The next day, the "Four Great Talents", who had already had enough joy, accompanied a group of female dependents to visit the places of interest in Yangzhou City. Many Goolan Washe is not very suitable for women to go, so they went to Daming Temple to enter the incense, and went to the Slender West Lake - at that time it was also called Baobao Lake - to see the scenery on both sides of the river. Although the red-sleeved move full of buildings seems to be amorous, for Fang Zhongyong, who is accompanied by a beauty, it is just a scenic spot.

After seeing it, it will soon be boring. Wang's family also didn't like this place of fireworks, thinking that staying for a long time would inevitably lose the man's spirit, so he decided to go north on the same day.

Xu understood that Fang Zhongyong was leaving this time, just like the yellow crane was gone, and the young but scheming Qiu Niang actually came to see him off.

Shi Zongyong, who had already led a group of minions to see him off, said with a smile: "I thought that Wen Yuan was not beautiful, but it turned out that he wanted to capture and indulge in it. I'm afraid that in the future, Qiu Niang's heart will be tied to Wen Yuan! ”

That Qiu Niang covered her face with her hands, pretending to be shy: "Shi Gongzi teased the slave family." The slave family does not follow, the slave family does not follow! He also made a gesture and beat Shi Zongyong with a powder fist.

Shi Zongyong also pretended to be in pain, and kept begging for mercy: "Spare Xiaosheng!" Xiao Sheng knew that he was wrong. ”

Fang Zhongyong, who originally had a trace of love for the little Lori, looked at this pair of "adulterers**" coldly, uh no, the "buyer and seller" are weird, not dirty or clean, not increasing or decreasing, not loving or hating, and his heart is like an ancient well without a ripple. Recite the three-word mantra silently in your heart, show affection, and die quickly.

With a wave of goodbye, the ship entered the canal waterway.

I don't know what Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty thought when he built the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, and how he did it, through an artificially dug river channel (of course, on the basis of making the best use of the old rivers and lakes) to connect China's three major water systems, the Yangtze River, the Yellow River, and the Huai River, the volume of the project should be equivalent to the construction of the Great Wall, and the technical difficulty is probably slightly better.

Emperor Yang of Sui, who was so happy, had not had time to enjoy the convenience brought by the canal, and the Sui Dynasty died. But what you should know is that the capital of Emperor Wen of Sui is Daxing (Xi'an), and Emperor Yang of Sui moved to Luoyang after ascending the throne.

After racking his brains, Fang Zhongyong remembered that it was Emperor Yang of Sui who took Luoyang as the center, repaired to Yuhang in the southeast and Zhuojun in the northeast. During the Yuan Dynasty, the capital of Yanjing dug three sections of the river successively, and only then did the horizontal canal of the Sui Dynasty with Luoyang as the center be built into a longitudinal Grand Canal with Dadu as the center and going south directly to Hangzhou. And when Zhao Kuangyin's yellow robe was added to the capital, he may feel that Luoyang's feng shui is not very good (?). Only then did he choose Bianzhou, which was also next to the canal, as the capital to the east of Luoyang.

The most amazing thing about the Grand Canal is the locks at the intersection of the three major water systems. In Yangzhou, the largest cargo distribution center on the canal, for example, the Yangtze River has a high water potential, and there is no problem for ships entering the canal from the Yangtze River to go down the river. But what about the ships that are transported by canals such as the Yangtze River? You can't wait until the dry season, right?

I wonder if you have ever been to the Three Gorges, and have you noticed how the passing ships pass through the Three Gorges Dam, which has a huge drop?

The usual practice is that when the boat advances from the downstream to the upstream, close the upstream gate of the tank, open the downstream gate, and when the water level in the tank is the same as the downstream, the boat enters the tank, closes the downstream gate, the upstream bottom gate is opened, and the tank is filled from the bottom, and when the water level of the tank is consistent with the upstream, the upstream gate is opened, and the boat opens the tank and moves upstream. Upstream to downstream is the other way around. In this way (at most, there can be as many as five locks), you can pass through the Three Gorges Dam, which has a peak drop of more than 100 meters.

You must have been amazed by such a genius design. However, what Fang Zhongyong wants to tell you is that the practice of using stepped locks to pass waterways with large drops is "ancient". Let's just say that the current Yangzhou wharf has adopted the method of secondary locks to send the canal's ships into the Yangtze River waterway steadily.

However, it was early winter, and the amount of water had dropped sharply, and the surging river water was no longer pouring into the canal. But because it is early winter, there are more and more merchant ships and passenger ships. After all, they all want to be able to reunite with their families before the New Year, or sell the trafficked goods at a good price. Of course, most of them are official ships transporting rice, grain, salt, and cloth, or noble merchant ships that sell transshipment orders, such as the Shi family and the Gao family.

