Gao Pragmatic has been concerned about the salt industry for a year or two, as early as when he entered Beijing with Gao Gong at the end of the third year of Longqing, he was already paying attention to the salt problem of Daming, but because he was born with a crooked buttocks, his mother's family is one of the best salt merchants, so he has been difficult to interfere. ，

Over the years, he has been studying how to deal with the salt problem, or in other words, how to solve some of the shortcomings in the salt problem.

Anyone who knows a little about the economic part of ancient Chinese history knows that the salt industry in ancient China has always been a big piece of fat, but whether fat is fat itself is not the main reason for high pragmatic attention, after all, as a traverser, there are many ways to make money, and it does not necessarily have to be a horizontal bar in the salt industry.

The main reason for Gao Pragmatic's concern about the salt industry is that the salt industry is a problem of people's livelihood and is related to the stability of the country, while the problem of the salt industry in the Ming Dynasty is particularly big and serious.

Specific to the salt used in the north of the Ming Dynasty, the two main channels for a long time are the "Lu Salt" of Changlu Salt Field and the "Pool Salt" of Shanxi Jiezhou, especially mentioning that Xie Zhou is west of Puzhou, that is, Zhang Siwei's hometown.

Luyan is sea salt, and Jiezhou is pond salt, that is, the salt of the salt lake.

The Zhang family had also engaged in pond salt before, but later due to changes in climate and hydrology, the output of pond salt gradually declined. In the early period of Jiajing, it happened that the Changlu salt farm was reformed, and the Zhang family gradually turned to the development of Changlu, and finally basically monopolized the salt of Changlu.

The salt industry system of the Ming Dynasty is not static, and in fact, it has always been fine-tuned and reformed.

The specific reform process, this book is limited to space, it is inconvenient to elaborate on my estimate, there are no 5,000 words can not be explained, so I can only make a long story short, the process is roughly "salt class folding", "salt field high and low with each other to open the middle", "surplus salt to buy supplement", "salt class to convert silver" and other policy changes.

The salt tax was roughly the reform carried out in the early years of Jiajing, and there was a saying in later generations called "Jialong Wanda Reform", which was an affirmation of some reforms in Jiajing's early years, and the reform of the salt industry was also part of Jiajing's early reforms. ，

It was after this reform that the Zhang family entered the Changlu Salt Farm.

In the ninth year of Jiajing, after the Changlu Patrol Salt Imperial History Fu Jiong's inscription, the Qingzhou Branch of the Jimin, Shibei, Huimin, and Naturalization four salt classes were further changed to silver after changing the folding cloth, "so that each stove Ding and each salt are introduced, and the silver is paid for one penny, and the surplus salt of the business is bought for the business." By the twenty-ninth year of Jiajing, almost all the salt classes of the 12 salt farms under the Cangzhou Branch were converted into silver.

Do you feel this routine familiar? Yes, this reform is similar to a whiplash. So I said a long time ago that a whip method is not Zhang Juzheng's invention at all, and even he is not the first to promote a whip method.

What is the specific method of this restructuring?

"It is agreed that the Cangzhou Branch Division of Shenzhou Haiyingchang stove households, in addition to the 13 households in Yanshan County near the field, and their residences in Hengshui County, Zhending Prefecture, etc., each silver penny. Liguo and other eleven years to do into Tianjin and other warehouse rice, each stone levy silver five dollars its Haiying and other 13 folded rice salt price silver, the old example of seven cents and five cents, now minus one point, each levy is completed, go to the division to solve. ”

It should be said that the reform of the salt tax is not only in line with the self-interests of the salt farm stove households, but also conforms to the overall trend of the reform of Changlu salt administration.

The salt class is converted into silver, and "the color is folded in the transportation department to give to the merchants", which can be described as killing two birds with one stone. It not only effectively solves the problem of suffering from compensation due to the ablation of salt, but also conforms to the willingness of businessmen to open salt farms in areas with convenient transportation, so as to play the effect of sympathizing with stoves and wealthy merchants.

However, this system has also bred some new problems: First, compared with the previous operation mode of salt farms, there is an additional link for stove households to sell salt to get silver, and in this link, stove households are often prone to the risk of salt merchants deliberately lowering the price of salt.

Someone once pointed out in Jiajing: "The place where the husband is in the house is the salt er." Today, they are all conscripted to fold the color, called the loan with double interest, ten rooms and nine empty, often forced to flee poorly, and there is no way to make a living. ”

The second is that the stove households broke free from the shackles of the salt field, left the salt field, and changed to other businesses, which became inevitable. In particular, after "the grasslands of the various stoves were invaded by the powerful and powerful, or they were bought in disguise", the poor and weak stove households who had lost their means of production could not guarantee production and were forced to flee.

