Chapter 95 Changes
After the implementation of the land registration system, Biyang County was like an old tree that had been withered for a long time, absorbing nutrients and water from its roots and slowly beginning to come back to life.
As time went by, the streets of the county town gradually became more crowded. Villagers from the surrounding towns had more free time and began to bring some mountain produce or other local specialties and handicrafts stored at home to sell in the county town, while also buying some daily necessities from the shops there.
Magistrate Meng also received an unexpected surprise—a commercial tax payment of ten taels of silver from Jinxiu Pavilion.
Since he arrived in Biyang County, the taxes collected by the county government each month have been almost fixed, consisting of commercial taxes paid by a few wealthy families who operate businesses on the main street in the county town, with the Zheng family paying the most.
But this time, Jinxiuge acted out of character, paying nearly a year's worth of commercial taxes in just one month. What happened?
Magistrate Meng was both surprised and delighted. He immediately sent someone to inquire, and the tax collector said, "I heard that a cloth shop owner from Luzhou ordered ten thousand hairpins from Jinxiu Pavilion. This is the first time Jinxiu Pavilion has received such a large order, and everyone is extremely busy, recruiting hairpin makers everywhere!"
Magistrate Meng said excitedly, "Come on, let's go take a look."
Upon arriving at the entrance of Jinxiu Pavilion, the place was indeed bustling with activity. The once spacious shop, with fabrics displayed on one side and hair ornaments on the other, had now been reduced to half its original size, with a dozen or twenty hair ornament makers making hair ornaments there.
Upon seeing Magistrate Meng arrive, Manager Guo, the owner of Jinxiu Pavilion, brightened up: "Greetings, Your Excellency. My shop has recently received a large order and is short of funds. I was just about to ask Your Excellency for some assistance when I arrived, and I didn't expect you to come here so soon..."
To make hairpins, besides having skilled hairpin makers, it's also necessary to purchase the dyes needed for hairpins. Biyang County lacks everything except these natural plant dyes, which grow very well. However, these things mostly grow in deep mountains and forests or near the mountains. In the past, Manager Guo didn't need much, so he could collect them slowly. Now, the boss from Luzhou has ordered 10,000 hairpins in one go, and there isn't enough dye.
Magistrate Meng was delighted: "When did Boss Guo find this important guest? I've never heard of him before?"
Manager Guo seemed to remember something, and suddenly his face was filled with gratitude: "Speaking of which, I have to thank your young lady, Miss Li. She took our Jinxiu Pavilion's hair ornaments to Liao Ji Cloth Shop in Luzhou to buy fabric. She told Manager Chen there that their hair ornaments in Luzhou weren't as pretty as ours in Biyang, and suggested that he buy them from us. A few days ago, Manager Chen asked the escort agency to buy dozens of hair ornaments from our shop. Not long after, they placed an order for a thousand of them with us. We worked day and night to finish them and delivered them. We thought it was a one-off deal, but then they suddenly placed an order for ten thousand..."
Ten thousand hairpins. Manager Guo couldn't sell ten thousand hairpins in ten years, but after doing business with Liao's for only a few months, Liao suddenly placed such a large order.
Each hairpin is sold at a wholesale price of twenty cash, so ten thousand hairpins would cost two hundred taels of silver. After deducting costs and taxes, he could earn at least forty taels, which was almost half a year's profit for the shop.
Magistrate Meng was taken aback: "Xiaoxiao? She's the one who introduced you to this business?"
Manager Guo said gratefully, "Yes, I will definitely repay Miss Li handsomely when I see her again. But right now we not only lack raw materials, but also hairpin makers. Please help me spread the word to the nearby villages. Any skillful young women or wives in the villages who can embroider are welcome to come to Jinxiu Pavilion for an interview. We will pay them per piece if their skills are up to standard. Also, we need to buy 200 catties each of dried madder, purple gromwell, sophora japonica, Malabar spinach, and indigo, as well as turmeric. Because turmeric is hard to find, we will take as much as they have."
He thought for a moment, then wrote down the prices of several dyes on a piece of paper and handed it to Magistrate Meng: "These are the prices I usually pay when I buy them. They're not cheap. I would appreciate it if you could help me spread the word."
Convenient, of course it's convenient. The hair ornament business of Jinxiu Pavilion is booming. It can not only provide an income for the skillful women of Biyang County, but also give the people who know about dyes a way to make money. When the people go to the city to sell dyes and get money, they will definitely buy some of the food and daily necessities they see on the street. The county government can also collect commercial taxes from this. The economy of Biyang County will gradually start to circulate.
This is an excellent start; how could Magistrate Meng not take it seriously?
