Chapter 2934: Tianjin Wei (13)

They walked on another stretch and came before a field of cotton. This field was larger than the paddies of a moment ago, reaching past the eye's far edge: the glossy green cotton shoots already stood half a foot high, the leaves fat and thick, the stalks stout and strong, ranked row upon row in perfect order, like soldiers on parade. Morning light lay over the field; on every leaf hung a bead of dew, glittering fine-grained in the sun, as if a layer of scattered silver had been strewn across the ground.

Han Zhaoxian crouched and parted the shoots with his hand, looking closely. His fingers turned among the cotton leaves, the motion soft and practiced, as if he were stroking something precious.

"This field was opened last year; this is its first year under cotton." He studied the growth of the shoots, his gaze intent, like a man taking a pulse. "See the leaves — ink-green through and through, and thick: it says the base manuring was laid in plenty. The stalks are stout too; pinch one — the sap runs full, no hollow heart. This year's cotton ought to make a good harvest."

"When the cotton is in, next year cotton again, and rice the year after. So turning it round and round, the land's strength never runs dry." He rose and clapped the soil from his hands. "The year before last the Grand Secretary even tried double-crop rice — early-ripening stock brought up from the south, raised first indoors as seedlings in the southern manner, planted hard upon the solar terms. But the cold of this country defeated it; it would not take."

Xu Guangqi said: "This old man too was indulging a fond fancy — thinking that one harvest more would mean a few more mouths kept alive. Only, the weather grows colder day upon day, and there is nothing for it but the old round, one crop of rice and one of mixed grain. Were it a few degrees warmer, another crop of wheat might go in besides. Alas — alas!"

He said "alas" twice running, his tone full of regret, as of some loss past all mending.

Li Luoyou looked out over the broad farmland, and ten thousand feelings moved in him. These years he had gone south and north, from Liaodong to Guangdong, from the capital to Sichuan; he had seen how many wasted lands, how many scenes of the starved dead strewn across the fields. But here, upon this strand that was once a waste, ran another weather entirely — crops rank and thriving, men and beasts multiplying, fields like a painting, channels like a net, everything green and climbing.

Was it that Heaven would not give men their rice?! he thought. It was the times that would not give men their rice!

Thank Heaven there still walked the world the great and wise like the Grand Secretary — so long as such men lived, the realm still had hope.

"The Grand Secretary is a man of great talent," he said from the heart, without one grain of flattery in his voice. "Your student has walked the whole of this realm and never seen another who could turn alkali waste into farmland such as this."

"It is no talent of this old man's; it is the method that answers," Xu Guangqi said with a laugh, his tone level, as of a thing that went without saying. "Wang Yingjiao in those years tried poldering and rice at Gegu and Baitangkou before me; I have only carried his method forward, with a little filing and fitting of my own thrown in. In the business of the land, the thing most to be feared is refusing to put in the labor. Put in the labor, and the land will not shortchange you."

He paused, then went on: "Half a lifetime at farming has taught this old man one truth: the land has a spirit in it. Use it well, and it uses you well; palter with it, and it palters with you. Keep your mind on how to serve the land well and grow the crops well, and be it drought or flood, a way of answering it can always be found..."

The words were plain, but through them showed the clear-sightedness of a man weathered by long ages. Listening, Li Luoyou's mind went suddenly to the books Xu Guangqi had written — the Complete Treatise on Agriculture, the Treatise on the Sweet Potato, the Miscellanies on the Farmer's Legacy... In those days he had been no more than a compiler in the Hanlin Academy, yet already his heart was set on the most needful matter under heaven: food. Decades had gone past; he had risen to the first rank of office and held command over a region — and he was still farming, still wrestling the alkali ground.

This man, in all his life, had never changed.

