Rebirth of Zhu Di's son

Chapter 414: Eight years passed by and the constant cold came

Time flies, like a white horse passing by, two thousand 920 days and nights pass by in a hurry.

It is now June of the 31st year of Qianxi, and the Ming Dynasty has finally inevitably ushered in the constant cold climate and officially entered the Little Ice Age.

Since November last year, Shandong, Henan, Lianghuai, and Zhili have experienced heavy snowfall with several feet of snow, and the sea in Huaidong has been frozen for more than [-] miles.

Even though local government offices in various provinces were well prepared to deal with ice and snow disasters under Zhu Gaoxu's arrangement, more than [-] cattle, sheep, pigs, and dogs froze to death, and more than [-] people froze to death.

In addition, from the first month to April of this year, heavy snowfall continued in counties in the south of the Yangtze River. Even though the government offices in Suzhou and Changzhou were well prepared, thousands of people died of freezing and starvation!
Fortunately, the main lines of the Jingyi, Jingkun, and Jingnu railways, which started construction in the 14th year of Qianxi, were finally opened to traffic in October last year after nearly 20 years of work.

In the past, in emergencies, if you wanted to transfer the grain produced in Hunan and Hubei to the two rivers and two Huaihe rivers in a short time, you could only use boats to take the waterway from the Yangtze River.

Historically, the rivers froze in the constant cold climate and waterways were blocked. The Ming Dynasty had to send people to transport food by land.

But now with the Jingyi, Jingkun, and Jingnu railways, the Ming Dynasty can transport grain from Huguang to Henan, Zhili, and then to Shandong, Shuofang and other places through railways.

Potatoes from Ili and the grasslands and soybeans from Nurgan can also be transported to Zhili by rail, and then transferred to other provincial capitals.

The opening of these three main railway lines marks the qualitative strengthening of Ming Dynasty's ability to resist disasters.

At the same time, large steam ships equipped with ice-breaking equipment can transport millions of tons of rice stored in the five provinces of Funan from the South China Sea to coastal ports such as Taicang and Tianjin, and then to inland provinces through inland stations.

There’s no typo here, it’s millions of stones of rice!
The Funan Peninsula has a hot climate, and rice can be harvested three times a year. Even if it is affected by constant cold, rice can be harvested twice a year. Therefore, on average, each mu of land can produce at least four kilograms of rice per year.

The five provinces of Funan have cultivated 2000 hectares of fertile farmland, which theoretically can produce 500 million metric tons of rice a year. In fact, excluding the effects of natural and man-made factors such as floods, more than [-] metric tons of rice can be produced each year.

The Ming Dynasty land tax set by Qianxi's New Deal was one-twentieth of the annual output. Together with the head tax on the number of people per mu, the average was close to one-tenth.

Therefore, the annual grain tax paid by the five provinces of Funan alone amounts to more than 150 million shi.

Since the Qianxi New Deal reformed the tax collection model and set up a Finance and Taxation Office and a Taxation Bureau in the Ministry of Household Affairs, with retired officers and soldiers as tax pawns specifically responsible for tax collection, the bad habit of transporting and eating food did not exist.

Each township has a township tax granary. Chief Jia calls on the people to bring the tax-paid grain to the granary. Then the county will send an appropriate number of four-wheeled carriages to take away [-]% of the grain, and then deposit it into the special county tax granary in the county. Finally, the remaining Fifty percent is stored in the county warehouse, and the other [-]% will be transferred to the city tax granary for storage, and will be uniformly dispatched by the Ministry of Household Affairs.

The remaining [-]% of the township tax granary is used for emergency relief purposes in response to food shortages for local rural people caused by floods.

The county tax granary is set aside at [-]% to ensure that in the event of natural disasters, the towns and villages under the county can support themselves until the Ministry of Household Affairs transfers grain to provide disaster relief.

If there are no disasters for two consecutive years, the old grain stored in the township and county tax granaries for two years will be taken away and transferred to the prefecture-level tax granaries in the third year, and will be coordinated and dispatched by the Ministry of Household Affairs.