Upon returning to the county government office, he immediately instructed the yamen runners to spread the news, encouraging the people of the surrounding villages to go up the mountain in their spare time to find the dyes that Manager Guo needed and sell them in the county town. He also encouraged families with skillful daughters or wives to come to the Jinxiu Pavilion in the county town to apply for the position. If they were selected as hairpin makers, their families would have another person to earn money...
After everything was settled, Magistrate Meng returned to the backyard. He watched as Li Xiaoxiao drove out in an oxcart, whistling as she went. He paused, wanting to say something to her, but then remembered what she was doing and decided to wait until later.
The Qingming Festival has passed, but the weather is still drizzling. Li Xiaoxiao put on a raincoat and went to the field where she planted rice seedlings to check on them.
There has been a lot of rain lately, and she's worried that the rice seedlings will be drowned, so she comes to check on them every day.
The ten mu of paddy fields had been planted by someone half a month ago. In addition to plowing the land twice as deep as others, her farming methods also aroused great discussion and opposition from the surrounding tenant farmers.
When transplanting rice seedlings, she hired twenty people and stretched a line across the field, instructing them to plant the seedlings horizontally and vertically along a straight line.
The rice seedlings were spaced at least a foot apart, which made the old farmers watching distressed and they cried out, "This is haphazard! Planting them so sparsely, we won't be able to harvest the rice seeds!"
"What does she know? How can we let her act so recklessly!"
"Young lady, this is for growing grain, not for making it look pretty. Why are you doing this?"
Tenant farmers had to draw lots to win five acres of prime land, and they wished they could plant the entire plot with rice seedlings so they could harvest more in the summer. But Li Xiaoxiao somehow came up with a method to plant the rice seedlings neatly and attractively. In addition to the rows being spaced a foot apart, there was even a two-foot-wide path in the middle of each acre, clearly separating the rice seedlings on both sides.
Li Xiaoxiao didn't know why she did this. She just remembered watching a video before, in which farmers in the pre-apocalyptic era cultivated the land in this way, so she simply copied it.
It's important to know that rice yields had reached 1,000 to 2,000 jin per mu before the apocalypse, so there must have been a reason for doing so.
She couldn't explain it clearly, but that didn't stop her from demanding that all the helpers do it this way, and forbidding them from making their own decisions. They had to follow her rules, which caused her to avoid people for a long time.
These farmers were really enthusiastic; they were afraid she wouldn't be able to grow rice, so they couldn't wait to pass on all their experience to her.
But after looking at their densely packed paddy fields, she felt that the low harvest was largely due to the lack of spacing between the rice seedlings so they could grow.
They had no choice but to do this because they didn't have enough fertilizer and the rice seedlings were of average quality, resulting in very thin and weak plants. If they planted them sparsely, they might not even be able to harvest the seeds.
Therefore, they dare not take the risk.
But Li Xiaoxiao didn't care. She farmed mainly to pass the time and to solve the problem of her excessive energy. She just liked to experiment with things she had never seen before.
If in the end there really isn't much of a harvest, it just proves that the planting methods learned from later generations don't work here.
She can afford to lose money now.
The rice seedlings stood upright within a few days of being planted. At first, they looked sparse and pitiful, but in less than half a month, they began to grow wildly. They not only grew taller but also became very strong. Gradually, they began to spread horizontally, splitting from one plant into many smaller plants, slowly encroaching on the empty spaces in the field...
The tenants who planted at the same time as her watched helplessly as her seedlings grew day by day. More than a month later, they were much taller than the densely packed seedlings they had planted, and it seemed that this was just the beginning.
Over the next two months, this sparsely planted ten-acre field became the most eye-catching one in the entire field. From a distance, it was the greenest, the largest, and the most vigorous, with even less grass growing on it.
This is simply unbelievable.
Li Xiaoxiao denied it with a serious expression: "That's not true! My field has a lot of weeds too!"
However, because the area she reserved was large and the rice seedlings were also large, they blocked the space for weeds to grow, so the weeds did not appear to be many and were relatively easy to pull out.
She hasn't harvested anything yet, but these ten acres of land are already famous far and wide.
Even Magistrate Meng heard about it and made a special trip to Crescent Bay to see for himself. He praised Li Xiaoxiao on the spot, saying, "I thought you were just messing around, but I didn't expect you to grow such good crops. If you really grow high-yield grain, I will reward you handsomely."
When May came and the rice plants were in bloom, she started messing around again. She brought a long cloth rope from home, and she and her mother each stood at one end, stretched the rope straight, and pressed down on the rice flowers all the way to the end, then pressed down on them from the end to the beginning.
