New Shun 1730

Many years later, when the Huaibei and Northern Jiangsu regions gradually got rid of the extreme serfdom and people were no longer eager to go to Southeast Asia, a ballad called "No Song of Death in Southeast Asia" was sung.

When the first group of people who had experienced the hardships of going to Southeast Asia heard this song, they would always think of the afternoon that gave them hope.

I advise you not to go to Southeast Asia, as it is like the gate of hell. Thousands of people go there but no one turns around, and knowing life and death is difficult.

It is difficult to make money and eat shit in the trivial matters of all kinds of truths. The intermediary only says that Southeast Asia is good, and making money is like scooping water.

The mouth is like a cousin's mouth, and relatives and friends cannot believe his words. He deceives people everywhere, and only makes money for the intermediary.

Thousands of intermediaries have no good death, and their bodies are torn into pieces and their families are extinct. How many people believe in his talk, and abandon the graves and ancestral tombs.

It is still okay to be single, without parents and family. I set an auspicious day and a good time, and left my house and hometown in tears.

Southeast Asia is thousands of miles away, and I work hard to earn money. The family and women are charged twice as much for the boat, and everyone has to keep the money in their heart.

The big ship is still at the port, waiting for good wind and good weather. Some people wait until February or March, and they have to eat, live and work during this period.

It is easy to send it with favorable wind, and it will reach Nanyang in less than ten days. When you set foot on Java, you will know the misery, and you will see three hundred piles of graves.

Everyone plans to find a way out, either hired or long-term. It is like selling cattle and horses in your hometown, opening your mouth to see your teeth and knocking your bones.

The price of young people is slightly higher, and you can count silver taels a month. For those over forty, a year is only half a year.

I have no tent to bite mosquitoes, and I have no quilt to freeze. If I want to change my clothes, I can only count and buy cloth.

I counted the beginning of the year and the end of the year, and I still owed money to my employer. I want to leave, but the debt has not been paid, and I have to work for another year. Two taels of money.

On New Year's Eve, people worship their ancestors, and my heart feels like a knife cutting. I have no relatives to serve me and no children, so I spend the New Year at the host's house.

Rest from the first day to the fourth day of the first lunar month, minus the cost of one thousand yuan. Robbery is just like this, and it is the same everywhere in Nanyang.

People say that Nanyang produces rice, and it makes me cry when I eat it myself. There are not a hundred grains of rice in a meal, and it is all filled with cassava and pumpkin.

Cassava is hard to eat, but I can still swallow it. I am afraid of bloating if I eat too much, and it is difficult to work if I eat too little.

If the wife and daughter have nothing to do, they have no choice but to receive guests in exchange for money. The husband receives the wild man when he enters the house, and he sits in the turtle meditation outside the house.

Regardless of men and women, tens of millions of people go to the plantation every year. Thousands of mistakes were made at that time, and I shouldn’t have trusted people to go to Nanyang.

Li Ling mistakenly entered the country of the Chanyu, and his heart was full of the Han Dynasty. I am the same now, and my black hair has turned white.

I want to escape but have no money, so I work year after year. Three years of ship fare and ten years of debt, ten years of old age still owe money.

If you go home and say that Nanyang is good, it must be Hua Niang’s cousin! Remind fellow villagers and elders not to believe what people say about Nanyang.

Every time a young man insists on coming, he will be beaten with sticks and have his legs broken and locked up in the house. Every word of this sad song is true, not a single word is false!

This is of course a ballad from a long, long time ago, and it only sings a simple fact: they went to Nanyang and were essentially debt slaves, but Dashun did not allow slaves, so they could not be said to be slaves.

It is a bit exaggerated that they could not pay off the three-year ship fare in their lifetime, but it can only be regarded as a slightly exaggerated rhetoric method, and it is still far from being a rumor.

Employers always have various ways to make you owe money.

There were many methods used in the Bangka Tin Mine before, and they were all "excellent" management experiences that could be learned from. Although the Batavia Sugar Factory no longer has the problem of residence permits, as long as the idea is right, it can always diverge and come up with new methods.

If there is money left every year, it can be regarded as the accountant is blind.

There is hydrocyanic acid in cassava. They don't know the reason, but they just know that cassava cannot be eaten too much, and eating too much will kill you.

But now, they don’t know what cassava is, nor do they care whether they will die if they eat it. When they were starving, the rotten sweet potatoes they picked up from the manure pit were completely black and bitter, making people vomit, but they didn’t say that they would die if they ate them.

At this moment.

These disaster victims don’t know what kind of fate is waiting for them in Nanyang.

It’s just that with the eloquent words of those “human traffickers”, the eyes that had long been dull due to despair and long-term natural disasters have regained their human brilliance.

Of course, the “human traffickers” at this time are not the same as the “intermediaries” that appear when small farmers stabilize many years later.

But the words said at this time are no different from those words that will be said in the future and will be called “the words of Hua Niang’s cousin”.

"Go! Nanyang is a good place. Rice there can be grown three times a year, and you can harvest it as long as you sow some seeds."

"You don't have to consider this season or that solar term. If you are here, there will be a cold spring and you miss the solar term, and this year is over. But in Nanyang, you don't have to remember any solar terms or days."

"You will work for three years to pay for the boat fare. After three years of work, the debt will be paid off. If you are willing to continue working, you can continue to work in the plantation."

"If you don't want to work, then work for a few more years to save capital. Buy some land and grow something yourself. As long as you have strength, one acre of land there is equivalent to ten acres here. Can you still starve to death?"

