The Ming Dynasty began from Sarhu

Chapter 562: The mountain must have a flaw, its momentum is overwhelming

Hey hoo! Hey hoo!
Hey hey! Hey hoo!
Hey hoo! Hey hey!
Carrying heather and rock, a thousand pounds on the shoulders;
Millions of people bow their heads, and the emperor ascends to heaven!
As night fell, the emperor sat alone on the highest throne in the Dazheng Palace in Shenyang. In the distance was the rushing Hunhe River and the passing time.

He is the only emperor who actually controls (or will control in the future) half of the earth. He is Emperor Liu Zhaosun of the Great Qi Dynasty.

The young emperor Liu Kan came before the retired emperor, and next to him stood his adoptive mother, the Eastern Empress Dowager Yang Qing'er. The three of them formed the three peaks of the empire.

The King of Emperors, this is how later poets of the Great Qi praised Emperor Wu Ding.

Considering that a few years later, most of the world and the people on this land were prostrating themselves before the already elderly emperor, and the empire's continuous commercial benefits around the world, it is not an exaggeration to call him the king of emperors.

Liu Zhaosun sat in a mahogany armchair so that he could meet with his trusted ministers who registered his property and wealth more comfortably and peacefully.

Silk, textiles, lacquerware, tea, pepper, bronze, gray glass, and gold from Macau; rough diamonds and rubies from Korea; pearls, cinnamon, and pepper from Southeast Asia; carpets, inlaid furniture, and embroidered sheets from Central Asia...

There was also ivory, the finest ivory from the east coast of Africa; from São Tomé came timber, cassava flour, bananas, yams, hens, sheep, goats, indigo, and sugar; from Cape Verde came some black people, wax, ivory, and leather (it should be noted that not all ivory came from elephants); from Jiangnan came cloth, wheat, spirits, shochu, tangerine peel, and fruit; and from other places, mainly Fujian, came sugar, tobacco, resin, indigo, timber, leather, silver, and gold. (Of course, this trade has now been interrupted by pirates.)
The empire's annual income from gold alone was as much as 150 million taels, and this only included gold powder and gold coins, not including anything else, including those that sank to the bottom of the sea and were looted by pirates.

Of course, this wasn't all the money Great Qi earned. The tolls collected on the Grand Canal alone brought in eight million taels of silver. The Grand Canal, painstakingly built by the previous dynasty, facilitated the collection of huge taxes. (In reality, this immense wealth wasn't used appropriately; a significant portion was siphoned off by corrupt officials.)
From the moment he established the Great Qi, Liu Zhaosun realized that loyalty must be put first and that he must use all means to ensure his subordinates' loyalty to the empire.

The retired emperor pondered over it. In addition to establishing a dense network of spy agencies and too many supervisory agencies to mention, he also paid high salaries to maintain integrity, provided large sums of money to the archbishop and the Catholic Church he controlled, established an office similar to the Inquisition, and brutally suppressed all heresy (those who violated the Da Qi system). He also did a good job of propaganda and brainwashing.

In addition to these routine operations, the retired emperor also spent over eight million taels of silver (a total of ten years), tens of thousands of tons of stone, bricks, and firewood, and employed thousands of civilians for manual labor (no scientific work was needed). The chief architect was a Portuguese (who had already fled), and civilians from Junzhou and even Huguang were employed as carpenters, masons, and stonemasons. Lamps, candlesticks, large bronze candelabra, wine glasses, gold and silver inlaid storage boxes, shrines to the Zhenwu Emperor, altar canopies, umbrella covers, white robes for pilgrims and priests, lace, and 300,000 large bluestone bricks from Linqing—Qi Jin insisted that this brick was the most sturdy for building the city.

Tens of thousands of ships were transported from the primeval forests of the northern border to make wooden planks for scaffolding, greenhouses and houses, as well as thick ropes and cables for capstans and pulleys; countless nanmu logs were transported from Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou to build the capital's palaces, Taoist temples and city towers. It is said that this kind of wood can last for thousands of years, so it was also used to build the tomb of Emperor Wu Ding. Liu Zhaosun began building his own tomb from the day he ascended the throne.

I hope the empire will last forever like these precious woods.

Masons, carpenters, goldsmiths, and silversmiths from across the country, statue and relief carvers, weavers, lace weavers and embroiderers, painters, cable makers, sawyers, gold and silver ribbon makers, gold carvers, carpet makers, clock assemblers, shipbuilders... over 58,000 people in all, all gathered in the small city of Junzhou. Like a group of tireless ants, they carried, cut, and reassembled various materials on the construction site. Tianxin City was located on a vast, flat land, trampled by the feet of the workers and run over by the wheels of the passing vehicles. Fortunately, everything was dry, thanks to the spring that had just begun to embrace summer.

According to the original plan, Emperor Wu Ding would tour Junzhou this autumn to inspect the progress of his capital.

At that time, the weather was dry and everyone could kneel down without worrying about getting their knees dirty.

Of course, people don’t need to think about this anymore.

Because Emperor Wuding was very dissatisfied with the siege, it was said that he wanted to kill people.

~~~~
The loose earth, gravel, and pebbles that gunpowder or pickaxes had driven from the hardened ground were carried away by carts, leveling hilltops and digging new pits to fill in valleys. Large, heavy fillers were transported on carts nailed with iron sheets, and the oxen and other livestock pulling the carts were not allowed to rest except when loading and unloading.

The inventor of shoulder pads should always be praised for his compassion for the people who carried the stones on their limbs and hips up the ramps of wooden planks to the scaffolding. These tasks have already been mentioned and simply summarized as manual labor. I am mentioning them again because we should not forget that this art is often overlooked because it is so common and insignificant.

Later researchers often wrote about it casually and absent-mindedly, so their work was buried by what others had already accomplished. It would be best if we could see it with our own eyes, even better if we looked down from a high vantage point, in the ancient city of Junzhou, from the bustling hilltops, the well-known valleys, and the wooden bird's eye view. Some wooden houses are decaying, the Laeriya pine forests have been cut down; brick and coal kilns, hundreds of them, smoke day and night; many ships are still carrying bricks, entering the Han River and transporting them along a man-made canal to the docks at the edge of the construction site; vehicles of all sizes bring in this and that material needed for the capital; and other vehicles bring in stones from Mount Wudang.

A black mass of people were struggling like ants at the foot of the mountain. Behind them stood thousands of Qi soldiers. These former elite soldiers of the empire were sent to the north by their chief officer Qin Jianxun at the strong invitation of the king's uncle, away from the Yangtze River and Huai River defense lines, to supervise the workers who were owed wages.

Since the construction of Tianxin City was of great importance, and in a sense it was a military project that could not afford to fail, when the accountants were surprised to find that the money in the project accounts was far from enough to pay the workers, the uncle of the emperor said indignantly:

"Money, money, money! You only think about money. For the sake of Great Qi, for the eternal cause of Emperor Wuding, I will endure the hardship and take the blame. Go, tell these unruly people not to mention money again!"

(End of this chapter)