"Lu Lao, what kind of place is this?"

"This place is called the Land Hall by the people of the mountain city."

No wonder there is a land lord at the door, Song Yingxing thought.

The moment he entered, he thought it was a temple.

Before he had time to ask what the Land Hall was, after bypassing the screen behind the Land Lord, Song Yingxing saw 3 huge sand tables.

"It's ......"

He is no stranger to the sand table, and in the "Heavenly Creation" he wrote, there is a special part about the sand table. However, most of the time in Huaxia's sand table was in the war, which made Song Yingxing puzzled, could it be that there was an enemy in Dongshan Prefecture?

"These are the three districts of the city." Lu Ge explained: "This is the city district of the port where you got off the ship, this is the commercial city where we are now, and this is the fifty city district where the headquarters of the Dongshan Prefecture Maritime Safety Bureau is located. ”

Song Yingxing understood, but still didn't understand what it meant by so many colorful and small flags with words in Shangcheng District and Fifty City District.

"That's what I want you to see, don't worry about that, you come with me."

Lu Ge took Song Yingxing and continued to walk towards the inner room, the land hall is generally a lobby with countless rooms layout, a total of 3 floors, open to the public 1 or 2 floors.

Song Yingxing found that there was a person dressed as a master in each room, trying to hold various notebooks and talk to the people who entered, this atmosphere was very similar to a bazaar.

But he also felt that it was different from the bazaar, at least not that way the bazaar felt.

Lu Ge took Song Yingxing from the 1st floor to the 2nd floor, and the situation of 2 was similar to that of the 1st floor.

Song Yingxing stood on the corridor on the second floor, the situation on the first floor was undoubted, and he found that many people on the first floor would stop in front of the sand table after coming out of the room, and occasionally talk to people they obviously didn't know, pointing at the sand table. Especially when the master comes to pull out the flag, the discussion of everyone will rise by an order of magnitude, and the people who were originally wandering around the room will immediately gather around the sand table.

"Old Lu, what are they doing here?"

Lu Ge still smiled and said nothing, standing on the stairs on the second floor and the third floor, and motioned for Song Yingxing to go up.

There are guards at both ends of the staircase on the 3rd floor, so it can be seen that the 3rd floor is completely closed to the public. When Song Yingxing went up, he happened to see a merchant in fur, who took out a thick stack of silver tickets from the fur and counted them in front of a table of eight immortals.

He suddenly sighed halfway through the order, put the silver ticket back with a complicated expression, and immediately two people dressed as masters came up, surrounding him and didn't know what he was talking about, and the merchant's expression became even more complicated.

Lu Ge was not in a hurry, so he moved two chairs and put them in the corridor on the third floor, so that Song Yingxing could sit and watch.

Two quarters of an hour later, Song Yingxing asked, "Old Lu, what are you trading here?" ”

"Turf."

"Turf!?"

Song Yingxing's expression was a little ugly.

He was demoted to Dongshan Prefecture because he investigated the use of land by the magnates and gentry in Jiangnan to trade land and seize the land of peasants, which provoked people who could not be provoked.

He always firmly believed that the free land trade opened by the Hongzhi Dynasty would become the bane of the Ming Dynasty's downfall, especially the gentry, aristocracy, and bureaucracy of the Zhengde and Jiaqing dynasties, who took advantage of the loopholes in the land transaction policy to forcibly annex land, which had dug a big hole for the Ming ship.

This dynasty relied on the reform of Zhang Juzheng and Zhang Ge Lao to temporarily fill this loophole, but it was a symptom. If His Majesty still agrees to the free trade of land, there will always be people who will take advantage of the land and annex it.

The handicraft encyclopedia "Heavenly Creations" needs to go to the folk to collect a lot of materials, which makes Song Yingxing see the suffering of the people. He hated land annexation, and even disliked the free buying and selling of land.

I didn't expect that the free sale of land that I hated the most was actually in Dongshan Prefecture!

Is that the next step for Dongshan Prefecture to be annexed to land!?

Although Lu Ge is far overseas, the Dongshan Prefecture Maritime Safety Bureau has spent a lot of money to establish an information network, and someone brings local news every quarter. Relying on his seniority and friendship, Lu Ge is the part of the people who see the latest local information, and they know why Song Yingxing was demoted to Dongshan Prefecture.

He saw that Song Yingxing's attitude had obviously changed, and he didn't call himself "Lu Lao" anymore, so he said: "Yingxing, Hao Ping, you know him, he was born in a poor show, and he also hates land annexation, believe me, he is not engaged in land annexation." ”

Song Yingxing took two deep breaths and calmed down. Indeed, as Lu Ge said, Hao Ping is not a traditional bureaucrat cultivated during the Zhengde and Jiaqing periods. It should be said that the entire Maritime Administration is not that kind of traditional bureaucracy.

