Chapter 10 Chapter 10 Chi Ji.
At dusk, Ji Feng went home with a bundle of firewood on his back, a big potato and four sweet potatoes in his arms, and a big smile on his face.
On the way, I ran into Jin who was watering the vegetables on her way home. Jin smiled and said:
"Picking some mountain fruits is fine, but you dare to steal the tangerine peels from the Feng family's fields? Be careful or your legs will be broken!"
Ji Feng snorted, "I'm not dishonest. This is the food that the eldest daughter and youngest son of the Feng family ate and gave to me by my elder sister."
Jin secretly said "Pooh" and was about to say, "Are you eating the coarse food in your house?"
She immediately remembered the extremely overbearing smell of meat wafting from the second room at noon. If she hadn't locked the door, Ji Huhai would have gone to the second room to beg for food.
Thinking of this, she could only clench her back teeth.
I thought to myself, the bamboo has been cut down, and the door of the second room has been closed for the whole morning, so what can they sell for money?
Muttering to himself, Ji Yuanzheng, who was squatting in the yard collecting beans with a bamboo basket, complained:
"Why hasn't Zhimei come back yet after selling brooms? I have to collect the beans she dried in the sun..."
Jin went to the low thatched hut to put down the urine bucket and muttered, "It's almost time to prepare dinner, and we're still waiting for her to buy meat."
She had instructed Ji Zhi to sell the broom and buy a pound of fatty meat to satisfy his craving.
"Did you use the money to buy food for yourself?" Ji Yuan slowly poured the beans in the basket into the sack, his resentment evident.
Coincidentally, the gate of the courtyard opened and Ji Zhi finally came back, but he was still holding one, two, three, four, four brooms in his arms?
Before being questioned, Ji Zhi was already full of complaints.
"This broom is not easy to sell at all. People say it's not tied firmly. I only sold one."
"Did you yell?"
Seeing that there was no meat, Ji Yuan felt annoyed as he had been smelling the aroma of meat from the second room for the past two days. He threw the winnowing basket away and left the remaining beans for Ji Zhi to collect.
Ji Zhi scooped a bucket of cold water from the kitchen and poured it in. "Why didn't I shout? The goods are not good and no one would buy them even if I shouted loudly. This is the only one I bought, and it was bought by a young man who didn't know the value of the goods."
Jin counted them and said, "How come there are only four coins..."
Ji Zhi came out and picked up the dustpan, raked beans into it with his hands, and lied.
"That poor kid kept trying to bargain with me, so I spared him a penny."
"I'm afraid you're hiding something." Ji Yuan gave her a sidelong glance.
"Since you think I'm hiding something, then you go out and sell it tomorrow, and I'll rest at home." Ji Zhi retorted.
Jin came out to smooth things over, "Alright, alright, stop talking, we're all sisters from the same family, so we should get along well."
But she favored the eldest daughter and started to criticize Ji Zhi again.
"Look at you, if you hadn't lost the pigs while herding them, it wouldn't have been Ji Erfeng's turn to do this job.
There are so many fruit trees on the Feng family's mountain, secretly picking some every day and selling them is a great way to make money."
Ji Zhicai didn't want to go and herd pigs, as he had to give all the money he earned every day to Jin.
She would secretly hide fruits every now and then, fearing being caught, but if she didn't hide the fruits she would be scolded again. She had deliberately lost the pig on the hill.
Jin Shi didn't know what her second daughter was thinking. She was still jealous of Gan Zhe, who was in Ji Feng's arms.
"If you were still herding pigs there, we could take some of those pickled mustard greens to the Feng family and exchange them for some of their sweet mulberry to sweeten our mouths."
Thinking that she had lost her job, Jin gritted her teeth and poked Ji Zhi's forehead twice with her fingers.
Ji Yuan also chimed in, "That's right, autumn is the best time to eat dates and chestnuts."
Ji Zhi curled his lips and said, "If you want to eat, go raise pigs yourself and see if they want someone as lazy as you."
Ji Yuan retorted, "Isn't the second daughter of the second house also tending pigs? As the eldest sister, I'm already fifteen and about to get married. How can I go and do the work of tending pigs for others?"
"That girl can even make white jade steamed buns and sell them in the market. People line up to buy them. You're also a sister, why don't you learn how to make money like her?"
"It's just steamed buns, what's the difficulty? Just do it." Ji Yuan said angrily.
Ji Zhi almost blurted out that other people's steamed buns tasted soft and sweet, but he quickly swallowed his words back into his stomach. If Jin Shi knew that she bought steamed buns from the maid of the second house, she would scold her to death sooner or later.
Jin interrupted, "The family is about to harvest the rice. Let's put the steamed buns aside for now. The rice in the fields is more important. Everyone needs to help harvest it. Even your grandfather will be back tomorrow."
Ji Fu usually works as a cart driver for a wealthy family in the county town and returns home during the busy farming season.
After the autumn harvest, every household has to pay land taxes and calculate money, which is a huge expense.
If there is a family that cannot pay enough, the head of the household may be imprisoned and forced to do hard labor.
Even her eldest wife had to save some of the rice for the winter and sell it for the money to cover the expenses.
In previous years, Tian had to tighten his belt, rent a few acres of land to grow crops, and sell vegetables all year round, working himself to the bone, just to scrape together the money.
