Late Tang Dynasty Floating Life

Gao didn't know how he got back.

As a woman, she vaguely knew what was going on, after all, she already had a child.

The two lieutenants became more and more polite.They carefully helped Mrs. Gao into the carriage. They used to say a few words of eccentricity, but now they didn't say a word, and there was a flattering smile on their faces - at this time, there is no need to offend the woman who is pregnant with the dragon species. Who can tell clearly.

Gao Shi was still covering her mouth and sobbing, in the midst of self-pity, she didn't notice the change in the attitude of the two of them at all.

After the carriage left Dafu, it drove slowly on the street.After leaving the south gate, turn west and go to the Jintai Hall of Linshuo Palace.But today is a bit of a "traffic jam"...

On the wide road, a large carriage overturned to the ground.The coachman hurriedly cleaned up the broken tiles and red bricks that had fallen on the ground, and other carriages loaded with building materials also stopped and went over to help.

"Unlucky!" Zhongguan Zhang Juhan yelled angrily, waved his hand, and asked the two little Huangmen who were guarding Gao's to also go up to help.

There were four other knights accompanying the car, and one of them was Yuan Xingqin, who had been promoted to lieutenant general. He rode his horse to go, inquired, and then came back, saying, "The Ministry of Internal Affairs is going to build a building in the southwest of Jicheng." A carriage workshop, specializing in the manufacture of four-wheeled carriages."

"Could it be the carriage that the saint rides?" Zhang Juhan was somewhat impressed.

"That's the one." Yuan Xingqin said: "I heard that this time the main purpose is to build a baggage transport vehicle. In fact, if this vehicle is transformed into a van, it will work well on the grassland, and it will be better than our original one."

One drawback of the two-wheeled carriage is that it is difficult to find a draft horse that is exactly the height of the frame.Generally speaking, the carriage has a certain degree of inclination, and it is not very comfortable whether sitting or standing.

If it's a four-wheeled carriage, it's perfectly fine.Regardless of the height of your horse's shoulders, the carriages are all horizontal, so it is much more convenient for people to stand in it to shoot arrows or fight.

"The sage is really vigorous and resolute." Zhang Juhan sighed: "The bricks and tiles are transported from the west. Could it be Xishan?"

"It's Xishan." Yuan Xingqin said again: "Last month, I followed the sage to go hunting in Xishan, but I saw thick smoke billowing. Some members of the Xiao clan built a brick yard in Xishan to burn bricks."

I don't know when the wind blew.Perhaps it was the Lingzhou era, when saints liked to build kilns and burn bricks.Moreover, after the prosperity of brick and tile wheel kilns, the output of bricks has increased greatly, and the efficiency has also improved a lot. The price of bricks has been falling all the way, and many people are more willing to use bricks to build houses.

As long as the sergeant's family has some money, their house is basically a mixed structure of brick and wood.

The walls are made of bricks, and the beams, doors, windows, and pillars are made of wood. After coal can be burned to dry wood, the price of wood is also greatly reduced.

The warriors are still very grateful for this.

You guys are not stupid, if you don't have bricks, you have to live in wooden or adobe houses.

The former is very afraid of insects and ants, and also afraid of humid climates.Some parts of Luoyang were originally swamps, low-lying and humid. If you encounter a rainy summer, it is not a joke to grow some mushrooms on the wooden walls.

The adobe houses are not strong enough. After all, not everyone knows how to pick fine sand and sieve it, and then ram the earth to build it. They are often dug up square and large clods, which are very afraid of rain and wind.After a long time, the adobe is still full of insect eyes, and some wasps nest inside the adobe, which is very annoying.

Bringing down the price of bricks and wood will benefit everyone.Maybe it can only benefit some wealthy people now, but what about the future?Maybe it will benefit more people.

"Brick burning requires coal. There must be a coal mine on the west mountain side. Whose?" Zhang Juhan asked.

"It still belongs to the Xiao family." Yuan Xingqin said: "It was opened by Li Cunzhang before, but it was confiscated by the court and sublet to the Xiao family."

"The coal mine is making money..." Zhang Juhan chuckled twice.

