In the thirteenth year of Hongwu, on the twenty-sixth day of the first month, Emperor Sima Shu officially set off on his southern tour under the escort of the Su Guard Army and the naval fleet. Empress Wang Huifeng, cabinet chief assistant Zhang Binling, Du Xi, Jiang Tong, Zu Ti, Wang Yan, Yang Xuanzhi and other cabinet scholars, as well as hundreds of civil and military officials, went out of the city for hundreds of miles to send off.

Sima Shu told Zhang Bin and Zu Ti in public, and then encouraged the hundred officials a few words, and after saying goodbye to the queen, he went east by boat.

The first stop on his tour was Peiguo Xiao County in Yuzhou (present-day Suzhou, northern Anhui), which was the most important port in the middle of the western end of the North-South Canal. Sima Shu came here for two purposes: first, to investigate the leading role of the water transport ports along the way in the local economic development after the opening of the canal; The second is to inspect the rural economic reform in the hinterland of the Central Plains.

The Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal is the longest man-made river in the world and one of the oldest. The opening of the canal has greatly strengthened the exchanges between the north and the south of China, and the ports along the way have become the leaders of local economic development.

Xiao County, for example, was a small town with a population of only 5,000 before the opening of the Grand Canal, and after the Grand Canal was opened, it soon became one of the distribution centers for goods from all over the Great Jin Dynasty to the south and north. With the gathering of merchants from all over the world, various industries in Xiao County have developed rapidly, and the scale of the city has expanded day by day, and now there are more than 3,000 shops here, and the merchant ships anchored in the port stretch for more than 10 miles, which is already quite a prosperous county in the central part of the country.

With the continuous development of the canal's water traffic, there are countless ships coming and going with Peiguo Xiao County every year, and sometimes standing on the edge of the harbor and looking far away, the surface ships are mighty and boundless. There are river boats, Jiangnan boats, lake boats, and so on. River boats are mainly used for canal transportation, and there are many types, among which the bulk materials such as rice, salt, firewood, bricks, tiles, and plaster are called large beach boats.

There is a kind of rice boat called the iron bucket boat, which can carry five or six hundred stones of grain and rice, and the boatman lives in the boat. The ships used by the temple and the nunnery are large and small "red oil carp beach" boats, as well as paragons, boats, boats, and boats that carry garbage, dung, and bulk cargo and individual passengers, as well as some fishing boats and fishing boats, etc., which go back and forth every day.

Located in the middle of the north-south canal, Xiao County is an ancient city with a long history. After the opening of the Grand Canal. With the expansion of exchanges between the north and the south, it has rapidly developed into an important economic town in central China with prosperous industry and commerce and a reputation all over the world. Because Xiao County is located in the key place of "connecting the coast, leaning on the Central Plains, and connecting the east and the west". Since the canal was built, the economy has developed more rapidly.

Xiao County benefited from the canal and developed rapidly. As a result, some handicrafts and businesses related to transportation have also arisen in the territory. For example, shipbuilding, iron smelting, rope making, wood processing and textile industry workshops and workshops were already dotted at that time, and the commercial areas in the city were distributed along the canal in the northwest of the city.

Xiao County is a transportation hub for going from south to north and west to east. Thanks to its strategic location, it was prosperous and prosperous in just ten years after the canal was opened. Wealthy businessmen flocked here from all directions. Among them were jewelers, rice merchants, tea merchants, silk merchants, timber merchants, medicinal herb merchants, and other merchants, as well as large merchants engaged in international trade.

Before the opening of the canal, the economic development of various parts of the north was relatively lagging behind due to the lack of canals, poor transportation, and the impact of long-term war. The opening of the Grand Canal has also brought infinite vitality to the economic development of the north.

After arriving in Peiguo, dozens of local officials in Yuzhou, such as Yuzhou Thorn History, Peiguo County Shou, and Xiao County Commander, came to meet him. Sima Shu looked at the local officials in Yuzhou and said straight to the point: "Ladies and gentlemen, I want to stay in Peiguo for a few days, and I can report on my work in the near future, and if there are any other problems, I will solve them in person, and if I can't solve them in person, I will make arrangements after I return to Beijing." ”

After listening to the emperor's words, the local officials present hurriedly took out the materials prepared in advance and reported them. Of course, this kind of report will be mixed with a certain amount of water, but everyone knows that Sima Shu has other channels to obtain the real situation, so the information provided by everyone does not dare to be too false.

On that day, Sima Shu and the local officials talked about business for an afternoon, and it was not until dinner time that everyone said goodbye and left. After dinner, Sima Shu didn't have time to rest, there were still very important things waiting for him to do, so he brought Pei Wei, Jia Mo, Wen Qiao and other accompanying officials to him.

"Ladies and gentlemen, here is the new survey report provided by Luoyang University Hall: "The Impact, Benefits and Disadvantages of Commercialization on Agriculture", Zhongqing will take a look first." Sima Shu motioned to Langguan Wen Qiao next to him to distribute several documents with the same content to Pei Wei, Jia Mo and others, and while everyone was reading the investigation report, Sima Shu waited while sipping tea.

