Chapter 2938: Tianjin Wei (17)

The party pressed on another li and more, and by the roadside there appeared a great working yard. It was large — a good several tens of mu — its surface of lime and sand rammed flat and hard, swept spotless. Along its edge stood row upon row of round silos, walls of blue brick, roofs of gray tile, seals pasted across the bin doors bearing the two characters "Official Granary." Beside the granaries stood a workshop, a waterwheel turning there as well, and from it came the rumble of millstones — plainly it was milling grain.

These silos Li Luoyou knew better than well. No official or private granary of the Great Ming ever took such a form — the long shed-like granaries ranged in a line, those he had seen aplenty. But these round towers rearing so high he had seen only in Lingao. Sealed tight, proof against rats and rain, grain stored within would neither mold nor breed worms for three or five years. It cost more, yes — but the spoilage fell by more than nine parts in ten.

A good many people were at work in the yard: some turning grain in the sun, some hauling sacks, some mending farm tools. Their clothes were patched, but not ragged. They worked quick-handed and in fine order. It was a rare thing for Li Luoyou to see common folk with such color in their faces.

The steward, seeing them come, hurried out to meet them at once. A man of forty-odd, middle-sized, in a blue cotton robe with a cloth belt at the waist and a small six-in-one cap on his head; his face square and regular, a few strands of short beard beneath the chin, everything trimmed neat as could be. His stride was quick but showed no fluster; drawing near, he bowed first, with great respect, to Xu Guangqi and Han Zhaoxian, then clasped his hands toward Li Luoyou — ease and confidence in every motion.

"Your Excellency has come." His voice was not loud, but perfectly distinct.

Xu Guangqi nodded and presented the man to Li Luoyou: "This is Steward Liu, an old hand of the Gegu settlements, many years in my service, and a brother of the Church besides. The day-to-day running of the three stations here is all in his hands."

Steward Liu bowed at once. "Sir, you have come from afar; your humble servant failed to welcome you at the road — forgive me, forgive me."

Li Luoyou returned the courtesy. "You are too courteous, Steward Liu. Everything here stands in perfect order, and the people look well — proof enough of your stewardship."

"You praise me beyond my deserts, venerable sir." Steward Liu smiled, and a thread of honest pride ran through the smile. "Your humble servant merely does as the Grand Secretary bids. Every regulation here was fixed by His Excellency, clause by clause; I only keep watch that those below follow them to the letter, and do not dare go slack."

Xu Guangqi waved a hand. "You need not be modest either. Master Li is likewise a brother of the faith. Tell him how things stand at the station. A merchant long in every quarter of the realm, he has seen much and knows much — he may even have some counsel to offer you."

A settlement steward was, in itself, nothing remarkable — among the people he would simply be the manager of a landed estate. Despise the post as humble, yet it was no berth for an ordinary man. It asked not only for shrewdness and capability, the power to keep the hands in order and parley with local officials — it asked for "conscience" as well. The former were easy enough to find; able men swarm like fish at a river crossing. A "conscience" — that was rare indeed.

Li Luoyou, like every Chinese of the old order, had bought land once he had money. He held more than ten farming estates scattered through the Two Guangs, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, Shandong, and elsewhere, with over ten thousand mu to his name. For all his own shrewdness, his estate stewards falsified accounts and embezzled rent grain, oppressed tenants, bullied men and ravished women — some even colluded with officials and the local rotten gentry and bullies, scheming to swallow his land outright — such things happened over and over. Steward Liu managed a government colony; were he a man without conscience, his lawlessness could run finer still — Li Luoyou had seen all too much of that at the imperial estates and princely manors in every province.

Li Luoyou had some schooling in physiognomy. He studied the man briefly and judged him of an honest, square stamp; and laboring as he did beneath Xu Guangqi's very eye, he should know his measures.

Steward Liu assented, and led the party into the yard at an angle, talking as he walked. "This station is the oldest in Gegu — twenty qing of old colonial land that Master Xu bought at Tianjin in the forty-first year of Wanli. It has been more than twenty years now. The fields here are the best tilled, the waterworks the most complete, the yields of grain and cotton the highest — so the people are more numerous here as well. At the first there were only fifty households; today this one station alone counts two hundred households, better than a thousand colonists. At the other sites there are another three hundred-odd households — sixteen or seventeen hundred souls."

He indicated the silos along the edge of the yard and continued: "These are the official granaries; they hold the public grain. The harvest of the colonists' fields is split sixty-forty: the household keeps four parts, the government takes six. Of that six, a portion goes up to the capital and to Tianjin for army provisions; a portion is stored away against famine and disaster; and a portion is shipped out and sold to meet the costs of the reclamation."

That split could fairly be called harsh. But Steward Liu explained: first, beyond this land rent the colonists bore no other taxes, levies, or corvée — the four parts they kept were clear gain. Second, for the old, the women, and the children the station had work to assign, with wages and rations settled over and above. And should natural disaster strike, the rent could be remitted. Add those two together, and the arrangement became rare and precious indeed. Moreover, with the reclamation yaman as a great umbrella against wind and rain, they escaped a great deal of the bullying and squeeze that fell on common folk elsewhere.

"All this land — who tills it?" Li Luoyou asked.