"Besides, after working for a few years, the owner will save money for you. When the time comes, you will be given a piece of land that guarantees that you will not starve to death. Hey, you can build a small house by yourself... Nanyang is warm, and the broken leaves are better than here to block the rain. After that, you can grow something to eat. If you are short of money, continue to work in the plantation for a few years."

"Have you ever eaten coconuts? Have you ever eaten jackfruit? Have you ever eaten mangoes? In Nanyang, the mountains are full of them. Even if you go to the mountains to pick them up and eat them, you won't starve to death. The fruit of jackfruit is like white sugar... Well, you’ve never eaten white sugar, but you’ve always chewed corn stalks, right? It’s much sweeter than that…”

"If you go there and work hard for a few years, you will have a house, a wife, land, everything. Even if you can't marry a Han girl, you can find a local Yi girl, and you won't have to worry."

"Yi girls can also give birth to babies. They have all the holes they should have."

The traffickers talked about the various benefits of Nanyang without any superb skills and only focused on two things.

Now.

future.

Eat now.

Hope for the future.

Being full now is a luxury.

There is hope for the future.

Many years later, when "The Death Song of Wuxiang Nanyang Wave" was sung, the social form and small farmer life in the Huaihe and Huaihe areas were already very different from what they are now.

And now, even as sung in the song of wandering death later, for the people here, it is a life full of hope.

At least, better than now.

From birth to now, the last time these people felt a sense of "hope" was when they cried when they were hungry as children, and their mothers would breastfeed them. That may be one of the few times in their lives where they hope to be satisfied most of the time.

From then on, until today, a flame called hope was once again ignited in my heart.

They don't care about coconut or jackfruit, and they don't even care about the taste of something much sweeter than corn straw.

In their imagination, it might be something like acorns or persimmons. Regardless of whether it's really delicious or not, as long as it's all over the mountain, you won't starve to death.

And there is actually no winter there, so there is no need to consider the four seasons. It doesn’t have to be like here, where an autumn rain and a spring cold will leave little of the year’s harvest.

Living is better than anything else.

What's more important is that as long as I go to Nanyang, the usury owed to the master here will be written off in one go. This is guaranteed by the government. Although the debt is recorded, according to the "Da Shun Law", the maximum amount is doubled and the debt is repaid in the future.

But everyone is thinking, pay back the money? What a fart!

This is enough for them to be willing to go to Nanyang.

Although according to their superficial understanding, the world is as dark as crows, the masters over there may not be much better than here.

But thinking about it, this place is like this, how could it be any worse? You can't eat people and drink their blood, right?

Not far away, the Funing County magistrate looked at the victims who were encouraged to go to Nanyang, but he had another thing on his mind.

He is a person with some conscience, and he thinks it is good to give these people a way to survive.

Nowadays, the imperial court is exempted, and in the future, it is said that an in-depth whipping method will be implemented to recruit people for work. These handymen can be exempted. In addition, the exemption is almost every year. As a county magistrate, he is actually a "disaster relief commander."

Other county officials still have to figure out how to collect this year's national tax. He has been working here for five years and has only been exempted from tax exemptions for one year, but his taxes have also been reduced by half. The fact that the county magistrate has failed to actually collect taxes shows the tragedy of this place.

Now, it is certainly a good thing to let these people go to Nanyang to find a way to survive without the county government paying any money.

But after the good thing happened, Jiedushi wrote to Fu Yin, and Fu Yin wrote to him, indicating that "the debts of tenants and lords must not hinder the voyage to Nanyang."

Neither the Jiedushi nor the governor explicitly said that these debts would be written off in one fell swoop.

Just the words "unstoppable" were given. It seemed that each county was required to give its best, but how could each county give its full play? Isn’t that just defaulting on your debt?

On one end are the Duke, the Governor, the Governor, and the Governor; on the other are the local gentry.

There is no need to choose which side to choose.

It's just that the official level suppresses people to death. They just say that it cannot be stopped, but they don't know what to do. This is normal in the officialdom, and the county magistrate has long been used to it.

The only thing I'm really worried about is that this year's debts will be forgiven, and next year the gentry will stop lending money. I'm afraid something big will happen. Fortunately, what we can count on is the Duke's credibility, which can really help us get a loan for this young crop.

Otherwise, I'm afraid that my black hat will be ruined.

No matter what happens, everything will be fine. Hello, I’m hello, everyone.

When something goes wrong, the governor said, I just told you not to hinder it and solve it on your own, but I didn't tell you to make the gentry refuse to borrow money. After the governor said this, the Jiedushi can also say the same.

On one side is Liu Yu who has kept his promise and must take responsibility; on the other side is the tens of thousands of people who have been suffering for a long time.

Being able to take on this seemingly low-risk responsibility is already considered a good official in the officialdom.

The human traffickers were there to deal with the victims and people, while the county magistrate had to deal with the gentry in the county who had debt relationships and tenancy relationships with these people.

Everyone who was relevant was invited to come over. The Funing County magistrate only advised: "These things should only be considered as donations from you."

A few gentry looked at the simple shacks for the victims to take shelter from the rain, and thought to themselves, we have contributed some money to these shacks for shelter from the rain, so why do we donate twice?

Besides, if you donate money, the court will reward you. This time the money is obviously not going to come back. If you say that you will definitely pay back the money if you live in the future, then why pay it back?

Officials don't know that some things can be done once but not a second time. I did it this time, and it will look good in the future!

Although they thought so and had many complaints, they dared not speak out. The central government of the imperial court had not collapsed and could still control this place. A major case had just occurred a few years ago, and the attitude of the imperial court was very annoying to these gentry.

But because the imperial court now had money and soldiers, they could only bury this resentment in their hearts.