Later, the advent of steam locomotives made transporting tax grains more efficient. Every year when collecting grain, the imperial court sent tax collectors to the county-level yamen, and then dispatched county policemen to go to the countryside with the village pavilion chiefs and pavilion soldiers to collect grain. Steam locomotives that could carry thousands of kilograms of taxed grain pulled the grain away.

During disaster years, one stone of rice plus two stones of rice bran ground into powder is enough to provide a person with a year's worth of food. The more than 150 million stones of grain handed over by the five provinces of Funan can save at least 70 to [-] lives!

In addition, there are crops such as potatoes and sweet potatoes that were not available in the Ming Dynasty. It is absolutely easy to save millions of victims every year.

If various crops are combined to make "brown bread", tens of millions of disaster victims can even survive in disaster years.

This is also the reason why Zhu Gaoxu was obsessed with annexing the Funan Peninsula.

In addition, in order to cope with the constant cold, a few years ago, the technical teams under Moqiaosi, the Ministry of Industry, and the Royal Commercial Bank have invested a lot of manpower and material resources in researching steam ship icebreaking technology.

Fortunately, Huangtian paid off, and the ice-breaking technology he developed was barely usable, but trying to break dozens of miles of sea ice would require damaging more than a dozen icebreakers.

Zhu Gaoxu's many years of advance planning finally came in handy.

Therefore, after he learned that the disasters in all provinces had been effectively treated, he felt relieved.

"Dad, ice is common on coastal seas and inland canals, and steamship navigation is blocked. At present, food is mainly transported by inland railways and official roads."

In the Wuying Hall, Zhu Zhantang sat next to Zhu Gaoxu's imperial table and said solemnly: "I suggest that the victims be gathered together and uniformly deployed by the government, with work instead of relief, and let them build bridges and roads. At present, many rivers are dry and dry. Freeze, mainly repairing bridges.”

"You have a good idea. When the river freezes and dries up, build the bridge piers first. This can save you a lot of trouble."

Zhu Gaoxu stroked his beard and said: "After all, the farmers' guilds and craftsmen's guilds in various places are already well-run, so we are not afraid that the government will make big mistakes in providing work-for-relief."

Since the father and son talked about building bridge piers and farmers' guilds, here we would like to mention the current method of building bridge piers in the Ming Dynasty and the situation of farmers' guilds.

In order to build the Beijing-Kunming Railway, the Ming Dynasty spent a lot of effort. It took eight and nine years to build the Yangtze River and Yellow River railway bridges respectively, spending tens of millions of money.In order to build railway bridges across the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce developed two main methods of building bridge piers in large rivers in addition to the cofferdam method. One was the caisson method, and the other was the caisson method. For the piling method.

The cofferdam method is the most common, relatively simple, and the most primitive method of building bridge piers, but this method requires relatively high amounts of money.

This is because the place where the bridge pier is to be built must first be enclosed with a water-stopping structure such as an earth-rock dam to form a puddle isolated from the outside.

Then use a steam pump to drain the water in the puddle, thus forming an open space similar to that on land.

Although this is very convenient, the workload of building a cofferdam is too large, and it will also extend the construction period. As the river water deepens to varying degrees, the cost of the cofferdam will double, so this method is only used in shallow water areas.

The caisson method was created by the great craftsmen of the Ministry of Industry under the inspiration of Zhu Gaoxu.

The caisson is a box-shaped structure with a roof and no bottom. It is made of reinforced concrete. The lower end of the shaft wall has edged feet and a shelf inside. It can float in the water. The caisson can be controlled to float or float by adjusting the amount of water in the box. sink.

The fixed air pressure in the operating room inside the box is controlled by the airlock on the top cover. This method is conducive to the entry and exit of personnel, materials, and soil into the caisson. The entire caisson is dug and sunk. When the specified depth is reached, the entire caisson is covered with reinforced concrete. Sealed.