This year, the second house only has three little girls. How can they raise this money? In just a few days, just by selling steamed buns? I'm afraid it will be difficult, not to mention that they still have to survive the winter.
Jin couldn't help but feel happy.
On the other side,
Ji Xu had already planted the rapeseed. In the vegetable field in front of him, ditches were built, one after another in an orderly manner, and there were dark wet marks on the soil after watering.
Hearing Ji Zhu happily say that she would help water the plants in the future, he smiled and responded while packing up his hoe and bucket and heading towards the house.
Coincidentally, Ji Feng came back. Seeing the sweet jujubes she brought back, Ji Xu couldn't help but feel happy. He kept one to make sweet snacks, and peeled the remaining three, cut them into pieces, and pounded them with a pestle to extract the juice.
After washing a piece of linen, she prepared to filter it and use it to boil brown sugar. The family was short of this linen, having found it from unpacked grain bags. They had three grain bags, one for flour and one for rice. A rat had gnawed a corner of the remaining bag, so she unstitched it, split it into two pieces, boiled them in boiling water, and used them to cover the wicker baskets when selling steamed cakes, keeping out the dust.
Now it can also be used to filter jujube juice. She squeezed out some green juice, which was collected in a ceramic basin underneath.
While I was busy, I suddenly heard a strange voice outside asking:
"Is Miss Xu at home?"
She put down her work, wiped her hands and went out.
The person who came was the village headman Liang Zhao. The original body had this person in his memory. When he first returned home, the village headman was the one who helped him settle down.
According to the household laws of this dynasty, women who met the following conditions could also become heads of households: first, they were widows; second, they were members of a family in which a woman married into a family; and third, they were adult orphans.
Ji Xu was fifteen years old and already an adult woman, which obviously met the third condition.
The imperial court would count the civilian population in August every year. I came back more than half a month ago, which was the end of August.
As a result, the deceased Tian was removed from her household registration by the local officials, and was re-registered in the second branch of the household as the head of the household.
Now the village headman was coming to deliver the "Chiji" of their second house, which was the household registration at that time. It was a thin piece of wood, and because it was one foot long, it was called Chiji.
Ji Xu took it and saw the household registration information written on it:
The head of the household's eldest daughter, Xu, is fifteen years old and has no disabilities.
My younger sister, Feng, is eight years old and has no disabilities.
My younger sister, Zhu, is five years old and has a slight stutter.
Below is their family wealth information:
There are no slaves.
No vehicles.
No livestock.
One house.
There are no fields.
…
Liang Zhao, the village treasurer, had some impression of the second branch of the Ji family. There was no elder in the family, and the eldest daughter had been kidnapped and sold into slavery by thieves and had just returned.
Look at this thatched hut with an urn window where they live. Compared with the big house of the Ji family next door, which is covered with tiles and surrounded by a small courtyard, it is so shabby that it looks like someone's toilet. They are truly the poorest people in the village.
But he had given me the ruler and could only give me a routine notice:
"On September 20th, five days later, all registered households in Niupi Township will pay their land tax and oral calculation fee at the grain field in Shengchangli.
Your family has no land, so you don't have to pay land tax. If you count the money by mouth, one adult and two children, one of whom is under seven years old, the total is 143 coins."
After hearing this, Ji Xu wrote down the numbers about money.
The current land tax is one-thirtieth of the yield per mu. Since their second branch doesn't even rent the land, they naturally don't have to pay it.
The so-called head-based tax is a population tax, which is collected per person every year, regardless of gender. People aged seven or above pay the head-based tax, which is 23 cents per person for those aged seven to fourteen; and people aged fifteen to sixty pay the head-based tax, which is 120 cents per person.
In their family, Ji Xu and Ji Feng needed to pay a sum that was exactly the amount mentioned by the village headman.
One hundred and forty-three coins.
August and September are the busiest times of the year for village officials to collect taxes from households.
Now, after notifying the village headman and his accompanying assistants, they hurried to another house, with a pile of books in their hands.
After hearing this, Ji Feng was extremely worried, and even the joy of being able to eat Ganzhe was dashed.
She went into the house, slipped under the bed, removed a small brick from the west wall, and reached in to rummage around.
When he came out again, he had a purse made of scraps of cloth in his hand.
He poured the copper coins on the bed and counted the money he had earned that day twice. There were twelve of them.
She couldn't help but hit her forehead, wondering how she could have forgotten about the huge expense of paying the bill in the fall.
I should have reminded my sister that she should save the money she earned these two days and not buy anything for now.
The author has something to say:
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The village headman is the head of a village.
"Book of the Later Han Dynasty, Hundred Officials, Volume 5": "In each township, officials were appointed as officials of rank, three elders, and patrol officers. The original annotation states: 'The officials of rank were appointed by the prefecture, with a rank of 100 stones, and were in charge of the people of one township. In smaller townships, the county appointed one official, a steward.' They were responsible for identifying the good and bad of the people, determining the order of service, determining the poverty and wealth of the people, and determining the amount of taxation, and balancing the differences in their wages. The three elders were responsible for education."
The official name "Soushifu" should appear again in the later text, such as Tianshoufu who guards the public fields, Chushoufu who is in charge of cooking, and so on.
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