I am not Yuan Shu

Chapter 340 Hidden Population in Bingzhou

Wang Yun was very worried about what was happening in his hometown. He immediately wrote back to Wang Yuan, telling him not to offend Yuan Shu and to do whatever he needed to do. If all else failed, he was willing to spend money to avoid further trouble.

Yuan Shu wanted people and land, money to deal with the Xianbei, and personal achievements, not the Wang family's life.

Therefore, as long as they hand over a portion of their population and land, Yuan Shu will not make things difficult for them.

Wang Yun sent out the letter and then waited anxiously for news, hoping that the whole family could get through this calamity and that the family could gain Yuan Shu's favor and appreciation, thus ushering in a new tomorrow.

Unfortunately, Wang Yun's idea was good, but reality was cruel.

Yuan Shu's attitude towards negotiations is to offer the highest and best price the first time, to be the most considerate of the other party, and to have the most spirit of compromise. If they refuse, it would be considered ungrateful, and he would not consider compromising.

court death!

Therefore, instead of a bright future, Wang Yun was met with Duan Wei, the Commandant of the Capital Region, and his subordinate officials and clerks from the Central Capital.

Duan Wei led a large group of fully armed officials and clerks from Zhongdu into Wang Yun's residence in Luoyang and arrested him.

According to Duan Wei, the Wang family strongly resisted the government orders of Yuan Shu, the governor of Bingzhou, and even resorted to violence, committing serious crimes. Furthermore, it was later discovered that the family's residence contained crossbows and armor, violating the strict orders of the imperial court and committing the serious crime of treason. The Wang family's property has been confiscated by Yuan Shu, the governor of Bingzhou, in accordance with the law.

The three members of the Wang family who were officials in Luoyang were also considered to be treacherous villains with ulterior motives and scheming intentions. After the Minister of Works Yuan Feng "reported" to the emperor, he received an imperial edict to send the Commandant of the Capital Region to arrest the members of the Wang family, and to interrogate and punish them severely.

Wang Yun was taken away from his residence in Luoyang by officials from Zhongdu in a daze. When he arrived at the prison of the Sili Commandant, he saw that the other two members of the Wang family had also been arrested, and he was filled with despair.

What awaits him is no longer a bright tomorrow.

Instead, it was a gleaming steel knife.

Three days later, Wang Yun and two other members of the Wang family were executed on Duan Wei's orders for treason.

At the same time, Yuan Shu also oversaw the execution of 106 members of the Wang clan in Jinyang County.

The vast amounts of land, numerous hidden people, and real estate owned by the Wang family were all confiscated and turned over to the public, filling the granaries of the Bingzhou governor's office.

A family that had long been rooted and lived in Taiyuan County was uprooted by Yuan Shu and easily wiped out, as if it had never existed.

Yuan Shu's move completely shocked all the gentry and local tyrants in Bingzhou, letting them know what absolute power and an iron fist meant.

They realized that if Iron Fist said you were a rebel, then you had better actually be a rebel.

But they weren't really rebels; they just wanted to seize land, annex it, and exploit the people to live a life of great wealth and power—that was all.

They didn't want to rebel; they wanted peace and tranquility.

Therefore, in order to achieve peace and tranquility, they surrendered to Yuan Shu in droves. After an emergency discussion within the family, they handed over specially processed ledgers of the businesses expanded after the first year of Jianning to the review team sent by Yuan Shu, adopting an attitude of sincere cooperation rather than confrontation.

As for whether the ledger is real or fake, Yuan Shu doesn't want to investigate for the time being. He also doesn't really want to find out whether these guys have handed over all the land they annexed and the people they hid after the first year of Jianning.

What he needs is the attitude and obedience of this group, as well as their willingness to sacrifice their own flesh.

Moreover, he believed that since this group of people had decided to cut their losses, they certainly wouldn't be too stingy, because if they were too stingy, Yuan Shu would be unhappy. They must have given Yuan Shu the best possible pledge of allegiance within an acceptable range.

Hopefully, once Yuan Shu has secured this pledge of loyalty, he'll stop causing them trouble.

From March to May of the third year of the Zhengshi era, within two months, Yuan Shu seized 1.69 million mu of land from powerful families of all sizes throughout Bingzhou.

This figure is quite small compared to the counties and prefectures of the Central Plains, but considering that Bingzhou is a vast and sparsely populated region with frequent wars and an overall cultivation rate of only about 10%, this number is quite considerable.

This is pretty much the limit that these powerful clans are willing to sacrifice. If we want them to continue to sacrifice, we'll have to find some other ways to do it.

Therefore, Yuan Shu did not express dissatisfaction with this data.

Next is the population size.

Regarding population figures, Yuan Shu had always known that powerful clans concealed their populations, a situation that was already serious during the Western Han Dynasty and would only worsen during the Eastern Han Dynasty.

Even just looking at the statistics reveals some problems. For example, the most populous prefecture in Bingzhou is neither Taiyuan nor Shangdang. These two prefectures, which have the best economic development and the highest agricultural cultivation rate, are not the most populous. The most populous prefecture is actually Yanmen, a border prefecture.

According to statistics, Yanmen County had 32,000 households and a population of about 250,000, with an average of almost eight people per household. Considering that Yanmen County was a military settlement county, it is not unreasonable that the population was larger and the number of people per household was larger.

