The influence of the Huizhou Merchants and the Shanxi Merchants on the Ming economy has a long history!

The formation of any economic system cannot be achieved overnight!

However, the border areas are bitterly cold, sparsely populated, and the huge number of border guards consume thousands of stones of grain every year, and they need to cloth hundreds of thousands of horses. In the third year of Hongwu in the Ming Dynasty (1370), Zhu Yuanzhang adopted the strategy of building a new policy of "salt opening", and opened the government salt monopoly system that had been implemented for thousands of years, allowing private merchants to send grain to the border in exchange for a salt distribution license "salt introduction", about 30 catties of grain can be exchanged for a "salt introduction", and it was the best quality and most profitable Huai salt introduction at that time.

The imperial court "retreated from the country and advanced the people", so that the people benefited, "the price of Huai salt is expensive, and many merchants tend to it", the problem of border defense and military needs was solved in one fell swoop, and the merchants of Shaanxi who enjoyed the geographical advantage benefited the most, and they rose from this. Originally, Shaanxi is 800 miles away from Qinchuan, fertile fields for thousands of miles, and has been the main grain producing area in China since ancient times. For example, during the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty (1403 ~ 1424), the official warehouse of Shaanxi Province stored nearly 11 million stone (a stone in the Ming Dynasty was about 90 kilograms), which was enough to pay for the garrison officers and soldiers for three years, and in the Wanli period (1573 ~ 1620), among the 260 prefectures in the country, according to the number of taxes and grains, Xi'an Mansion was second only to Songjiang Mansion (now in Shanghai), which was known as the granary, ranking fourth. From this point of view, the "opening up of salt to China" in exchange for grain transportation is tantamount to a preferential policy tailored for Shaanxi businessmen, and for a time, the peasants in the grain-producing areas in Guanzhong set off an upsurge of going to the city to do business, selling grain and salt.

In contrast, Shanxi has always been short of grain, and Shanxi merchants have to enjoy the policy of "salt in China". I had to push a wheelbarrow to Shandong to buy grain. Re-trafficking at the border. It is a painstaking "purchase of grain for introduction", and Huizhou is far away from the border fortress, the mountains are high and the road is far away, and Huizhou businessmen are even more unable to participate in it. This is also an important reason why the Shaanxi merchants started earlier than the Jin merchants and Hui merchants in the early years of the Ming Dynasty.

However, the "special zone" policy, which was exclusive to Shaanxi merchants, changed in the middle of the Ming Dynasty. In the fifth year of the reign of Ming Hongzhi (1492), soon after Ye Qi, the head of the household department in charge of finance and taxation, took office, he changed the "open middle method" of grain transportation to the "color folding method" of silver exchange. In other words, merchants no longer have to travel thousands of miles to send grain to the border gates, but directly take out silver to buy salt, that is, they can obtain permission to sell salt. Ye Qi was a native of Shanyang (present-day Huai'an, Jiangsu), and this move obviously broke the inherent advantages of "border merchants" such as Shaanxi and Shanxi, and gave a good opportunity for "domestic merchants" who were geographically closer to Lianghuai and mainly Huizhou merchants to enter the lucrative salt industry.

Since then, it has lost its economic significance to stay in the northwest to grow grain, and Shaanxi merchants and Shanxi merchants have come to Yangzhou, a salt transshipment hub along the canal, to become professional salt merchants. It is documented. At that time, there were no less than 500 Shaanxi businessmen who gathered in Yangzhou, and the famous ones were "the beams of the three plains." Zhang and Guo of Jingyang, Shen of Xi'an, Zhang of Tongguan, (they) are also from their homeland, and they are all living in Yang", which marks the beginning of a Shaanxi merchant gang that rushed out of Tongguan and went to the whole country.

It was in Yangzhou that they met the long-standing and ambitious Huizhou salt merchants.

