Chapter 1477: White Mountains, Black Waters, Forests, Northeast China, a Peaceful Home
Chapter 1477 White Mountains, Black Waters and Forests, Northeast China, a peaceful home~~
"Ancestor! 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, the kind calculated by a hundred pounds. How about this kind of goods, will the tribes in the west accept this kind of 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 'people in the forest'! Not only the people in the forest, Various Jurchen tribes, even the Liaodong in the Ming Dynasty in the south, and the guard posts and forts inside and outside the border walls, are very short of salt! Well... I should say that it is not a lack of salt, but that 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 Haixi Jurchens farming in the south, or even the guard villages of the Ming Dynasty border forts... regardless of Mongolian, Han, or Jurchen , there is no one that is not short of salt!
Of course, the reasons for this salt shortage are actually different among different ethnic groups. The hunting Jurchens and herding Mongolian tribes cannot produce salt themselves, or the manpower and fuel costs of producing salt are too high, exceeding the productivity and technological level of the tribes. Therefore, they can only look for bitter salt brine as a substitute for daily life. The lack of salt in Ming Dynasty's border forts was entirely due to human factors and the result of official salt policy regulation.
"Witness the Lord God! The Ming Dynasty government 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 even save dozens or even hundreds of coins! So much so that the guards at the border forts even asked for bitter salt brine from each 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, Harman Chief Ali 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 grasslands or Liaodong, all ministries were neither short of salt nor iron. After the founding of the Ming Dynasty, they began to implement salt and iron monopoly and completely controlled the salt and iron trade in the north. However, during the reign of Emperor Taizong, the Mongol and Jurchen tribes who followed him were generously rewarded, and the iron tools and salt needed by each tribe could also flow out of Han.
After Yongle, the imperial court increasingly regarded "salt and iron" goods as an invisible "weapon" to kill people, and imposed a strict embargo and blockade on thousands of miles of northern Xinjiang. Under this policy, even the Han people in the Liaodong border fortress could not 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 six or seven taels of silver in Liaodong. One tael of silver can be exchanged for One thousand liters. More than 10 jins per pound of salt... That’s five to six hundred pounds of salt, let’s exchange it for one tael of gold..."
"What! Hundreds of kilograms of salt are worth only 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 "private salt dealers in Liaodong" was completely aborted before it was even launched. Counting the inventory in Huatai Port, the fifteen hundred kilograms of gold left in his hand can be converted into at least one hundred and fifty thousand taels of silver. Compared with this "huge sum of money", there are only a few businessmen in Liaodong who are richer than him, so what kind of personal gain is there? ...But soon, he 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! With such a powerful Ming Dynasty, there are tens of thousands of soldiers, and iron weapons are everywhere, so how can the tribesmen be so poor? …”
"Zu Shaman! Ordinary people of the Ming Dynasty have no hunting grounds, forestry, livestock and mounts. They can't even leave the guard post and 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 survive the tax collector's demands is already a blessing! As for saving a tael of gold? I'm afraid most of the Han people in Liaodong have never seen a tael of silver in their lives! 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?..."
Halman chieftain Ali smiled bitterly. This "wild shaman" with "huge amounts of money" in his hand obviously knew nothing about the powerful taxation ability of the Ming government and the value of this bag of gold. To be honest, the control of the Ming government over the people is not something that the Mexica League or the Kingdom of the Lake can even compare to!
For these Jurchen leaders who have been granted official positions, no matter how the border troops secretly extort them, the Ming court will at least give them preferential treatment and generous rewards, and will not levy taxes. But for those Han people who have no roots, the court will squeeze them, and they really can't lose a penny. No matter if they sell their children, they must pay the full tax and several times the miscellaneous taxes!
At present, among the Haixi Jurchen tribes, the Jianzhou Jurchen tribes, and the Mongolian Doyan Three Guards, how did so many Han refugees come from? Aren't they forced by the court and can't survive? No matter how poor the Jurchen tribes were, they did not have to pay taxes to the court, and they would not owe the court money! The rapid sinicization of the Jurchen tribes and the improvement of village productivity were largely influenced by the integration of these Han refugees...
"May the Lord bless you! This powerful Ming Dynasty in the south is really like a god in a smoke mirror, changing and unpredictable!..."
After a long conversation, Zuwaro shook his head and sighed from the bottom of his heart. At this moment, he did not know that he was spying on the largest and most complex ruling machine of this era, and also ruled the largest country in the world. There is no doubt that this is a truly powerful empire. No matter how many internal hidden dangers there are, it is the Ming Empire in its heyday!
And where will the future of the empire go? How big will he, a golden hummingbird from the East China Sea, flap his wings and what kind of impact will he have? At this moment, no one could have predicted it, not even the divinely inspired His Majesty Shulot could have predicted it…
"Let's go! Ali! Come south with me to the kingdom's sacred port of Karafuto! There is a peaceful camp, a port of potatoes and salmon... There will also be a new home for all the tribesmen of your Harman tribe and all the Jiao people!"
When the first snow of September drifted from the sky of Nurgan. The three kingdoms' long ships, also fully loaded with more than a hundred kingdom warriors, filled with two hundred raw and cooked Jurchen tribes, set off on the route to the camp of Karafuto Port in the south.
On the shore, Maha Aguda, wearing a tiger skin and hanging a stone hammer, watched the brother tribes of the long ship go away. And the tribal priest Kuihuo, wearing a fiery red fox skin, stood beside Aguda, like a fox pretending to be a tiger. As for the long ship, Zuwaro wore a feather crown and a new ritual robe made of beaver skin. Ali, the chief of the Harman tribe, wore a roe deer horn hat, a roe deer fur coat, and put his hands in his sleeves.
"Hoo! Hoo!..."
The cold north wind blew across the vast forests of the Northeast, from the Greater Khingan Range in the north mountain to the Greater Khingan Range in the river. Tigers roared in the mountains and forests, looking for prey for the winter. Foxes followed behind them on tiptoe, and a bite would fill their stomachs. Beavers were busy by the river and the sea, building their increasingly large nests. A roe deer also followed carefully behind, looking around curiously.
This is the peaceful home of all "animals" in the Northeast, the White Mountains, Black Waters, and Forests. And the most peaceful winter is coming~~