The rice seedlings were bent over by the cloth rope and then quickly straightened up, and who knows how many rice flowers were crushed in the process. An old farmer who saw her messing around again ran over and asked her what she was doing.
Li smiled and said, "I'm pollinating."
The old farmer stamped his foot and said anxiously, "You've crushed all the rice flowers like this! The rice is already in gestation stage; if the flowers are gone, it won't fill with grain. Your rice was growing so well, and with you messing it up like this, it's probably going to be all empty husks! It's infuriating!" If this were his granddaughter, the old farmer would have slapped her hard. There was still more than a month until harvest; how could she do this?
Li smiled and said, "No, I didn't use much force."
These fallen flowers are definitely useless.
The old farmer was so angry that he left.
Mao's mother said, "Who taught you to do this? Can rice really yield a high harvest?"
Li Xiaoxiao shook her head: "I don't know, but I've seen people do it this way before, so I wanted to give it a try."
Mao's mother was dumbfounded: "Are you really messing around? No, you can't let such good rice be wasted. You don't know anything, so you're just relying on other people's experience to avoid making mistakes..."
Li Xiaoxiao pointed to the rice stalks next to her and said, "Look, is the rice they grow with their experience as good as mine?"
Mother Mao glanced at the rice seedlings beside her, then at the rice seedlings in front of her; the difference was enormous.
Li smiled and said, "People say that beginners have a protection period. This is my first year of farming, so I'm still within that protection period. I believe God won't spoil my fun..."
In the end, Mao's mother was coaxed into helping to compact the rice seedlings on all ten acres of land. Looking at the rice seedlings that were still as flat as a palm after compaction, Mao's mother felt that their little action shouldn't have much impact on the grain filling process...
During the newbie protection period, Li Xiaoxiao clearly did something right. A little over a month later, while the rice in other people's fields was only the length of a little finger and the grains were sparse, each bunch of rice in her field was nearly two inches long and densely packed with plump grains...
This not only alarmed the farmers of Crescent Bay, but even villagers from Shangxiahe Village traveled several miles to see her rice. Everyone crowded around and discussed it animatedly:
"I've never seen such good rice before. How was it grown?"
"Didn't you see the superior soil? Such black mud, such good water..."
"Not only that, I heard that Miss Li plows the land exceptionally deep, about two feet deep!"
"So deep! No wonder, the rice seedlings have strong roots, so the yield is high!"
"And look how good her rice is." The man reached out and grasped a handful of rice seedlings: "Our three rice plants aren't as strong as one of hers."
"That's not all. Look at this land. There are only a few rice seedlings on this huge plot of land. They have room to grow. Unlike us, where rice is planted in one large patch like soybeans..."
...
When it was time for the final harvest, the village chiefs from several nearby villages abandoned their own work and came to watch. Magistrate Meng, along with his steward Zhao and his son, the newly recruited farmhands, and a dozen or so yamen runners, came to help with the harvesting, threshing, and weighing. In the end, the weight was measured at five thousand catties in full view of everyone.
The village head of Hexi Village murmured, "With a gross weight of five thousand catties, after removing the rice stalks and leaves mixed in, and removing the moisture after drying, it should be able to dry four thousand catties, at least four thousand catties of dried rice. The yield per mu is a full four hundred catties, no more and no less."
"Four hundred jin! It actually weighs four hundred jin!"
The onlookers were buzzing with discussion: "Are her seeds better?"
"No, it was bought from us..."
"Isn't this land good? This is top-quality land, look how fertile it is!"
“We also rented the land next door, which is also top-quality land. Can it yield 300 catties?”
"Hard to say, how could it be so different?"
"Miss Li mentioned before that she had turned over her land two feet deep and even dug up river mud to use as fertilizer..."
"Also, she used a rope as a ruler to measure and planted the rice in rows, leaving plenty of space in between!"
"I also saw her using ropes to press down the rice flowers when they were in bloom, saying that shaking them might make the grains plumper. Now it seems that it was actually true!"
"Miss Li, can we learn that too? Can you teach us how to do it?"
...
Even Magistrate Meng looked at her with surprise. She said she didn't know how to farm, but how did she know so many intricacies?
Li Xiaoxiao scratched her head: "I learned farming from everyone else, there are only three differences. I plowed the land a little deeper, left more space when planting, and weighed it down with a rope when it flowered... But it could also be a good year, I can't guarantee that planting it this way will definitely work..."
Sighs rippled through the crowd. Everyone had witnessed how she farmed. She certainly didn't hold back, and being so young, she didn't even know how to read the agricultural calendar. It could be said that besides these three basic techniques, she relied entirely on learning from the older farmers around her. But she was also very generous; everyone could rent or use her oxen freely, as long as they provided some grass.