In addition, there is a shortage of grain in the north, and there is a shortage in the northwest, and the rations, salt, and other products of several metropolises in Chang'an, Luoyang, and Bianliang almost all rely on the transportation of canals. You can imagine how busy the canal is.

Take Bianliang, the largest city in the world at that time, for example, with a population of nearly 2 million, how many of them grew crops? If you only rely on the grain produced by a few acres of sandy land and a few estates outside the city, I am afraid that it will not be enough to feed the chickens.

So how much grain does Bianliang supply through the canal in a year? According to historical records, at its peak, it was about 8 million stone (nearly 1 billion catties). Of course, not all Bianliang people are pot-bellied, and they can't use so much for their own food. It is also necessary to transfer military rations to all parts of the country, especially the border areas where there is a shortage of food, through officials of the DPRK and China.

The huge amount of grain, money and silk transported from the south to the north through the canal was not only used to feed the hundreds of thousands of troops stationed in Bianjing and pay for the administrative expenses of the central government, but also some of them were transported to Hebei, Hedong and Shaanxi to meet the needs of border defense. Because the Northern Song Dynasty coexisted with the Liao and Western Xia regimes in the north, and the border provocations arose, and the Hebei, Hedong, and Shaanxi roads were in the brunt, so the Northern Song Dynasty deployed heavy troops in these places, and the food and salary required by the heavy troops in the border areas could not be met by local taxes, so the Song court had to transfer some of the materials transported from the canal north to the three roads.

To put it bluntly, if the canal is closed and cut off, Bianliang will immediately fall into a panic of food shortage, and the border army will inevitably mutiniate due to the lack of food. If the closure is a little longer, such as half a year, the city of Tokyo will be self-defeating, and the Great Song Dynasty will fall apart.

For the Great Song Dynasty, the canal is really the lifeblood of the country.

Therefore, since Zhao Kuangyin Dingding, the Song Emperors of all dynasties have attached great importance to and cared for the canal.

The Huimin River, Bianhe River, Wuzhang River, and Jinshui River, which surround Bianliang, are like the four major arteries of the heart, transporting supplies to Bianliang, and then distributing them to all parts of the country. Among them, the Bianhe River that transports materials in the south is the most important, and in the second year of Taizong's Chunhua (991), Taizong said: "Yang gives a canal of water here." When Shenzong was in Xining, Zhang Fangping, the governor of the government, also said: "Based on Caoyun." ”

In order to ensure the needs of Cao Yun, the official shipyard of the Song Dynasty built a large number of Cao ships every year. In the last year of Taizong to the end of the Dao (997), a total of 3,237 boats were built in one year. At the end of Zhenzong Tianxi (1021), the annual output was 2,916. In the second year of the reign of Emperor Yingzong (1065), "Zhulu created 2,540 ships".

How to ensure the safe transportation of materials from all over the country to the central government is a problem that the Zhao and Song dynasties must face, so the Caoyun audit agency came into being.

The regulations of the Song Dynasty on the audit of Cao Yun are mainly divided into four aspects, namely the time limit for the issuance of Cao Yun, the itinerary calendar and the management and reward and punishment system of the approval.

The first is the departure time limit of Caoyun. As the name suggests, this regulation mainly restricts the transportation time of materials, and its fundamental purpose is to prevent the officials in charge of escort from cheating, berthing for too long and thus selling official materials, and then falsely claiming that the materials are lost for various reasons, for example, in the fourth year of Yongxi, an escort official "visited Wen Xilu's official Zhumu Lu dragged the road to Beijing, and most of them were escorted envoys, officials, regimental heads, and sailors to secretly sell bamboo and wood, and paid a small amount, that is, falsely claimed to be lost." In addition, this regulation also ensures that some time-sensitive materials can be transported to Beijing in good condition, such as tea "shall not be accumulated there, damaging official tea".

The second is the management of the itinerary and the approval of the book. In essence, these two are to understand whether the escort personnel are in compliance with the rules and regulations on the way to escort, so as to reward and punish them on the basis of this, in other words, these two are an important basis for the evaluation of rewards and punishments of escort personnel. In this regard, the "Song Hui Manuscript" contains: "The history of the destruction of the itinerary of the Zhuzhu Gang is the same as that of being destroyed. The same applies to those who have not been licensed, or who falsely claim to have been damaged, or who do not have sufficient attachments to this outline, and who have not been approved by the department, although there are reasons for the audit process to hinder the reward, and the same is true for those who have not approved the book. The ministries are within the limits of the reward". After arriving at the destination, the approval of the escort personnel's grain itinerary will be collected uniformly, summarized and reported together, and reviewed by the relevant agencies, which is the management of the approval.