In short, the policies of folding cloth in the salt class, matching the high and low levels of the salt farms, buying and supplementing the surplus salt, and converting the silver in the salt class are the countermeasures of the Ming Court to solve the problem of salt accumulation in some salt farms in Changlu and the withdrawal of salt catties in the middle of the non-commercial opening. However, in the later period of Jiajing, some salt farms finally appeared in the situation of "having a field but no stove", and the salt farms had no name.

So before the return of the high arch to Beijing in the third year of Longqing, after the Zhili patrol according to the imperial history Fu Mengchun, the Ming court merged the Yimin field into the Fucai field, the Haifu field and the Hairun field, the Runguo field into the Fumin field, and the Sanhan Gu field merged into the Fengcai field. As a result, the number of Changlu salt farms was reduced from 24 in the early Ming Dynasty to 20, and 17 of them were actually controlled by the Zhang family, basically completing the monopoly.

This time the salt farm merger, in Gao Shishi's view, actually means that the operation mode of Changlu salt farm has deviated from the development path set by the state.

That is, the stove households produce salt in the salt field and sell the salt produced by the salt factory to exchange it for silver, and the salt farm ambassador urges the stove household to collect salt and silver, which develops into the following: the stove household leaves the salt field, no longer produces salt and returns to the state and county where it is located, and the salt farm ambassador of another industry urges the stove household to collect salt and silver.

The problem it brings is that it is easy to breed disadvantages in the actual process of urging the stove class. The ambassador of the salt field lacks skills, and he will inevitably assign the task of urging the stove class to the stove head or the general urge, which is easy to breed the disadvantages of taking over the stove class, wantonly increasing the distribution, and arbitrarily delaying it.

The state and county officials also "subordinate to the stove household, have their own special members, and do not restrain them, so that they hide treachery and dirt, and act arbitrarily, which is also inevitable of the situation."

All in all, it is not good for the stove household, the field official, and the state. Therefore, the restructuring before Longqing's three-year high arch returned to Beijing failed to solve this problem.

As for the period when Gao Gong was in power, firstly, because Gao Pragmatic had previously persuaded him to see Chapter 020 of the first volume of this book, "On Salt and Iron", secondly, because Zhang Siwei was the core ally of the Gao Party, and thirdly, because there was still a lack of effective means to reform salt affairs at that time, in short, he could not make any achievements in this matter.

Since the iron-fisted reformers like Gao Gong have not touched the salt affairs, Guo Pu, the more stable Shoufu, will obviously not act rashly.

What's more, the relationship between him and Zhang Siwei is not as close as Gao Gong and Zhang Siwei, and many times he even needs Gao Pragmatic to lubricate him, so it is naturally even more impossible for him to move the salt affairs, which led to the split of the Gao Party.

It stands to reason that after Zhang Siwei himself became the first assistant and began to govern, there should be no chance to change the salt issue, because Zhang Siwei himself is the so-called vested interest.

However, the fact is that Zhang Siwei himself is also dissatisfied with the current situation of the salt industry, and it is precisely because he himself is the first assistant of a family of salt merchants that he sees the problems of the salt industry more clearly, and because he hopes to leave a name for future generations, in fact, he is more willing to further reform the salt industry.

When Gao Pragmatic went to visit Zhang Siwei last time, Zhang Siwei tried to mention the issue of the salt industry to Gao Pragmatic for the first time, of course, he did not directly say that he wanted to reform the salt industry, but asked Gao Pragmatic whether there were any good investment channels to keep the Zhang family from hanging on the tree of the salt industry.

It was from that time that Gao Pragmatic discovered that Zhang Siwei may have the intention of reforming the salt industry, but it is likely that he has not yet made the right idea.

But intention is the best news, because the rest is only a matter of means.

I'm afraid that Zhang Siwei insists that the salt industry is the core interest of the Zhang family, and it is not allowed to be touched by high pragmatism, which is annoying. Because in terms of a highly pragmatic identity and personality, then you can only wait for Zhang Siwei to pass away, so that you can let go of your hands and feet to reform the salt business.

After all, in this era, pay attention to uncles like mothers, not to mention that Zhang Siwei gave Sanshenyuan to Gao Pragmatic back then, which is actually his first pot of gold, if he reforms the salt affairs despite Zhang Siwei's opposition now, no matter how sufficient this reason is at the national level, it will inevitably make him have a reputation for unfilial piety.

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