Someone timidly spoke up: "Sir, I think the rice in Miss Li's field is particularly good. Could we exchange some for seeds?"
After saying that, he quickly added, "We're not exchanging one-for-one; for seed buyers, we can add 20%."
This is also the village's rule for exchanging seeds. Everyone wants to exchange for good seeds, because they taste better when cooked. Why would someone exchange plump seeds for your withered ones? The village's unspoken rule is to get 20% more.
The onlookers also watched Magistrate Meng with eager eyes, everyone wanting to switch places.
Magistrate Meng laughed and said, "This rice was grown by Xiaoxiao. You'll have to ask her."
Li Xiaoxiao pondered for a moment: "Alright, but there's no need to mix 1 for 2. I'll just mix the raw rice with your dried rice, 1 for 1."
How long would it take her to dry 5,000 catties of raw rice? And it's summer now, with frequent, unexpected rain showers. If she has to dry so much rice at home and rush to harvest it, she'll probably die of exhaustion in the yard.
So the news spread like wildfire, and in less than three days, the five thousand catties of raw rice that Li Xiaoxiao had collected were transformed into five thousand catties of dried rice and stored in the warehouse in the backyard.
With her hands behind her back, she strode confidently in front of the fifty bags of rice, grinning as she boasted to Mother Mao, "So the actual yield of dry rice per mu is five hundred jin! Hahaha, I'm truly a genius!"
Looking at the warehouse full of rice, Mother Mao asked, "Aren't you going to sell it?"
Five thousand catties of rice can be sold for forty taels.
Li Xiaoxiao waved her hand dismissively: "We won't sell it; we'll keep it for ourselves."
Mao's mother looked at her and sighed.
How did she develop such a magnanimous attitude of regarding money as dirt? What kind of background did she have that allowed her to say she wouldn't pay for 5,000 catties of rice?
When Liu heard this, she was deeply moved. This girl was always thinking of her family, and her character was impeccable. She called her over and rewarded her with fifty taels of silver.
Li Xiaoxiao stared blankly at the fifty taels of silver, wondering if she had recently overturned the God of Wealth's money bag. Making money was too easy for her!
She had a bumper harvest on her first attempt at farming, so she was eager to plant another season. However, Liu rejected her idea, saying, "Have you forgotten what you're supposed to be doing? You still have the mind to farm?"
Li Xiaoxiao looked at her blankly: "What do you want me to do?"
Liu pointed to the calendar on the table: "Look at what time it is now."
Li Xiaoxiao leaned closer to take a look. June 20th, is it some special day?
She thought for a moment: "Is it someone's birthday?"
Liu sighed, held back for a moment, but couldn't help herself and poked her forehead with a finger: "You brat, have you forgotten what we're supposed to do at the end of this month?"
"The end of this month?" Li Xiaoxiao thought for a moment, her clear black and white eyes wide, and finally remembered: "Oh! We have to go to Luzhou to pick up the young master!"
Liu rolled her eyes: "You just remembered? Qi-ge'er is coming back from Wanshan Academy in early July. It's been raining a lot lately, so to avoid you getting caught in heavy rain on the way, you'll have to stay a couple more days. You and Zhao Jian will be leaving in five days at the latest. You're still thinking about going to farm? Is farming more important or Qi-ge'er taking the provincial exam?"
Of course, it's more important for the young master to take the provincial examination, but what will happen to the ten acres of land if she leaves?
Liu said, "You don't need to worry. Steward Zhao told me that countless people are eyeing your land. Even if you just let it go, there will be plenty of people wanting to rent it."
Li Xiaoxiao sighed, "Yes, that piece of land is excellent. If I could plant one more season, I might be able to harvest another 5,000 catties of rice. Our family wouldn't have to worry about food for the next two years!"
Mrs. Liu was touched: "How can the family go without food? You don't need to go to the fields anymore. I'll have Steward Zhao sublet the land. For the remaining ten days or so, just stay home and keep warm, at least make yourself a little whiter..."
I've never seen a young lady so unconcerned about her appearance. She has perfectly proportioned features and is very beautiful, but she's tanned all over, with only her teeth being white.
Liu hesitated for a moment, but couldn't help herself and said earnestly, "You're sixteen this year, you can't keep tanning like this, otherwise it will affect your marriage prospects if you don't get your fair skin back!"
Li Xiaoxiao nonchalantly picked up a plum and started eating it: "I'm still young, there's no rush to get married."
Liu glanced at her subtly, then sighed softly behind her back.
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