The situation around Yingtian Prefecture has been inspected. It is impossible for Zhao Jun to visit all the rural areas across the country. If he does, he may not be able to finish visiting them all in his lifetime. He can only visit the more typical county governments in various states.
According to his research, the situation of land annexation is indeed very serious and has almost reached a very dangerous level.
Yingtian Prefecture is the Henan region, which is part of the North China Plain.
There are a lot of vast farmland here, but most of the owners of the land are landlords. The good fields are controlled by the landlords, and most of the land owned by the self-cultivating farmers is just ordinary or inferior land. The people have a very difficult life and can only barely make ends meet after working hard all year round.
Many of them became tenants and servants of the landlords, working for them. Many wore coarse cotton shirts, their faces and bodies were covered in mud, their skin was dark, their complexions were pale and their bodies were thin, and they were surrounded by poverty.
At least during these days, Zhao Jun did not see many people with enough food and clothing, did not see a decent house, and did not see many wealthy families.
Their houses were all shabby wooden or rammed earth. The better off could afford a rammed earth wall that would collapse easily. Ordinary families could only afford a fence, and the poorest had a dilapidated wooden house with almost no place to stand.
Zhao Jun did not witness the so-called prosperous reign of Emperor Renzong, but only saw the hunger, poverty, suffering, and numbness hidden beneath this prosperity. It was spring plowing time, and the countryside seemed full of vitality, but everything was also silent.
The only thing that seems to have some advantages is that the clan power in the north is not serious, and the government laws in various villages are still more powerful than clan laws.
Because when Zhao Jun came, it was the stage of urging spring plowing. The government sent people from the yamen to various villages to urge the people to farm together with the local heads of households and village heads. These rural officials and clerks shuttled between the villages, promoting farming and solving certain problems.
Because widows remarry and relatives live apart, some fields will become abandoned. However, if no one cultivates the fields, the household still has to pay taxes on the fields. Some people abandon their fields to others to avoid taxes.
Then these rural officials and clerks would register and, through the "one field, two owners" system, help the household heads sell the land and find landlords or other laborers to buy it and cultivate it, thus avoiding wasteland.
After all, if the system were completely bad, the country would have collapsed long ago.
So although land annexation was indeed serious in the Song Dynasty and the upper class sucked the blood of the lower class, it also gave rise to the possibility of private land transactions and easier access to land for labor, thereby reducing the occurrence of abandoned land and reduced grain production.
In the case that clan power in the north is not particularly strong, if the first industrial revolution can be developed in the Pingdingshan area through the local coal mines and iron mines, there will be no shortage of labor, and a large number of young and strong workers can be recruited from Henan, Hebei and other places.
Zhao Jun recorded all these things one by one. The First Industrial Revolution seemed to be quite beneficial. After the young and strong people were absorbed, the landlords in Hebei and Henan lacked labor. Accordingly, they would definitely increase their treatment to retain these young and strong people. It would probably help a lot for the lives of ordinary people.
After leaving Yingtian Prefecture, we passed Huiting Town under Gushu County and paid taxes again before entering the territory of Huainan.
Near February, in the town of Lingyang, Bozhou, Huainan East Road, the town is not big, but the trade is quite developed. Many ships are anchored at the dock, and workers come and go carrying goods. Before getting close to the dock, a strong smell of medicine hits your nose.
Since the Tang and Song Dynasties, Bozhou has developed a wholesale industry for medicinal materials. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, it was one of the four major pharmaceutical capitals.
Medicinal herb merchants from all over the country gathered here and sold the herbs to all parts of the country through the canal. Even blond-haired and blue-eyed foreigners came to Quanzhou and Guangzhou to buy herbs, which shows how big the market was.
The town of Yingyang is connected to the canal. There is a small river to the west of the town that passes through Ying County and merges into the Huanshui River. Then it enters the Woshui River basin through a tributary and goes to Qiao County, the capital of Bozhou Prefecture.
According to the original route, Zhao Jun's ship should have passed Bozhou to Suzhou, and then went south by land to Haozhou, Shouzhou, Luzhou, Chuzhou and other places. Because of the severe drought in Huainan two years ago, these places were the worst affected.
But at this moment he planned to follow the branch road into Qiao County.
However, his ship had just left Yingyang Town for less than an hour and was still more than 30 miles away from Ying County when it was blocked.
Because the river channel ahead was too narrow, a boat capsized and blocked the river channel.
Originally, this tributary is not narrower than the canal, but the canal is fixed at a width of more than 20 meters, while some natural rivers can be as wide as 100 meters and as narrow as only 10 meters or even a few meters. It is difficult to pass when this happens occasionally.
So the ship could not move forward.
If you want to take a detour, you can only go back to the canal, go from Yongcheng to Linhuan County, and then go upstream along the Yishui River to Qiao County.
This is obviously a long way to go and not worth it.
Therefore, in the end, they had no choice but to trust the efficiency of the government's actions and organize people as soon as possible to tow out the overturned ship and clear the waterway.
"Looks like we can't leave today, so let's just wander around the nearby villages first."
Zhao Jun raised his head and looked at the sky. The sky was gray. It had rained in the past few days. The spring rain was like oil, moistening the earth and making the whole world gloomy.
But it's actually still early now, probably around two or three o'clock in the afternoon. It's just quite a distance from Ling County. It will probably take a whole day to report the messages and organize the manpower, so we definitely can't leave.
But it didn't seem like a good idea to wait on the boat, so I just went down for a walk.
After Zhao Jun gave the order, the big ship lowered the small boat, and Jiang Dalang, Huang Sanlang and other guards, more than ten people protected him as he went ashore.
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