The content of the report is roughly divided into two parts, the first part first affirms the guiding role of commercialization in agriculture, mainly taking the port of Peiguo Xiao County as an example, focusing on how the local government uses the advantages of regional ports to drive local economic development, and then promote the adjustment of local agricultural structure.

The second part tells the story of the effective complement and promotion of agricultural development by commerce, but also hindered and hindered the agricultural development of Dajin to a certain extent. This is especially true when business forces are not effectively guided and supervised.

With the completion and use of the port terminal, the local economy of Peiguo rose rapidly and developed, and soon entered a certain degree of commoditized society. Due to the development of local industry and commerce, nearby villagers can go to work in factories, docks and other places during their spare time, and can also apply for migrant workers in government projects, and get a lot of "wages".

There are also some villagers who stay in the village and "get rich" through other means, such as planting mulberry and silkworms, and planting cotton. Due to the rapid development of industrial commerce in Dajin, the demand for raw materials such as raw silk and cotton is extremely high. In addition, the profit of planting mulberry cotton is very high, and planting mulberry trees, three years of maturity, you can be worry-free for many years, it is a small investment in the profit of a large livelihood, cotton compared to rice and other crops, the land requirements are not high, and the profit space is greater. After participating in the literacy class, a small number of villagers learned to learn "agricultural science" technology and were better at growing mulberry cotton than others, so they quickly became rich.

In this report, Luoyang University Hall made a statistical finding: in the annual slack period, nearly one-third of the local young people go to work in other places, and women will also go to work in neighboring textile factories and other places, and the value of agricultural products cultivated in just a few months of labor is profitable.

Nearly two-thirds of the farmers concentrate on mulberry cotton after planting their fields, and some even grow fruits and other crops. Selling towns for profit, a small number of people "contract" other people's land and become large growers. Only a few peasant households can only monopolize farmland due to lack of labor, and their lives are very ordinary.

The report also found that the more commoditized the region, the more vulnerable agriculture is to environmental impacts. In a local mountain village near the wharf, one-third of the farmers grow cotton and linen for profit, and two-thirds of the farmers concentrate on farming for various reasons, but they go out to "work" the most, more than half, almost two-thirds.

Villages farther away from the port and docks are a different story, with the vast majority of people living on farmland for food, and only a few brave people go out to work to make a living, accounting for only about one-tenth of the local youth.

The purpose of economic commodification is to make the lives of the people rich, and the commoditization has enabled the villagers to have "creativity". The biggest feature of commercialization is the abundance of products, and villagers will naturally try to "create wealth" in order to pursue wealth and their own wealth. Whether it is a wise person who opens up his own way or a person who is in the middle of the peace to learn from the way or a dull person who follows the trend, they all begin to create new wealth on the basis of the original agricultural production, and it is this kind of creation that has become an important support point for the rapid development of the economy of the Great Jin Dynasty in the early stage.

In the past, the Dajin economy was the representative of the manor serf economy, and the people could only produce in a specific environment due to the constraints of conditions, and those manor owners actually assumed the function of wealth distribution, so under this system, no matter how hard you worked, you could only have food and clothing, so the villagers had no motivation to create new wealth.

"Pei Aiqing, can you tell me if this report is useful to the imperial court?" After about an hour, Sima Wei saw that the people present had basically finished reading the information, and he first asked Pei Wei, who was the leader.

"Well, Your Majesty, in the opinion of the minister, the data provided by Luoyang University Hall has a great enlightening effect on us. First of all, these data show that the implementation of the new policy has been remarkable for so many years, and the effect is obvious; secondly, the imperial court invested in the canal, and the goal of using the canal to drive economic development has been completed; In the end, the boom in commerce brought clear benefits to ordinary people. ”

"But, Your Majesty, some of these evils are also pointed out in this report, but they are not necessarily universal. After all, this report only takes Xiao County as an example, which is a bit narrow. If he wanted to get more detailed data, he thought that he would have to investigate a few more places. ”

"Well, Pei Aiqing's words are really the words of Lao Cheng's country! Wen Qiao: What do you think? Sima Shu looked at the few young people standing on the side again, this time Sima Shu toured the world, and deliberately brought Wen Qiao and several other young officials with him, in order to cultivate a reserve force.

"Your Majesty, the minister agrees with Master Pei's suggestion, it's better to draw conclusions after more investigation!" Although Wen Qiao has a high IQ, after all, he is young and has no political experience, if he really wants to say something, he still can't catch up with Pei Wei, and he still needs to exercise more.

"In this way, Wen Qiao, you are responsible for transferring this information to Chang'an, and let the cabinet organize a manual investigation. It's getting late today, let's go back and rest, and we'll go to Jiankang early tomorrow morning. With that, Sima Shu got up and walked to the back.

(ps: Thank you for the 588 reward of the book friend's professional life!!) (To be continued......)