Then there are the incentives. In order to encourage the escort officials to fulfill their duties, the Song Dynasty set up a series of incentives for the transport personnel, such as escorting fragile items such as salt, if the amount scattered and lost on the way is less than the specified amount, then all the personnel involved in the escort will be rewarded to varying degrees. For example, for those who have not made mistakes for several years, the Song court will also give different degrees of rewards, for those who do not make mistakes for one year, they will usually be rewarded with reduced friction and money, and for those who do not make mistakes for five years, in addition to giving money rewards, they will also directly promote their official positions.

Finally, there are punitive measures.

During the transportation, the Song Dynasty allowed the loss of materials, stipulating that for every 8,000 Shuo of Bianhe grain, it was allowed to lose less than 400 Shuo, but if this limit was exceeded, it would be punished by forced labor, so some escorts often lost too much, they would directly abandon all the materials, including the means of transport, and then lie about natural disasters, so as to avoid being punished. The existence of this kind of behavior is a great waste of materials, and Song Ting naturally knew what the escort personnel did, but because this kind of behavior was not described in the previous regulations, there was no way to punish it according to the rules at the beginning. Later, in response to this malaise, it was stipulated that "if a boat is lost from now on, even if the palace attendant or military general reports the problem, he will not be exempted from the crime of losing it." In case of bad weather, the shipwreck should also try its best to rescue the materials, and "if the rescue is divided, there is no other intruder, forgiveness".

The specific punishment for throwing away official property, as well as the responsibilities of the personnel of the audit institution, are recorded in detail in the "Song Hui Yao Draft":

"Those who are inadmonished by the people, the ranks of the subordinates, and the workers who are unaware of the theft and are prone to deceive and conceal the official property of the program and the ship, and who can obtain the prisoner by themselves even though the matter has been discovered, shall be removed from the crime. Two or more co-offenders, but one or more offenders. The level of the soldiers is the same as that of the hired people. Bo Yi is the official of the ship, and the crime is the most criminal; The rod sins are the same as the fire. Those who are unconscious of the cadres of the local division and urging the outline, the shore patrol inspection, and the county lieutenant will have one hundred rods, and the order officer will be reduced by two degrees. Those who can be convicted within 30 days do not sit; If two or more persons are awarded one, this is also permitted. ”

However, just as eating and dressing are the most basic needs of human beings, watching the cute little money walk in front of you in vain is really a great test of personal character. It is a pity that many people in ancient and modern times, both in China and abroad, have not been able to pass the test.

Even in the early days of the founding of the country, Song Taizu set the tone of "being the strictest in dealing with corrupt officials", not only severely punishing corrupt officials according to the law, but also strengthening the supervision and restraint of officials' behavior through the appointment system, and strictly restricting the use of non-capital criminals in terms of recruitment, promotion, promotion, recommendation, and promotion.

But again, you don't see that even if Ming Taizu used extrajudicial punishment to "peel the last grass", it did not make the Ming Dynasty's officials clear and clear. Besides, the officials of the Song Dynasty said that we need to be corrupt, do some business casually, accept some donated land, plus the court's generous Yulu (for high-ranking officials), there is no need to do those indiscriminate things.

However, without extra money, it seems that something is missing when working, just like overtime without overtime pay, which makes people unable to lift their spirits to make some achievements. In addition, in the Song Dynasty, the official system of stacking bed frame houses, it seems that many people are in charge of things, and it seems that many people don't care about things, and prevarication is really common.

To this end, the Song Dynasty inherited the Tang system, and set up a Ministry of Industry and a capital water supervisor to be in charge of the management and management of rivers and lakes, and to carry out the responsibilities of guiding water sources, cleaning up siltation, strengthening flood control, and planting trees and berms, which also achieved some results. Especially regarding the governance of the canal, it is often the emperor who names a certain minister to deal with it directly, and no matter how much he wants to shirk, he does not dare to fool the emperor Laozi. Once there is a loss, it will inevitably be a major event that will shake Gyeonggi and the government and the people will be worried, and if you don't do it well, you will be joking with your own future and small life. Do you think that the knife of the old Zhao family is not good?

Therefore, when Fang Zhongyong took a boat along the canal all the way north to Shanyang, traced the Huai River up to Xuyi, and then passed Sizhou on the north bank of the Huai River, he entered the essence of the Sui and Tang Grand Canals - Tongji Canal (Bianhe).

In the words of later generations, this Bianhe River is a "golden waterway". The river is full of boats, the trees are well maintained, and the water is crystal clear, with the occasional fish passing by. Busy but not chaotic, environmental governance is also good, it seems that the feet of the Son of Heaven are different!