They walked on again and came to a rise. It was a mound built up by hand, some twenty feet in height, its top leveled and paved with stone slabs, four stone pillars standing at the corners, carved with the characters "Cross Polder, Jia Series." From here the whole farming country of Gegu lay gathered in a single view—

The paddies were mirrors, one sheet joined to the next, shimmering under the sun like countless mirrors laid out upon the earth. The cotton fields were carpets, green and glossy, unrolling to the sky's edge and melting into the far horizon. The channels were a net — main lines broad, laterals fine, like the root system of some great tree driven deep into this land. The roads were a weaving — the straight bunds crossing and recrossing, cutting the fields into their ordered squares, like the grid of a chessboard, even and exact, not a thread astray.

Farther still, toward Baitangkou, great tracts of farmland and scattered houses could just be made out. There stood several windmills, their tall timber frames turning slowly in the wind, driving waterwheels that lifted the river's water into the high channels, whence, following the fall of the land, it ran down grade by grade into every field. The mill blades flashed in the sunlight, bright and dark by turns, as if beating out some measure of music.

Among the fields lay scattered a few villages. They were not large — twenty or thirty households — the houses neat and orderly; though roofed with rice straw they were brick, far other than the rammed-earth hovels common in the north. About the villages stood trees — willow, locust, elm — their green shade like a canopy, folding each village into an embrace of emerald.

In the fields people were at their labor. Here one set out seedlings, bent at the waist, hands rising and falling, and rank upon rank of green stood upright in the water; there one hoed the weeds, the hoe flying among the cotton shoots, quick and sure, harming no shoot and sparing no weed; another spread manure, a bamboo basket on his arm, casting the stuff across the ground fistful by fistful, the motion even and practiced. By a distant channel a few colonists were clearing silt, heaping the dredged mud on the channel bank to dry for manure.

Farther off still, toward the Haihe, lay a building site, where scaffolding and busy figures could dimly be seen. It was a new farm station going up; Han Zhaoxian said it was to be finished before the autumn harvest, against the settling of newly received refugees.

"These last years the colonization administration has raised, one after another, more than forty stations and taken in twenty thousand refugees. In the busy season the refugees farm; in the slack season they train as mutual-security militia. The bandit plague has gone out of the district, and the people have come by warmth and food." So Han Zhaoxian went on.

Cook-smoke rose in slow curls from the villages, pale white threads climbing gently through the windless air, like so many invisible silk cords binding heaven and earth together.

Li Luoyou stood on the rise and looked at the scene before him, and for a long while said nothing.

He thought of his first coming to Tianjin, ten years before. He had come to collect a debt, and passing Gegu had seen a stretch of flower-white alkali waste, a few tumble-down straw huts scattered thin, a few yellow-faced, skin-and-bone folk squatting at the roadside, their eyes empty, as if waiting only for death.

Now, in no more than ten years, the place had become another world altogether.

"At Gegu and Baitangkou between them, this old man has enclosed, over the years, above a thousand qing of waste — all of it alkali strand that no one wanted," said Xu Guangqi, pointing at the far fields, his tone quiet but with a pride past hiding. "Now the greater part of that land is under crop. The grain gathered each year not only feeds tens of thousands of colonists to the full, but sends a good deal up to the capital besides. And the cotton above all is a great staple — several hundred thousand jin a year, all of it sold to the merchants of the south."

At the words "merchants of the south," something stirred in Li Luoyou's heart, but he said nothing. His gaze settled on the cotton field; watching the glossy green shoots, he reckoned within how much cloth that cotton might spin, and how much silver it might come to.

Xu Guangqi seemed to read the thought; he glanced at him and smiled faintly. "Venerable Master Li — does your Liaohai Trading House deal in cotton as well?"

"To answer the Grand Secretary: the Liaohai House deals mostly in Liaodong goods; cotton figures little among them," Li Luoyou answered as it was, his tone candid. "Though your student has some dealings with the Tianbao Trading House, and now and then handles a little cotton business on their behalf."