Without a foundation, can you open a coal mine?He once went to Heyang Xiuwu Coal Mine as an envoy, and there are too many ways to make money in it.

The washed coal is sold directly.

I remember that when the price was set for coal mining in Guanbei, the following people asked the sage what the price of coal was.The sage only recited two lines——

"A cart of charcoal weighs more than a thousand catties, and the palace envoy will not regret it."

"Half a bolt of red gauze and one zhang of silk, tie it to the bull's head and fill it with charcoal."

Red yarn is very cheap because it is too light and thin, and the material is insufficient, much cheaper than silk, and half a piece only costs more than 100 yuan.The price of silk is relatively expensive, and the quality and fabric used in the palace may be better, but it costs three hundred yuan.

Half a bolt of red gauze and one zhang of silk would definitely not exceed five hundred renminbi, and even more likely only four hundred renminbi, but buying a thousand catties of charcoal, equivalent to a catty and a half pennies, is indeed no different from robbery.

However, the output and cost of coal are much cheaper than charcoal.Especially in Lingzhou, sheep hoofs have produced coal when digging grass roots. They use "half a piece of red yarn and one zhang silk" to price a thousand catties of coal, but they are profitable and have contributed a lot to the shogunate.

Zhang Juhan didn't know the price of coal in Beiping Prefecture, most likely it was much more expensive than Lingzhou, and he thought it was quite profitable.

In addition, the coal needs to be washed after mining, and the precipitated coal powder after washing can be used to make briquettes or bricks, and even the broken coal gangue can be used for burning after being mixed with yellow mud. income.

"Is the imperial court going to start collecting coal money?" Yuan Xingqin asked suddenly.

Zhang Juhan was taken aback for a moment, then nodded slightly, and said, "Probably so."

In fact, everyone now understands the sage's routine.

When a new thing comes out, he will not collect taxes, and even do everything possible to provide convenience, care for its growth, let more people use it, and eventually reach the level of inseparability.

Because any kind of new thing, its position is not stable when it first comes out, and not many people know about it.At this time, if the fish is exhausted, it may die young and disappear from then on.

When it enters thousands of households, more and more people use it, and more and more people engage in this business, you can slowly reap the fruits.

Things like coal were first used by the people of Taiyuan decades ago.It was still called "carbon charcoal". It was dug by oneself, no one asked for money, and it didn't look like a business at all, so it didn't develop for a long time.

Some coal mines sporadically appeared in various parts of Datang, but they were all localized.As far as the whole world is concerned, very few people use it.

But the sage forbade people to cut down trees in Guanbei and ordered coal to be used instead.Although the implementation process has been largely out of shape, and many people still secretly cut down trees to burn charcoal, even today, it is an indisputable fact that the number of people using coal has increased significantly.

With the successive victories of the saints in the military, more and more states and counties are controlled, and coal mining industries have gradually emerged in other places, such as Zhouzhou Coal Mine, Xiuwu Coal Mine, and Liangxian Coal Mine.

Although the nobles felt that coal was not as good as charcoal, for ordinary people, the price of coal was too close to the people. Over time, charcoal was defeated and more and more people used it.

The saint said that he initially promoted coal to "protect the environment", saying that once the forests in Guanbei were cut down, as the weather got colder, they would never grow back, and then they would all turn into sandy land, where the people could not survive.

Zhang Juhan didn't quite believe it.But anyway, the sage did.

To prevent the common people from cutting wood and burning charcoal, it is useless to rely on lip service, and even severe punishments are useless, because charcoal is something that people really need, you have to come up with a substitute, right?

The saint really took it out, and it was cheaper, so he succeeded, and Zhang Juhan admired it very much.

"The coal money should have been collected long ago." Yuan Xingqin said: "City people cook and keep warm, who can do without coal? The woodcutters in Youdu County have all gone to the mines to dig coal. Without this thing, they can't cook well If the tax is collected, even if it is "one tenth", it is still a great number, so as to save the court from having no money to give rewards to us warriors."

Zhang Juhan laughed, and said: "In the past, when you Lu Longjun had no money, didn't you all take it yourself?"

