Xinshun 1730

Chapter 1021 Two Sides of Things
Killing is the simplest thing in the whole thing, without any technical content.

Just after the summer solstice, the memorials and secret memorials of various officials in northern Jiangsu had already arrived in front of the emperor, as well as the "Huai'an Evil Gentry Records" that involved more than 800 lives.

The emperor just casually flipped through the volume of "Records of Evil Gentlemen in Huai'an", and since there were no ministers around, he didn't even pretend to be angry.

With just a quick glance, he threw aside the book that involved more than 800 lives, and not just ordinary lives, but the lives of squires.

It took about half a minute to look at the 20-word Evil Gentlemen's Book, and 10 minutes to look at the 1-word Estimated Confiscated Official Land Mu Book that was handed over.

Then, before going to bed today, the emperor had been watching the "Zou Inviting the Salt Area to Reclaim Wasteland" presented by Liu Yu.

There are two copies of this memorial.

One copy can be taken outside and brought to the court.

The other copy is an internal version, which cannot be taken to the court to read.

In recent years, Liu Yu has seldom read such serious memorials. The emperor only read a few pages, and found the long-lost "serious" feeling.

With the help of kerosene lamps presented by the bright Tianbao Mansion, which are purely hand-made and can only be used as tributes, I read this serious book "Zou Invitation to Reclamation in the Salt Area" with rich pictures and texts.

Chen Yu said:

Before the Tang and Song Dynasties, the Fangong Dike in the north of the Yangtze River was known as the sea.

Since the Song Dynasty, the Yellow River seized the Huaihe River, silted up, and the coast moved eastward.Fan Gongdi is also the coastline in Song Dynasty.

The land of vicissitudes of life starts from Guanhe Chenjiagang in the north, reaches Lvsigang in Nantong Prefecture in the south, is bounded by Fangong Dike in the west, and ends in the sea in the east. .

See Figure A for details.

At the beginning of the siltation, the soil was all brine, and no grass grew, but it was good for salt, so it benefited Huainan's salt industry.

However, as the rain washes away, the water in the Yellow River and the Huaihe River becomes fresh, the sea air recedes day by day, and the brine becomes clearer day by day.

Therefore, Huainan is a salt field, but in terms of natural conditions, it is far inferior to Huaibei.

In addition to nature, there is another tradition.

Due to the system of the previous dynasty, this dynasty inherited it, and the method of boiling salt is mostly used in Lianghuai.What to do, in my opinion, in the early days, it was a last resort for recuperation and sparse population in the Hongwu period of the previous dynasty; but later, the method of drying salt became more and more popular, but because it was easier to control the salt households to cook salt than to dry salt, so Follow it.

If the method of boiling salt remains the same, the choice of salt cannot be cultivated, and the selection of cultivated salt cannot be used.

Before reclaiming wasteland, His Majesty must first decide whether Huainan's future positioning is to produce salt or grain, and then the method of reclaiming wasteland can be determined.

Therefore, I first discuss the disadvantages of promoting salt in Huainan.

There are three of them.

One: The method of extracting brine in Huainan is too old.

Before boiling the salt, you need to extract the brine first.

However, the extraction of brine does not directly take seawater, because firewood and grass are used to boil salt, and the seaside is scarce and transportation is not easy, so we can only choose firewood from nearby places.And because the Huanghuai River and the Yangtze River flow into the sea, the seawater in Huainan is relatively weak, which is not as good as other places.

The method used to extract brine in Huainan is the "spreading ashes and pouring brine method" in Song Dynasty, which is to get brine on the land.

The method is as follows:

Choose a sunny day to dig a saline-alkali land.Then tamp the foundation, expose it to the sun in sunny days, and rise through the water vapor, so that the salt below rises to the tamped surface.

Then, take the plant ash and spread it evenly on the landmarks, and use the plant ash to absorb the salt in it.

When the adsorption is almost done, pour water into it.

Put in stone lotus seeds again, and rely on buoyancy to determine whether the salt content is high enough and whether it is worth cooking.

If it is worth boiling, then the salty grass ash water can be regarded as brine.

Your majesty forgives the vulgarity of your ministers. If you are in those places where you can dry salt, this method of soaking the salt alone will be unnecessary to take off your pants and fart, which will increase a lot of costs.