Steward Liu replied: "To answer your honor: the station's land is of two kinds. One is estate land, run by the station as a whole and worked by hired labor — the entire harvest goes to the government. The other is the household land divided out to the colonists, each family's share fixed by its working hands: one grown man, thirty mu."

He ran the sum through his head in a moment. Suppose a five-mouth household with but one able-bodied man: thirty mu. Reckoning, as Han Zhaoxian had said, one dan to the mu, the four-part share came to twelve dan — enough to feed five mouths for a year on grain alone. And farming was but one income; by Han Zhaoxian's account, a family could add to it by working for the station. Reckoned so, a household would live warm and fed with room to spare.

Only — was there truly that much work to be had?

Steward Liu read his doubt and explained. "What the venerable sir does not know is this: to farm at Gegu costs ten times the toil of any other place, and more besides! The channel works alone swallow I know not how much labor — and then there is the carting of manure, night soil, and town refuse from every quarter, the clearing of silt at the river works, the digging of clay and firing of brick at the kilns, the workshops at every site... A man need only wish to work, and the work will never see its end."

"And the women?" Li Luoyou asked again.

"The women do not sit idle either," said Steward Liu. "In the busy seasons they go down to the fields to help with the transplanting, the harvest, the cotton picking; the station runs a spinning mill, and then there are the chickens to feed, the pigs to feed, the vegetables to plant... all of it women's work."

Li Luoyou nodded. The station's arrangements were ordered to a hair: old and young, men and women, not one soul sat idle. Hard living, no doubt — but survival stood assured. Say what you would about mere survival: in these days, for very many, to live at all had already become a hope beyond reach.

"And where do the colonists come from?"

"From every corner of the realm," Steward Liu sighed. "Most out of Shandong, Henan, and Northern Zhili... These past years, what year has passed without famine? Famine comes, and the people take flight. On that flight, if five or six in ten live to arrive, it counts as good fortune. His Excellency has had reception stations set up at Tianjin, Cangzhou, Jinghai, Qingxian, and such places; the fleeing folk are gathered in there first, and then sent on to Gegu."

"Those who reach Gegu are not given fields and houses out of hand," Han Zhaoxian added at his side. "First they must dwell half a month in the reception station — under quarantine."

"Quarantine?" Li Luoyou was faintly startled. They had learned even this?

Han Zhaoxian explained: "Fleeing folk lie in the wind and dew all along the road, eating bran and swallowing greens; most carry sickness in their bodies. Set them straight among the villages, and one ailing head passes it to the next — in a few days the whole settlement would suffer. So the Grand Secretary fixed the rule: every newly come refugee dwells half a month in the reception station, and the physicians examine them one by one. The sick are treated, those with scabies are salved, the lousy have their heads shaved and their clothes boiled and washed in the great cauldrons. Only after the half month, once they are certified free of sickness, are they parceled out among the villages."

"Nor do they eat and lodge those fifteen days for nothing," Steward Liu took up. "Those who can move lend a hand at the lighter tasks — picking over vegetables, boiling water, washing clothes, sweeping the yard; those who cannot lie abed and mend, and speak of work when they are well. No one may eat bread for nothing — eating for nothing breeds lazy bones. Even a man past heavy labor must shell some beans, twist some hemp rope, pick over some stones — some light task or other."

Li Luoyou nodded, silently impressed: learned to the bone.

"And after they are assigned to a village?" he asked.

"After the assignment, an old household takes them in hand for a month's work. That month is given chiefly to learning the land, the roads, and the people, and the rules of the settlement. When it is past, those who have given a good account are settled as colonist households in full standing. Any skulking, slippery, idle, drifting breed is sent to the river works or the kilns for hard labor."

Li Luoyou stood in the yard, watching a young errand boy's back disappear behind the workshop, and suddenly felt the whole scene waver like something half-dreamed. These days in Gegu — all he had seen, heard, and felt differed utterly from what he had imagined this reclamation station to be. He had supposed it no more than an official land-colonization scheme: a few thousand settlers, a few tens of thousands of mu, some grain grown, some common folk kept alive — and there an end. Once inside, he found it far more intricate than he had imagined: mills, river works, brick kilns, farm colonies, granaries and yards, workshops — and the Nameless Whites gathered in from the Southern Park, the refugees fleeing in from every quarter, the soldiers seconded from the army, the artisans engaged from Lingao...

Was this not Lingao itself, as he had walked it in the old days? Less "Australian" in flavor, far smaller in compass — yet a miniature of the whole, every move and every posture faithfully learned. This place was less a settlement of the Great Ming than a small "Australian" town.

"Master Li." Han Zhaoxian's voice drew him back out of his thoughts. "We have come a long way. If the plainness of the place gives no offense, rest here a while and take a cup of tea with a little something?"

Li Luoyou, in truth, was not tired — but he supposed the Grand Secretary's strength must be running low. He nodded at once and said, smiling, "Much obliged."

Steward Liu said quickly, "We have only coarse tea to set before guests — so long as it does not offend the gentlemen." With that he turned and instructed a young errand boy at his side: "Go and have word sent — sweep out a clean room. His Excellency the Grand Secretary and the gentlemen will rest here!"

The boy answered with a whoop and was gone like a wisp of smoke.

(End of chapter)