However, this is relative to the vast border counties, not to the inland counties.

Taiyuan County had approximately 31,000 households and a population of around 200,000. Considering Taiyuan County's relatively good agricultural production conditions and economic development, this figure is hard to believe.

Shangdang Commandery was even worse. It was closer to the Three Rivers region than Taiyuan Commandery, and its economic and agricultural development conditions were relatively better. It had many economic exchanges with the Three Rivers region and was connected to Jizhou to the east. Despite these frequent exchanges, it only had 26,000 households and a population of only 127,000.

Is this some kind of fool?

How could Yuan Shu not be furious?
In addition, after the Wang family's property was confiscated, Yuan Shu counted more than 13,000 people hiding in the agricultural estates the family had built in four counties. If one family could hide so many people, what about other families?
However, while the Wang family was completely wiped out, the other families were not completely eliminated. They must have retained some members, and the majority of them must have been retained.

Data from May of the third year of the Zhengshi era shows that powerful clans in Taiyuan Prefecture handed over a total of 106,317 people who had been hiding.

The powerful clans of Shangdang County handed over a total of 89,132 people who had been hiding.

These two counties together handed over nearly 200,000 unregistered people, accounting for one-third of the registered population of Bingzhou.

The remaining seven counties combined only handed over 49,313 hidden persons.

Yuan Shu had reason to believe that the number of hidden people in Taiyuan and Shangdang counties definitely exceeded the number of registered people, especially in Shangdang County, where the number of hidden people might be several times greater than the number of registered people, while the actual population of Taiyuan County was estimated to be close to 600,000.

But what they handed over was really not much.

Yuan Shu was somewhat dissatisfied. He actually wanted the insects in the two counties to hand over more people, but compared to the registered population of only about 650,000 that Yuan Shu controlled, the additional nearly 250,000 hidden people were enough for him to operate for a while.

Including this batch of hidden people who were handed over, Yuan Shu controlled a population of about 900,000 in Bingzhou, a scale comparable to the registered population of Shu Han in its later period.

The Shu Han regime could support an army of 100,000 with its population size. Yuan Shu felt that although he would not exhaust the people's resources, supporting an army of 50,000 should not be a problem.

Moreover, it should be said that because Bingzhou was frequently embroiled in wars, the average life expectancy was lower than that of the inland prefectures and counties. As a result, the population was generally young, consisting almost entirely of young and middle-aged men and women, with very few elderly people. Therefore, this was a major advantage for future reproduction and growth.

After a series of maneuvers, Yuan Shu achieved a complete victory in the first phase. He triumphed over both the Xianbei externally and the powerful clans internally, eliminating nine thousand Xianbei and capturing two hundred and fifty thousand hidden people. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that he was utterly triumphant.

But he wasn't satisfied with that; he had more pursuits and plans.

Unfortunately, he needed time to digest these spoils of war and the fruits of victory. Therefore, for the next period of time, Yuan Shu's main task was to mobilize the entire population of Bingzhou to realize his Liangzhuang construction plan.

The majority of the hidden population was resettled in the five northern prefectures to build Liangzhuang (good villages). These Liangzhuang were constructed to the level of military fortresses, capable of both production and functioning as military strongholds to defend against Xianbei raids.

At the same time, he also had to rebuild and repair the existing low and dilapidated city walls, connect the city walls and Liangzhuang with roads, and build a dynamic production and defense system.

Liangzhuang needs to be built, the city walls need to be repaired, the roads need to be restored, and the water conservancy needs to be repaired. In the coming period, Yuan Shu must mobilize all the manpower and resources of Bingzhou and make them to the fullest extent in order to establish a complete survival system for Yanbian.

A dynamic survival system integrating production, living, military training, trade, and military defense was established in Yanbian, which mobilized all the resources at the disposal of Bingzhou, giving Bingzhou a strong ability to defend itself and repair itself.

This ambitious plan placed high demands on officials and required a high level of mobilization capabilities from the government. Ordinary governments did not possess this capability, but Yuan Shu was different.

Among the nearly 40,000 people under his command, the Yixinhui Group has a sufficient number of personnel with this capability, and has formed a mature operating system. They are able to build a good estate from scratch, which is their specialty.

So while Yuan Shu was mobilizing the hidden population to go north, he also began to recruit outstanding members of the Yixin Association and students of the Zhixing Academy from his Luoyang base camp to go north to Bingzhou, preparing to put them into the large-scale construction project.

Incidentally, replace the local insects of Bingzhou with them.

While dealing with powerful clans, Yuan Shu also audited the local officials in Bingzhou. It's no exaggeration to say that most of them were incompetent and lazy, lacking any sense of responsibility or commitment to developing or maintaining the local area. They only cared about making money and getting promoted.

As for those local officials, although they were willing to defend their territory, they cared more about their own families than the whole.

As a result, from the prefects to the minor officials in the counties, few in Bingzhou were serious about their work. They were all selfish and self-serving parasites. How could such a group of parasites possibly carry out Bingzhou's major construction plan?

Therefore, while the large-scale construction plan was being promoted, Yuan Shu also began to purge the officialdom of Bingzhou.

(End of this chapter)