"Big soldiers like to take it by themselves." Yuan Xingqin spat, and said, "I have a family and a business. If there is a mess, and the woman in the family is carried away by the warrior, who can I ask for reason?"

Zhang Juhan was overjoyed.

In fact, the generals really didn't want to make trouble, but sometimes they had to fight back when the big soldiers put a knife on their necks.

"As far as coal is concerned, as far as the current consumption is concerned, tens of thousands of dollars a year can be collected." Zhang Juhan said.

"That's all?" Yuan Xingqin was incredulous.

"If you want to charge more, you have to allow more people to use it." Zhang Juhan said: "To ask for taxes, the former Tang Dynasty Yizhi, and the same for Huangxia. The coal money will gradually increase."

Discussion tax is actually the commercial tax of later generations, and it was an important source of fiscal revenue for the court in the late Tang Dynasty.Especially in the case of separatist regimes, the imperial court received less and less income from the two taxes, and relied more and more on commodity taxes.

The biggest income in the tax is the salt money, that is, the income of the salt tax. At most, the court could receive several million coins at one time.

In addition to the salt tax, there is tea money, followed by various commodity taxes such as iron and lacquer. At one time, wine money was levied, but it did not persist, and there were too many opposition voices.

The tax is collected directly by the three divisions of the imperial court.

For example, the Guzhu tea farm in Huzhou was run by the imperial court and hired a large number of seasonal workers for tea picking, sometimes tens of thousands of people.The third division specially sent people to garrison at the spot to count production and sales, and then collect taxes.

Private tea farms are also taxed, the same as government-run tea farms, initially 10%, and then gradually increased.

In history, Tang Zhaozong still had the money to reorganize a new army of [-] after the destruction of the Shence Army, relying on the supply from the towns and the rich commodity tax and commercial tax revenue from various checkpoints.

The feudal town is yours, you collect two taxes, and then donate part of it.But the commodity tax belongs to the imperial court, and you cannot intervene—this is an ideal situation. In fact, there is a certain game, but it is also true that the imperial court can collect a large amount of commercial tax. At least it can negotiate conditions with local feudal towns and share revenue.

To put it simply, the late Tang Dynasty was a period of great commercial development in Chinese history, and it was the first time that commercial taxes accounted for such a large proportion of central fiscal revenue.

In fact, the commercial tax in the late Tang Dynasty was acceptable. The tax was included in the price of the product, and the final sales price was not too outrageous.

In the Northern Song Dynasty, it was really an exaggeration. The Northern Song Dynasty court had a very bad habit. It had to intervene in everything that made money, and some were even monopolized by the government, instead of both government-run and private-owned as in the Tang Dynasty.

Taking coal as an example, people began to use it in large quantities in the mid-Tang Dynasty. In the late Tang and Five Dynasties, there were signs of industrialization, and it developed greatly in the Northern Song Dynasty. Therefore, the Song court directly took it over and monopolized it, and private parties were not allowed to intervene.

In the twelfth lunar month of the fifth year of Song Zhenzong's Dazhong Xiangfu, "there was heavy snow and bitter cold for days on end, and those who sold charcoal in the capital would pay two hundred yuan per scale (15 catties)", that is, after the government-run coal was wholesaled, terminal merchants sold it for more than ten yuan per catty, and Kaifeng The people expressed that they could not afford it.

Seeing that many people were freezing to death, Song Ting "ordered the third division to distribute 40 scales of charcoal, half of the market value, to help the poor."

The Song Dynasty sold 40 scales of coal at half price to the people for the winter, that is, seven yuan a catty. Although it was still expensive, almost twice the price of grain, it was just needed in the cold winter and the twelfth lunar month, so it had to be bought.

As a result, "it's the small people rushing together, and there are people who trample the dead." It also led to a stampede, and people died.

Of course, this is what the people in Kaifeng can afford.

A catty of coal costs seven cents, why not grab it?So the trees in the imperial tombs of the Northern Song Dynasty were secretly cut down for warmth, and they deserved it.

At a moment's notice, the overturned carriage was finally cleared away, and the road became clear again.

Yuan Xingqin and Zhang Juhan guarded the weeping Gao Shi, who was out of his mind, and hurried all the way back to Linshuo Palace.