"The Tianbao Trading House." Xu Guangqi repeated the name, and nodded. "A good part of this old man's cotton is sold precisely to them."

Li Luoyou was startled in secret. He had known that Xu Guangqi kept company with the Australians — the wheelchair a moment since had shown as much — but he had not dreamed the tie ran so deep. The Tianbao House was his wife's nephew's property, and its trade was the Australians' trade. Where the cotton went, no one needed to ask.

He remembered the letter, not long past, from Gu Baocheng, which had spoken of the Australians pushing cotton planting in Guangdong and opening cotton mills. He knew the Australians' cotton business well: at the first they had imported cotton cloth from India through the English and the Portuguese; this last year or two they had begun building mills of their own, spinning and weaving — and had turned instead to importing raw cotton.

Even from the old Grand Secretary's lands, cotton was now going to them! The thought struck him as absurd and laughable in one. But thinking again — was he not himself upon the hottest of terms with the Australians? Remembering his argument with Gu Baocheng those few days past, it was he himself who was the hypocrite, the laughable one!

"...Of all trades, the cotton trade most makes itself worth doing," Xu Guangqi said — well pleased with the business, by the sound of him. "Better, when you reckon it up, than growing rice by a long way."

That Han Zhaoxian, speaking of the ways of cotton growing, should be so clear in his threads and so sound in every sentence, did not surprise Li Luoyou. Xu Guangqi was, after all, born of a great household of Songjiang, and Songjiang prefecture was the cotton land famous under heaven; that he should trial cotton here upon Tianjin's reclaimed strand was a thing that followed of itself — nothing remarkable in it.

What truly gave him pause, in private, was that all before him was too orderly by half, too easily come by. Li Luoyou knew the score full well: true, the Grand Secretary had bought land at Gegu for farming as early as the forty-first year of Wanli, and had afterward gone to Tongzhou to direct the training of troops — but those were small ventures, a probing hand laid out, nothing that could come to much.

From his true coming to Tianjin under imperial mandate, formally superintending the colonization and directing the training, the tally came at most to seven or eight years. That in a bare handful of years he should have turned a waste strand into good farmland, with farming, training, and cotton each in full voice and color — such startling results were past the strength of one man alone.

Beyond the Emperor's trust, and the wholehearted help of the core circle of Catholic gentry about him — led by Han Lin, Duan Gun, and their fellows — there plainly stood one further force: unseen, yet mighty in its push, working somewhere behind.

Who that force was, no one needed to ask. His time in the capital had already taught him that one of Delong's greatest lending clients there was none other than this same Grand Secretary Xu, directing farm and soldiery at Tianjin. How much silver Delong had sunk into Xu Guangqi, Li Luoyou could not say; but the sum total, he feared, was a figure to stagger the mind.

Delong, of course, would never lose on the bargain. The governor's yamen had not only pledged its great tracts of newly reclaimed waste as security for the loans; it had made Delong's Tianjin branch sole agent for the yamen's every receipt and disbursement — had made it, in effect, the yamen's counting house.

And this was no small advantage. The post of Governor of Tianjin sat at too critical a joint: within the compass of its authority it controlled the Tianjin Circuit Intendant, the three Tianjin guards, the canal-transport judge, the Revenue Ministry's branch office, and the river constables of every guard — shielding the capital — while it coordinated besides the canal transport, the waterways, the salt administration, the coastal defense, and the local grain and pay. Over the civil and military alike of the district, the good and ill of river and canal, the moneys and grain of the marketplace — there was nothing into which its hand could not reach.

The yamen's power was frightening to behold, and the grain and silver passing through its hands lay heaped like mountains. To act as agent for its every receipt and payment — quite apart from whatever perquisites might be skimmed in the course of it — the yearly flow of position from the millions upon millions of shi of canal grain and the river-works and salt duties alone was enough to let Delong leverage the current, turn and borrow against it, and command every advantage of place and of the moment.

(End of chapter)