And this marinating method requires a large amount of grass ash.

Grass ash is burnt out of grass.

Therefore, a large amount of grass is needed again.

Cutting the grass, drying the grass, burning the ashes, spreading the ashes, and introducing brine are all costly.

This is one of the disadvantages.

Second: The method of boiling salt in Huainan is too old.

Changlu, Yingkou, Fujian, Taiwan and other places all use the method of drying salt.

Because it is not a place with heavy salt tax, the imperial court's supervision is weak, so it blossoms and bears fruit.If the previous government didn't want to take care of it, it is really powerless to take care of it.

In Huainan, because the imperial court wants to control the salt tax, some salt officials are ignorant and conservative, so they don't know how to manage the salt law or how to collect taxes on the basis of the salt law. The sun-salt method has not been allowed.

As a result, Huainan had to go through a cooking process to turn the brine that was so easily extracted with plant ash into salt.

Boil... Since the east of Fangong Dike was only rushed out after the Song Dynasty, how could there be shallow coal mines?
Therefore, it is necessary to cook salt without coal, and plants and trees are needed.

Boiling salt requires a lot of pastures and forests.

Not to mention the places where trees and grass can grow, basically you can reclaim wasteland. Just mentioning the two processes of soaking brine and boiling salt, both require a lot of vegetation, which makes the cost of Huainan salt extremely high.

This has two disadvantages.

Third: Huainan salt has high production costs and high transportation costs.

Since the previous dynasty, the invasion of Sichuan salt into Chu, Fujian and Guangdong into Jiangxi has been a difficult matter, especially in this dynasty.

why?

From Huainan to Hankou, all the way is sailing against the current. How can it compare with Kuizhou's salt going down the river?

Huainan still uses the method of boiling salt, while Fujian and other places have used the method of drying salt. How can the production cost be compared?

The transportation cost is also high, and the production cost is also high. In this way, even if the price of official salt does not have the disadvantages of those salt merchants, how can they compete for Fujian salt and Sichuan salt?
Official salt is becoming more expensive, while private salt is increasing. The population of the dynasty has more than doubled, but the salt tax in Lianghuai and Huaihe Rivers has not increased. This is all because of this.

Your Majesty is also aware of the tea tax in England, Guizhou and Liberia, so it is the same here.

From these three disadvantages, the minister thought that Huainan should be a waste of salt to promote reclamation.

The matter of abolishing Huainan salt can be subdivided into three directions.

Generally speaking, there must be official salt from other places to supplement the Huainan salt market.

The development of Sichuan salt is supplemented by Xiangchu.

Firstly, because of casting coins and transporting lead, this dynasty is already familiar with the Yangtze River route. Although the current sinking rate is [-]%, your majesty should know that at least half of the [-]% sunk copper ships are actually They all pretended to sink and sold the copper privately.

Two, after the Northwest War ended, Shanxi merchants had abundant financial resources, and they were able to develop Sichuan salt, making southern Sichuan the bridgehead for the township to the southwest.

For those protected by the minister, within three years, Chuanyan will surely be able to make up for the needs of Xiangchu.

This is the first direction.

The second direction is Huaibei, especially Haizhou Salt Industry.

The difference between Huainan and Huaibei is that in terms of salt, Huaibei is more suitable for sun-dried salt than Huainan in terms of precipitation and climatic conditions.

The benefits of the sun-dried salt method have been mentioned by the minister many times, so I won't go into details here.

This salt government reform started in Huaibei and ended in Huainan.

The third direction is the words of Fujian and Guangdong, and this matter can be discussed in the same way as the second direction.

That is to say, use salt from Huaibei, Fujian and Guangdong to supplement the salt market in Huainan except Xiangchu.

In all parts of the Jiangnan area of ​​the Huaihe River, His Majesty is sage, benevolent, and magnificent, so he abolished the disadvantages of the canal and promoted the benefits of sea transportation. With the prosperity of sea transportation, the Jiangnan market does not have to worry about the salt transportation from Haizhou, which can completely fill the vacant market in Huainan. .

This matter cannot be taken lightly, and should be resolved within five years.

