Lin's father returned to the prefecture capital and promptly fell ill.
His father-in-law, Vice Minister Wen, therefore remained in Qingjiang Prefecture.
The two men had come for three reasons. First, to assess the situation in Qingjiang Prefecture and determine whether its model could be replicated elsewhere to generate greater revenue for the imperial court. Second, to conduct an inspection tour of the entire province of Jiangxi and stabilize both the civilian population and the military's morale. Third—and not least—because their children were here, which had moved them to volunteer for the assignment in the first place.
They had originally intended to look things over and leave, but after conferring with Lin Xuejin, the two men decided to stay.
Both Lin's father and his father-in-law held the rank of Senior Second Grade and served as Vice Ministers at court. The two jointly submitted a memorial requesting permission to remain in Jiangxi, govern the region, and raise funds for His Majesty and the imperial court. With the backing of their respective factional patrons, the Emperor graciously consented and conferred new appointments upon them both.
Wen Jingran was named Governor-General of the Two Rivers, with authority over military affairs in Jiangxi and Jiangnan.
Lin Xuehui was appointed Governor of Jiangxi, with responsibility for civil administration and the people's welfare.
In other words, Wen Jingran was to keep the armies in order and forge them into a capable fighting force, while Lin Xuehui was to manage local affairs and squeeze as much revenue as possible for the court.
In truth, this amounted to a demotion. The rank was the same on paper, but a posting in the provinces could hardly compare to the comfort of a capital appointment. Then again, the capital was gone, so there was little point dwelling on such distinctions.
Moreover, if the two men performed well and the Emperor managed to reclaim the capital one day, the very worst they could expect would be appointments as Ministers of one of the Six Boards—and entry into the Grand Secretariat as chief ministers was not entirely out of the question either.
Of course, given the present state of affairs, that was essentially pie in the sky.
By rights, Governor-General Wen and Governor Lin ought not to have been based in Qingjiang Prefecture at all—it was hardly the nerve center of anything. And yet here they remained. Given the situation, if they had packed up and gone elsewhere, what real prospect would they have had of raising troops or funds?
---
Qingjiang Prefecture.
The several small lanes near the county yamen had been transformed long ago. They had been renamed Taoyuan Street—and as the name implied, the people who lived there were almost all from Taoyuan Township.
The number of residents holding Taoyuan Township identity cards had already surpassed a thousand.
Over the past half year, Taoyuan Township had been sending a steady stream of personnel to support the reconstruction effort. The people managing the thirty thousand mu of land held in Lin Xuejin's name, for instance, were mostly graduates of the Taoyuan Township primary school, sent over for the purpose. Managing thirty thousand mu of farmland and five thousand tenant households was not the kind of work you could entrust to locals—not if you actually expected to collect a hundred million jin of sweet potatoes. Even the few hundred jin of grain distributed to each household might have dwindled to almost nothing before it reached anyone's hands. Things certainly would not have been distributed as cleanly and honestly as they were now.
The pay scale for those posted away from Taoyuan was raised by two grades. Someone earning a first-grade daily wage of 1.2 yuan, for instance, would receive the third-grade rate of 1.8 yuan while working here. Add the stipend that came with holding a little red identity booklet, and the daily total came to 2 yuan. Most of those posted here were perfectly content with the arrangement.
Taoyuan Street had long since been remade by the Taoyuan people into a miniature Taoyuan Township. Food, drink, and entertainment of every kind were on offer; people used paper currency as a matter of course, and while merchants would accept silver coins and copper cash if pressed, the look they gave you when you produced them was more than anyone could bear.
*Heh, still carrying that stuff around? What a country bumpkin.*
The people who actually resided within the prefecture capital were hardly ordinary folk, and their actual spending power was, if anything, greater than that of the Taoyuan people. But the novelty and liveliness of Taoyuan Street drew their eyes all the same.
More and more of them had fallen into the habit of strolling through Taoyuan Street whenever they had nothing better to do. There they would watch people who earned less than they did—Taoyuan Township people—wearing smart, clean clothes, eating cheap food that nonetheless tasted perfectly decent, playing mahjong after work, or heading off to the bathhouse for a comfortable soak. And then those same people would turn around and look at *them* as though they were the country bumpkins.
The people of the prefecture capital burned with envy.
*You lot make ten or twenty wen a day and you're swaggering around like that? What gives you the right? I can do that too!*
So more and more of them began to follow the Taoyuan people's example. They went to Taoyuan Street to buy new-style clothes and put them on. They went to the bank to exchange their silver for paper notes. They went to the bathhouses, ate at the street stalls, played mahjong.
And well—it had to be admitted—it really was rather pleasant!
A portion of the population grew genuinely fond of the Taoyuan way of life, and some began to dream of eventually moving to Taoyuan Township altogether. So even as Taoyuan Township continued dispatching people to the prefecture capital, its own population kept growing, slowly but steadily. Every day, a good number of people completed their probationary period, received their identity cards, and became Taoyuan people.
The power of assimilation is a formidable thing. As more and more people adopted the Taoyuan way of life, Taoyuan Street grew ever more crowded, its edges pushing constantly outward—until the day they would finally reach the city walls and transform the entire place into a second, vastly larger Taoyuan Township.
The first to embrace the Taoyuan way of life were the middle class—primarily the community of small merchants. Once they accepted the Taoyuan lifestyle, they accepted paper currency; and once they accepted paper currency, they began using it in their everyday commercial transactions. Silver poured into the Taoyuan bank in great quantities, exchanged for sheets of paper—and the people doing the exchanging walked out beaming, convinced they had somehow gotten the better of the deal.
These merchants traveled from place to place, though the constraints of the environment meant that "from place to place" covered no great distance in practice—within the county at close range, or within the prefecture at its broadest. As they made their rounds, they discovered to their considerable delight that Taoyuan bank branches had appeared in counties and even townships throughout the prefecture, making their transactions far more convenient than before. Their enthusiasm for exchanging silver for paper notes grew all the warmer.
The Taoyuan way of life was spreading through the prefecture capital—slowly, steadily, and without pause.
As paper currency came into ever wider use, it brought a continuous and substantial flow of wealth back to Taoyuan Township.
Every note that Zhao Baihui had issued was on record in the system.
Taoyuan Township's nearly twenty thousand residents held a total of approximately five million yuan in currency among them—the equivalent of fifty thousand taels of silver.
But people outside Taoyuan Township had already exchanged nearly one hundred million yuan in paper notes—close to one million taels of silver!
And what fraction of the entire prefecture's silver reserves did that represent?
Or perhaps only a fraction of a fraction?