Ming Dynasty: A mere unruly commoner is rebelling against the heaven?

Chapter 136 Puzhou Shanxi Merchants!

"what?!"

Gao Feng, who is always mature and steady, couldn't help but exclaim in surprise after hearing this great news.

He looked at Zhu Youtang in shock, somewhat unable to believe his ears.

He used to be envious of He Yong's position as president of the Beijing branch.

But now, he was appointed by Zhu Youtang as the governor of the Central Bank of the Ming Dynasty.

One is the central bank and the other is the Beijing branch. The gap between them is self-evident.

Zhu Youtang raised his eyes and glanced at Gao Feng.

Facing Zhu Youtang's gaze, Gao Feng suddenly became extremely panicked and kowtowed to apologize.

"I lost my temper for a moment, please forgive me, Your Majesty!"

"Your Majesty trusts me, and I will do my best to help you."

Gao Feng secretly felt annoyed in her heart, blaming herself for doing such an inappropriate thing.

Zhu Youtang put down the teacup in his hand and returned his gaze to the book at hand: "Step back."

"It's Your Majesty."

After Gao Feng left Hongde Hall, he patted his wildly beating heart and breathed a sigh of relief in fear.

After the fear in her heart passed, Gao Feng began to fall into deep ecstasy.

This is the governor of the Ming Central Bank!
Thinking of the power he would have in his hands in the future, Gao Feng felt hot all over. Even in the cold snow, he didn't feel that cold.

But soon, the news that He Yong was beheaded in the street as a public display of shame spread back to the palace.

After Gao Feng learned the news, he immediately came to his senses from his ecstasy.

Gao Feng shuddered and felt his hands and feet were cold.

Only then did he feel the freezing cold and the biting wind.

……

Jinzhou.

Pingyang Prefecture.

Qin Lu, Wang Yan and Yang Jizong led the team into Jinzhou and arrived at Pingyang Prefecture in the south of Jinzhou.

Gong Ang, the prefect of Pingyang Prefecture, personally hosted a banquet to entertain everyone.

But at the banquet, Gong Ang only talked about love and romance, not state affairs.

When Wang Yan asked Gong Ang what local forces there were in Pingyang Prefecture, Gong Ang just laughed it off and did not say anything clearly.

On the second day, Gong Ang, who was full of energy at the banquet, fell ill in a blink of an eye.

He was so ill that he couldn't even get out of bed.

The original plan to accompany Wang Yan and others to survey all the land in Pingyang Prefecture had to be abandoned.

The farmland in Pingyang Prefecture can only be cleared by Wang Yan and others.

Pingyang Prefecture Post Station.

Wang Yan pounded the table heavily and gnashed his teeth: "This old official Gong Ang, he never got sick earlier or later, but he got sick at this time."

"He even said he was too sick to get out of bed. He clearly wanted to avoid offending anyone!"

Yang Jizong was as calm as ever: "This is already very good. Think about Zhang Hai, the prefect of Shuntian Prefecture."

"The local landlords and gentry have been running the place for many years, and these prefects are temporary officials. If they can refrain from interfering or causing trouble, they will be doing us a great favor."

After this period of land surveying work, Wang Yan, Yang Jizong and others have summed up some work experience.

The most important point is that when surveying the land, the local landlords and gentry must be dealt with.

The solutions here are divided into literary and military solutions.

The written explanation is easy to handle. The sensible landlords and gentry will actively cooperate with Wang Yan in the land inventory and obey all of Wang Yan's arrangements.

There are actually many such landlords and gentry, but sometimes we always encounter some uncooperative landlords and gentry.

At this time, military solution is needed.

The military solution was easier to handle. Qin Lu, the second in command of the Western Factory, directly mobilized troops from various garrisons with Zhu Youtang's order to arrest and punish all the landlords and gentry who prevented the land survey.

With the precedent of the Wang brothers of Jinghai, few gentry in the entire Shuntian Prefecture, and even in the entire northern Zhili, dared to stop Wang Yan and his team from conducting an inventory of the land.

The place of Jinzhou, especially Pingyang Prefecture, is very different from places like Northern Zhili.

Because this is the territory of Shanxi merchants.

Wang Yan looked at Yang Jizong with a worried look on his face: "But this is Pingyang Prefecture. The Shanxi merchants in Pingyang Prefecture are very powerful. They are not ordinary landlords and gentry. If we can't handle it well, I'm afraid..."

"What are you afraid of?"

Yang Jizong responded indifferently: "No matter what, this is the territory of the Ming Dynasty. These Shanxi merchants cannot rebel against the heaven."

Wang Yan smiled bitterly and muttered to himself that those Shanxi merchants certainly could not rebel against the sky.

But if those Shanxi merchants were pushed into a corner and decided to fight to the death, then he and Yang Jizong would be the broken net.

Thinking of the Shanxi merchants, Wang Yan couldn't help but sigh deeply again.

Shanxi merchants were one of the three major business groups in the Ming Dynasty.

The remaining two merchant groups were the Huizhou merchants and the Chaozhou merchants. In the southern part of Jinzhou, the population was dense and the land was small, and the contradiction between people and land was fierce. Some smart people left their hometowns and became traveling merchants.

The rise of Shanxi merchants can be traced back to the wars of suppression against the Northern Yuan Dynasty and the border garrisons after Emperor Taizu of the Ming Dynasty founded the Ming Dynasty.

After Zhu Yuanzhang established the Ming Dynasty, he sent troops deep into the grasslands to wipe out the remnants of the Mongols.

On the one hand, border towns were established in Datong, Xuanfu, Liaodong and other places to guard the Ming Dynasty's borders.

However, the Ming Dynasty had always been short of food in the north, and the large number of military and civilians stationed in the north further exacerbated the food gap.