Song Yingxing, the author of the Ming Dynasty science and technology masterpiece "Tiangong Kaiwu", once wrote: (Yangzhou) merchants have the foundation, most of them belong to the Qin, Jin and Hui counties. The literati of Shaanxi in the Qing Dynasty also said that "Huai salt is the bulk of Western merchants". Fujii Hiroshi, a modern Japanese scholar who studied the history of Chinese merchants, pointed out that in the Ming Dynasty, the Shaanxi merchants, as salt merchants, were once superior to the Shanxi merchants, and their hometowns were Sanyuan County, Jingyang County, Suide Prefecture and other places.

In the "Xingshi Hengyan" compiled by the legendary novelist Feng Menglong in the Ming Dynasty, there is a well-known famous article "Du Shi Niang's Angry Sinking Treasure Chest", in which the rich merchant Sun Fu is written is based on the Shanxi businessman who lived in Yangzhou. In various literary or opera works written by contemporaries, the shadows of Shanxi merchants flashed from time to time, which shows that their status in the social life of the time could not be ignored. The Shaanxi salt merchants who gathered in Yangzhou, out of the need to protect their own common interests, funded the construction of the Shaanxi Guild Hall, and later in order to deal with the competition of the Hui merchants, they jointly built the Shanxi Guild Hall with the Shanxi salt merchants. At that time, the strength of the Shanshan merchants was still strong, and the Hui merchants had to buy salt from them from time to time. The Shanxi Guild Hall was built alone in Dongguan Old Street, Dadongmen, near the canal, while the merchant gang guilds in Huizhou, Hunan, Jiangxi, and Lingnan were clustered in the area of Xiaodongmen in the emerging market, reflecting the historical trajectory of the rise of merchant gangs.

Another song of the Ming Dynasty "Yangzhou Bamboo Branches" sang: "Salt Ke Lian Sui has huge wealth, and there is life hidden under the Zhumen River." The local pronunciation of Qin language and the language of She, do not ask the name of the person but ask the flag. "Qin language" is Shaanxi dialect, and "She language" is Huizhou dialect (She County is one of the six counties of Huizhou). It can be seen that Shaanxi merchants and Huizhou merchants are the main forces of Yangzhou's prosperous business. According to records, at that time, among the eight chief salt merchants (that is, the leaders of the salt industry association), the western merchants and Hui merchants accounted for four of them.

Shaanxi merchants who lived in Yangzhou not only operated Huaiyan, but also expanded their business to pawn, cloth, leather goods, tobacco and liquor. However, the Hui merchants, who were both advantageous and popular, were suddenly aggressive and aggressive, and because of their tradition of "Confucianism on the left and on the right", their cultural level was generally high, and they liked to initiate lawsuits at every turn, and they repeatedly had commercial conflicts with Shanxi merchants. According to historical records, in the litigation cases between the "Nanren" (i.e., Hui merchants) and the border merchants (i.e., Shanshan merchants), the former often obtained favorable official judgments and gained the upper hand in the fighting.

The "Yangzhou Mansion Chronicles" compiled during the Wanli period in the middle and late Ming Dynasty recorded this subtle trend: "Yangzhou is all from all over the world, Xin'an (Huishang) is the most prosperous, Guanshanxi, Jiangyou (Jiangxi) is second. ”

I don't know why, the longer I have been in contact with this inspector, the more Shi Kefa feels that this inspector has the same style as the emperor whether he is doing things or speaking!

But Shi Kefa didn't dare to associate the prosecutor with the emperor, after all, the emperor couldn't go out of Beijing without permission, right? He also guessed that in addition to the identity of Wang Chengen's nephew, the prosecutor should have a closer relationship with the emperor! I just can't guess what the relationship is.

"Lord Inspector, this time to kill so many people at once, our people will immediately make up for it, all according to the administrative system of the Jingshi?" Shi Kefa has also been very busy in the past two days, without the slightest preparation, and without any handover! The gap after the lack of thousands of officials will be filled by the one hundred from the nine grades he brought! And these people themselves are raw melons and eggs! (To be continued......)