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Text Chapter 12 (33) After the Wheat Harvest

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    After mid-autumn, it¡¯s time to harvest wheat.

    The vast golden wheat fields around Shangjing became bare almost in the blink of an eye.  Huge arms of wheat stalks were lying on the edge of the field, waiting for people to move them back.  The adults have already begun to be busy in the village yard. There are only one or two sensible children gleaning wheat ears occasionally in the field.  These dolls know how hard it is for adults to farm, and they also want to help.  They walked around with their heads down in the fields that were scorched by the sun, holding a few pitiful grains of wheat in their hands, hoping to retrieve all the food that had fallen into the cracks in the soil

    This year¡¯s performance has been good.  Although the weather after autumn is not much different from that in summer, there is no shortage of rain and there is no obvious drought. Therefore, this is the year that has produced the most grain in recent years.  Especially the sunny days that last for ten days in mid-to-late August make drying wheat even easier.  Farmers who have been working hard for more than half a year would squat by the threshold when taking a break, looking at the thick yellow wheat grains spread out in the yard, and mentally calculating over and over again how much money they would receive after paying the autumn tax.  After paying a small amount of money and paying back the land rent agreed upon when renting the land before spring, how much harvest can I still have left?  As they mentally calculated again and came up with the number that they had confirmed so many times, a satisfied smile gradually spread on their faces.

    However, everything has its pros and cons.  Some people are happy, and naturally some people are sad; some people are happy, and naturally some people are sad.  During this harvest season, only those tenants who had to rent other people's land and those who had to rent part of the land were in a good mood.  And the vast majority of middle-class and upper-class households are jumping up and down to curse, they curse the grain merchants - they are all grain merchants whose consciences have been eaten by dogs, and they work together to keep the price of grain down.  There is only half of the previous year, so all the thoughts that everyone has been thinking about for most of the year have come to nothing!  As for the wealthy families and gentry who own large amounts of land, they are so worried that they don't even have the energy to curse.  Today, God has opened his eyes and the weather has been favorable. From plowing in the ground in spring to harvesting in mid-autumn, it can be said that everything is going smoothly. This is such a rare good year!  However, now that they look at the warehouses full of food at home, not only do they not feel the joy of harvest, but instead they feel a deep sadness.  According to today's food prices, whoever harvests more food will suffer more losses!  As for keeping food at home to survive this period of low grain prices, they generally don't even dare to think about it.  Storing grain also costs money; there is no point in hoarding less. If you want to hoard more, where can you find such a suitable ready-made granary?  You can't just pile all the food in the open, right?

    "However, if you worry, you will be worried, and if you scold your mother, you will scold your mother. The food that should be sold must still be sold.  In the face of unexpected and severe reality, the vast majority of people chose to bow their heads.  They had to sell the grain.  If we don¡¯t sell food, where will indispensable things like diesel, salt, vinegar, and sauce come from?  If we don¡¯t sell food, will we still be able to read and progress in our studies?  If they don't study or go to school, how can villagers like them change their families and families, and how can they change the fate of themselves and their descendants?  The most important thing is that if these grains are not sold, there will not even be a place to store them!

    Sell ??it.  There is no choice but to sell it.  Even if you lose your capital, you can only sell the food at a low price!  Fortunately, they are all from middle to lower households and do not have much land. The food they grow is not only enough to eat, but also a few spare cash to spend.  Nowadays, not only food cannot be sold at a high price, but also things such as firewood, salt, vinegar, sauce, cloth, etc. are much cheaper than in the past. In this way, they don't suffer too much after accounting.

    Hum, it is cheap those grain merchants with rotten belly!  Let you be rampant for a while.  However, thirty years in Hedong and thirty years in Hexi, guys with daily stamps, let¡¯s wait and see, one day you will be unlucky!

    But the grain merchants also have troubles that they can¡¯t tell.  The food cannot be sold at a high price, so we can't blame them at all.  Alas, the villagers who don¡¯t know the world still think that they have made huge profits, but they know very well that based on the current price of grain collection, plus principal, labor, transportation, storage, and sales,  In a series of trading steps such as business tax and commercial tax, they are still losing money when the grain is transported to the city and then sold at market price.  In Shangyanshang, to be honest, they are actually not willing to engage in such a loss-making business, but they are in the grain business, and it is not easy to get into such big businesses as grain, tea, cloth and medicine.  It's also not easy to go out - the government won't let them do it at all!  Their lives and future are in the hands of others. Even if it is a loss-making business, they can only pinch their noses and admit their misfortune.  Hey, others can still gain a good reputation by trading at a loss. They lost their capital, but they received a lot of scolding.  They are like the mouse that got into the bellows. On one end, the farmers call them profiteers, and on the other hand, the government also calls them profiteers. They are getting angry from both ends.  Even the common people who can buy as much food as before with half the money are also scolding them: the number of ships plying the Luo River today is more than half that of previous years., the labor price at Guankou Wharf has dropped to less than fifty cents a day. Many people stay at the wharf for a day and cannot even earn a living. How come the price of food in the city dares to be so high?  These black-hearted grain dealers, are they going to let anyone live?