In order to solve the problem of food shortage in the northern border towns, in the third year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang began to implement the Kaizhong policy while organizing military farming on the border.

Simply put, merchants transported food and fodder needed by the Ming Dynasty court to border towns in exchange for "salt permits."

After obtaining the "salt permit", merchants can go to designated salt fields to buy salt and then sell it in designated areas.

Although this method is troublesome, it can effectively prevent officials from corruption.

At the beginning of Zhu Youtang's reign, the former Minister of Revenue Ye Qi wanted to replace the Kaizhong method with the Zhese method, which was more prone to corruption, but was stopped by Zhu Youtang.

In the era when salt and iron were government-run, selling salt brought huge profits.

Most of these huge profits were taken away by merchants in Jinzhou.

Among them, the Pingyang Prefecture merchant group located near the salt field made the most money.

The southern Shanxi merchant group, represented by Puzhou County of Pingyang Prefecture, was the earliest rising Shanxi merchant group.

They were close to the Jiezhou Salt Field and not far from Datong Prefecture, so they searched everywhere for grain and transported it to the border towns in exchange for salt permits.

When more and more big merchants came into being in Jinzhou, they spontaneously formed an alliance and established the Jin merchants.

Since the early Ming Dynasty, these Shanxi merchants took advantage of the opportunity to transport grain to the border to smuggle salt, iron, tea, and silk to the remnants of the Mongols, thereby making huge profits.

Shanxi merchants have always believed in a saying: make money from the end and protect it with the source.

After acquiring a large amount of money and silver, Shanxi merchants began to aggressively acquire land and property in the local area.

If there was a disaster year, a large number of farmers would sell their good land at low prices, and Shanxi merchants would buy large tracts of land at very low prices.

Jinzhou is a densely populated place with limited land, and the land has been annexed by the big Shanxi merchants.

Ordinary people in Jinzhou could only become tenants of the Shanxi merchants. They were exploited by them for generations and became their de facto slaves.

At the same time, the considerable profits of the Kaizhong system naturally also attracted the powerful groups represented by border generals and nobles.

They began to interfere in the salt administration and resell "salt permits".

The Shanxi merchants not only did not object to the intervention of the border generals and nobles, but welcomed it very warmly.

The Shanxi merchants took the initiative to offer their shares, allowing the nobles to make money without doing anything.

Because they knew that only by having connections with the court could this kind of business be successful for a long time.

At the same time, Shanxi merchants also saw the importance of having someone in the court who was good at business, so they invested huge sums of money to open clan schools and sponsor those smart children to study for the imperial examinations.

In the middle of the Ming Dynasty, control over merchants was already very loose.

Not only could the descendants of merchants take part in the imperial examinations, they were even allowed to take the examinations in other places, which reduced the difficulty for merchants to enter officialdom.

Therefore, in the following hundreds of years, Shanxi merchants spent huge sums of money to make friends with the powerful and wealthy, while training their children to take the imperial examinations.

After hundreds of years of hard work, these Shanxi merchants eventually gave birth to two powerful official and business clans.

They are the Wang Chonggu family, which spanned the Longqing and Wanli dynasties, and the Zhang Siwei family.

Wang Chonggu and Zhang Siwei were both from Puzhou County, Pingyang Prefecture, Jinzhou, and Wang Chonggu was Zhang Siwei's uncle.

From the Longqing period to the Wanli period, Wang Chonggu served as the governor of Xuanda and was the highest commander in the defense of the northern border of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhang Siwei was the chief minister of the cabinet and the leader of the civil officials in the court.

These two people led the "Longqing Peace Talks", opened eleven border trading ports, and legalized the trade that was previously only possible through smuggling.

Among the eleven trading ports opened by the Longqing Peace Talks, four were located in Jinzhou, which was a real benefit for the people at home.

Although this action ensured peace in the northern border for a certain period of time, it abolished a means for the Ming Dynasty to control the remnants of the Northern Yuan Dynasty, and in fact promoted the Northern Yuan Dynasty's rise again.

Towards the end of the Wanli reign, Nurhaci led the Jianzhou Jurchens to rise and establish the Later Jin.

However, Nurhaci never broke into the Guanning Defense Line. Not only that, the Ming Dynasty also closed the trade ports to the Later Jin, hoping to trap the supply-scarce Later Jin regime in the northeast.

At the critical moment of the Later Jin Dynasty, Shanxi merchants represented by Fan Yongdou, Wang Dengku and others stepped forward.

They approached the Later Jin Dynasty through both land and water routes. Some Shanxi merchants set out from the sea and entered Liaodong from the Bohai Sea, while some Shanxi merchants provided a steady supply of funds to the Later Jin Dynasty through their trade routes throughout Mongolia.

In order to please the Qing Dynasty, these merchants not only traded goods, but also provided relevant intelligence within the Ming Dynasty.

With the help of Shanxi merchants, Huang Taiji got rid of the predicament of material scarcity and once again strengthened the strength of the Eight Banners Army.

Shanxi merchants also made a fortune by smuggling to the Qing Dynasty.

After the Manchus entered the Central Plains, Shunzhi did not forget the eight Shanxi merchants who had made great achievements for his rule over the Central Plains. He held a banquet in the Forbidden City, summoned them in person, and bestowed Manchu clothing on them.

And from then on, the eight Shanxi merchants became the eight imperial merchants of the Qing Dynasty and were affiliated with the Imperial Household Department.

The eight of them also transformed themselves from upright Han people into bondservants of the Manchus!

Later, famous Shanxi merchants such as Lei Lutai, Qiao Zhiyong, Cao Sanxi... all rose to prominence during the Qing Dynasty.

From this we can see that the Qing Dynasty has always treated Shanxi merchants very generously.

(End of this chapter)