the peaceful home of all the "animals" in the northeastern part of the country, including the white mountains, black waters and forests. And the most peaceful winter is coming~~