That is: within five years, Sichuan salt, Huaibei salt, and Fujian and Guangdong salt will completely replace the Huainan salt market under the premise of ensuring sufficient production, no shortage of people, and more official salt sales than before.

The matter of Sichuan Salt is not mentioned.

The Huaibei Salt Administration, the minister believes that the purpose should not only be to "change quotations into votes", but to completely replace the Huainan Salt Industry. Changing quotations into votes is only a means, not an end.

This matter should be divided into three steps.

The first step is to change the quotation to a ticket, so there is no need to say more.

The second step is to organize the Huaibei Salt Industry Corporation.

In Haizhou, taking advantage of the strong sea brine and abundant sunshine in Haizhou, the minister can guarantee that within three years, the Huaibei salt production can fully meet the needs of the people after the Huainan salt and Changlu smuggled salt exit.

for a period of five years.

The first year, that is, this year.

Change the Huaibei salt ticket law, and in Hankou and other places, snipe the counterattack of Huainan salt merchants and destroy their capital.

At the same time, it absorbs investment and establishes Huaibei Salt Industry Corporation. Taking advantage of the climate, it popularizes the salt drying method in Haizhou to increase salt production.

Next year is the second year of Weixin.

Taking advantage of the fact that the sale of official salt has increased significantly due to the crackdown on salt smuggling in Changlu, the voices of opponents of the salt reform in the DPRK and China have been suppressed.

At the same time, if Huainan salt merchants compete with the official salt of the imperial court in Hankou, their financial resources will inevitably weaken next year and they will be unable to resist.

In this way, the Xiangchu salt market is required to be attributed to Huaibei.

The Huaibei Salt Field developed vigorously to make up for the vacancy in the Xiangchu salt market.

After a few years, or three, or five.

The salt production in southern Sichuan is enough to supply the Xiangchu market, and the salt from the Huaibei market will be withdrawn from Xiangchu to replace the remaining Huainan salt market.

The key to this is the official promotion of commercial sales and the transformation of lords into merchants.

For example, in Hankou, those who undertook the sale of official salt were all Hunan and Chu merchants.

Because it is official luck, they don't need to consider whether it is Sichuan salt, Huainan salt, or Huaibei salt.

There is no impact on the sales side.

If there is no impact on the sales side, it will have no impact on the people.

In this way, the imperial court could control the salt production in Huaibei and southern Sichuan in a planned way, and withdraw Huaibei salt when the southern Sichuan salt could supply the Xiangchu market.

The production of salt in Huaibei, because of the needs of the Xiangchu market, has also developed, enough to fully replace the salt market in Huainan.

In this way, after three to five years, the imperial court can completely abolish Huainan salt.

And because of the characteristics of official business and sales, the common people and merchants could not feel the turbulence of the salt industry reform.

The key point lies in the Xiangchu market, which serves as a buffer and reservoir.

In the second year of Weixin, the purpose of Xiangchu market is to boost the salt production of Huaibei Sun Salt Corporation, to ensure profitable capital and to expand production.

However, in the new year three to five years, the Xiangchu market is still a buffer, and the already developed Sichuan salt is introduced, and the output of Huaibei sun-dried salt has been boosted by this buffer market, fully invading the final market of Huainan salt.

Huainan salt, however, cannot be compared with Huaibei salt in terms of cost or quality, and after the previous attack on the capital of salt merchants, it is already powerless and doomed to failure.

If His Majesty decides on this major reform of the salt policy, the land reclamation industry will flourish.

The sage said: Looking at it dialectically, everything in the world has its two sides. Good things can turn into bad things, and bad things can also turn into good things.

We must learn to look at the problem comprehensively, not only to see the positive side of things, but also to see its negative side.

Under certain conditions, bad things can lead to good results, and good things can also lead to bad results.

Lao Tzu said: Misfortune depends on fortune, and fortune rests on misfortune.That's why.

As a human being, one should look at things comprehensively, find out the laws and make use of them, and turn bad things into good things.

Therefore, the minister also said: The disadvantage of promoting salt in Huainan is the benefit of developing reclamation.

Both in Huainan, salt brings disadvantages, and reclamation brings benefits. This is the two sides of things.

　120 Happy eighth birthday!
　　
　
(End of this chapter)