In this way, a relatively complete bridge pier will be obtained.

This caisson method requires relatively low mechanization for building bridge piers on large rivers, and it does not affect navigation.

However, the air pressure inside the caisson is relatively high, so the working environment at the bottom of the caisson is difficult, which will cause certain harm to the body of the constructor.

The piling method uses a steam piling ship to drive piles in deep water areas.

Although the bridge craftsmen of the Ming Dynasty often avoided deep water areas to build bridges, sometimes some deep water areas were unavoidable, so they had to build bridges in deep water areas. If the air pressure of the caisson method was too high, it would kill people, and steam piling was needed. Boat.

The master bridge builder will set up different piles according to different rock structures on the river bottom, and then send out a piling boat to sink the pre-made piles into the underwater rock layer little by little under the pressure of the steam piling boat.

As for the technology of determining the position of bridge piers in the river water and the method of manufacturing reinforced concrete piles, I will not go into details here.

In short, under the leadership of Zhu Gaoxu, the Ming Dynasty gradually entered the era of steam engines from the era of handicraft industry through various difficult infrastructure constructions and driven by the great prosperity and development of commerce.

Even certain inventions from the electrification era in history, such as wired telegraphs, telephones, and wireless telegraphs, have been introduced one after another, and have been improved and optimized, and put into practical use in daily life.

As of the 31st year of Qianxi, Ming Dynasty has entered the steam engine era and is working hard to move towards the electrification era.

In the previous handicraft industry era, that is, before the 18th year of Qianxi, the difference between private industry and commerce in the Ming Dynasty was not obvious. Basically, apart from government-run industries, local wealthy businessmen controlled industry.

Specifically reflected in the scattered small-scale manual workshops and concentrated large-scale manual workshops on the market, both are run by businessmen.

At this time, scattered manual workshops were the majority, and centralized large-scale manual workshops were rare.

As early bourgeois, businessmen not only controlled industry, but the local wealthy businessmen who relied on the government gradually became giant-level factory owners under the supervision of the government and the private sector. They were the wealthy businessmen class of the Ming Dynasty that later surpassed ordinary wealthy businessmen.

The wealthy merchants of the Ming Dynasty were the richest and most economically powerful class in the entire business community of the Ming Dynasty.

The fact that the wealthy businessmen controlled by the government and the private sector controlled industry and occupied the first place among the merchant class did not mean that the development of industry and commerce in the Ming Dynasty was mediocre and there was little improvement.

At that time, the level of development of industry and commerce in the Ming Dynasty was already considerable, and the import and export trade was also quite developed. In particular, the merchants affiliated with the Royal Commercial Bank, who formed the overseas trade, traveled to the Ming Dynasty's overseas kings, vassal states, dependent countries, and trading countries, seeking to expand the market. and snatch raw material sites.

Frictions and conflicts between vassal kingdoms and trading countries are essentially commercial wars.

The competition for overseas markets has reached such a fierce level, which in turn proves that the development of industry and commerce in Ming Dynasty has reached an unprecedented height, and the capacity of the domestic market can no longer meet its needs.

In addition, the small-scale peasant economy of the Ming Dynasty also gradually declined under the impact of the continuous development of the handicraft industry, and was even replaced by the emerging large-scale contract agricultural economy.

This was specifically reflected in the Yongle period when the imperial court implemented the system of dividing land into acres. In order to make money, many self-cultivated farmers went to work in the city. After leaving a piece of vegetable land, they rented other cultivated land to others for cultivation.

During the period of sharing the land, the imperial court implemented the household registration reform, and a large number of tenant farmers were liberated from the status of mere appendages to the land. They were no longer appendages to the land. They had personal freedom, and they could also be wage laborers who sold their labor power.

In other words, in the Yongle era, land ownership had begun to be gradually separated from land management rights. The land owner did not have to be the actual operator of the land, and the person responsible for the management functions did not have to be the land owner.

PS: This month’s main text has its finale. After the main text ends, there will be an extra chapter.

(End of this chapter)