    The accusations made by the common people against grain merchants are completely unreasonable.  The fundamental reason for the decrease in the number of ships on the Luo River is that prices in the capital continue to fall, and merchants are unprofitable. Of course, they are not willing to transport all their goods to Beijing for sale as in the past, so the number of ships on the Luo River will naturally decrease;  With fewer ships, people working on the docks to make a living naturally have no work to do. In order to attract business, these people can only sell their strength at a low price, so the price of labor can only go down again and again.  Let's go; these people can't make money on the dock, and they are certainly more reluctant to spend money carelessly. As a result, tea shops, small restaurants, cake and bun shops, and many other industries that originally relied on them to make a living will no longer be able to make a living.  They fell into depression one after another, and the income of people working in these places was bound to be directly affected In the end, this impact expanded to all industries in the entire Gyeonggi region, and began to spread to other states and counties.

    The impact of this incident was so great that it even alarmed Emperor Dongyuan, who had never cared much about the suffering of the people.  However, Emperor Dongyuan was good at calligraphy. When dealing with this kind of thing, he couldn't even come up with a high-level program and instructions.  The only thing he could do was to severely reprimand the prime ministers headed by Tang Xing and Zhang Pu and ask them to solve the problem within a time limit.  But the imperial court never expected such a thing to happen, and didn't know how to deal with it. It could only hurriedly publish various contradictory documents and notices.  The consequence of this is to attract criticism from both the government and the opposition.  The gentry who own a large amount of land are scolding, the upper and middle households who own a small amount of land are scolding, the grain merchants who collect grain are scolding, the common people who buy grain are scolding, the merchants are scolding, the job seekers on the dock are scolding, and the officials of the six ministries are scolding.  They are scolding, and local officials are also scolding

    There is no doubt that among all the criticism, Right Prime Minister Zhang Pu is definitely the target of public criticism.  Because state treasury revenue began to fall into stagflation after he became prime minister, and even regressed last year, public opinion inside and outside the court was very unfavorable to him.  People not only criticized some of his actions, but also doubted his ability to serve as prime minister.  As his personal prestige was severely challenged, doubts about him reappeared in the court. The left-minister struggle, which had just become clearer, seemed to have the possibility of falling into chaos again

    Amid the denunciation, at noon on the first day of September, a sales contract was recorded at the Pingyuan Mansion Yamen.  This is a land sales contract. The buyer, Pingyuan Ran, purchased 147 acres of high-quality cultivated land for 6,545,000 yuan. The average price per acre is only 44 yuan and 500 yuan.

    One stone stirs up a thousand waves!  No matter what other content is behind this land sale that has not been written into the contract, it is undeniable that the unit price of land has fallen below fifty cents, and the continuous decline in land prices seems to be an irreversible trend!  Through word-of-mouth and communication among the land sales middlemen in the Queer Market in western Beijing, it took only three days for the sellers and buyers in the capital who wanted to sell land to get the news.  The price of land in Gyeonggi Province fell in response. The land transaction delivery price in Queer City fell directly from the floor price of 60 cents per mu that had been maintained for more than 30 days to 55 cents per mu.  This seems to be a signal.  In the next day or two, the prices of grain, tea, silk, cloth, fur, medicinal materials, manpower and other businesses in the Shangjing area also readjusted, with prices reduced by half to 10% This is an almost unprecedented situation.  In the process of beneficiary, all participants, whether they are workers, customers or traders, are all victims; even the government and the court are not immune.  Among the various taxes in Da Zhao, more than half of the taxes are physical taxes levied on a proportional basis. For example, the land tax is one for twenty taxes, and the commercial tax is one for every ten. The grain, cloth and other materials collected by the government are recorded in the account books.  But they separated the physical account and the cash account.  The physical account does not matter, but the amount in the discounted grain account will inevitably show a downward trend as prices adjust.  On the day when prices plummeted, wailings broke out across the prefectures and counties in Gyeonggi Province.  Everyone knows that with such tax account books, the Ministry of Revenue will definitely not be able to pass the test, let alone this year's official evaluation. If there is a "medium" evaluation, everyone should burn incense to fulfill their wishes.

    It was not just the capital that was depressed. It soon spread to Zhengzhou and Huaizhou in the west, Huazhou and Xiangzhou in the north, Caizhou and Xinyang in the south, and Shanzhou in the east.  It even affected Jiangnan and Chu'e, important producing areas of grain and tea.  According to the latest report from the Changzhou Prefecture, local grain transactions in August were 20% lower than in previous years, and grain prices fell by half. Bulk transactions such as tea, silk, porcelain, medicinal materials, etc. also experienced a decrease in price and volume.  Changzhou Prefecture also speculated in its submission that this was probably affected by the drop in grain prices in Shangjing

    ¡­Just when the depression in Gyeonggi Province began to spread to surrounding areas, Jiang Tuan came to Shangzhuang again.

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