I don't know if it was intentional on the part of His Majesty, in short, among the bureaucrats of all sizes in the Maritime Safety Bureau, 7 percent were not from the traditional family gentry, but from the military and civilian backgrounds.

"So what's going on with this land sale?"

"This is what Hao Ping has no way to do." Lu Ge asked: "Ying Xing, how much less is this year's Dongshan Prefecture budget than last year?" ”

Song Yingxing's face turned pale: "Nearly 1 percent." ”

"What about 5 years ago?"

"This year's budget is only 70% of what it was five years ago."

"Look, that's the problem in Dongshan State." Lu Ge stood up, holding the escalator on the third floor, looking at the hustle and bustle downstairs: "Dongshan Prefecture is inseparable from the support of the imperial court at all, but this is not a long-term solution, we must have our own industry like the Annan Metropolitan Protectorate!" ”

"Buying and selling land is not a good business!"

"I know that I also don't agree with land sales as a pillar industry in Dongshan Prefecture, and I can't support it at all."

"Then why build this land hall?"

Lu Ge looked back at Song Yingxing: "Because we have no money, the establishment of Jinshan City has drained the last copper plate of Dongshan Prefecture's treasury, and in the months before you took office, the Maritime Safety Bureau was looking for money borrowed from commercial banks, and it was not turned around until this year's budget followed the Minfu fleet to Dongshan Prefecture." ”

Then Lu Ge began to tell Song Yingxing how Dongshan Prefecture had spent the past few years.

At the beginning, there was no commercial district and fifty districts in the planning of the city.

At first, the Shangcheng District was only a manor built by a few trading houses themselves, because other commercial houses from the city of Zhushan and the Central Plains were unwilling to live with the people of the Chengcheng District, so they built their own residences in the south, and the Shangcheng District of Jusha Chengta appeared.

At this time, when Hao Ping had just taken over, the local side also began the westward expedition, and the finances were suddenly tight. The Cabinet has reduced its budget in the northern, eastern, and southern directions.

However, there are huge herds in the Beiting Metropolitan Protectorate, and the people in the area are mainly nomadic herders, so the demand for infrastructure is not so high, and they can plunder in the Western Regions, and the reduction of the financial budget is not a pain in the bones for them.

Not to mention the Annan Metropolitan Protectorate, all the folk tycoons who appeared in the Wanli Dynasty and were called "Shen Wansan Reincarnation" all started by relying on the Annan Metropolitan Protectorate.

The Cabinet is already discussing the independence of the Indochina Peninsula, which was originally ruled by the Annam Prefecture, as a province.

What's going on?

is afraid that the Annan Metropolitan Protectorate will become stronger and stronger, and it also indirectly shows the wealth of the Annam Metropolitan Protectorate. People don't care about your court's budget at all, you can charge me more taxes, don't always think about cutting power.

But Dongshan Prefecture is different, the trade volume with the mainland cannot support Dongshan Prefecture at all, and the fiscal budget shrinks, and Dongshan Prefecture will begin to decline hopelessly. In the future, it is very likely that it will be the same as the former Jiaozhi County, because it is far away from the mainland and has no interests, and the Central Plains will slowly break away from the rule of the Han people as soon as it is in chaos.

In order to save himself, Hao Ping found Lu Ge, who was living in seclusion in Jishan City at that time, and the two discussed for a long time, but did not find a solution. Until one year, Hao Ping returned to the Central Plains to report on his work, and immediately after returning to Dongshan Prefecture, he built fifty cities.

Standing on the 3rd floor and looking down, the fifty city sand table in the middle of the lobby is very special, different from the chaos of the city and the mall area, the layout of five vertical and seven horizontal is very clear.

From the beginning of the planning, Fifty Cities was already ready to take the road of land finance, and it was obviously a pilot project of Hao Ping.

At that time, land was bought and sold freely, and the government rarely intervened, and the land sold was basically private farmland. However, there was no shortage of arable land in Dongshan Prefecture, so when Hao Ping sold land among the commercial houses under the banner of Fifty Cities, these commercial houses were full of curiosity and participated in the first land sale in Fifty Cities.

But the effect is actually tepid, and not much land has been sold.

Until the third land sale in Fifty Cities, the headquarters of the Dongshan Maritime Safety Bureau moved to Fifty Cities, the most famous green buildings in Fifty Cities, the best restaurants moved to Fifty Cities, and the best restaurants moved to Fifty Cities.

In an instant, the clever businessmen all understood that the Fifty City District was the center of the future Yushan City, and they all made a move, and finally created the land price of the current Fifty Cities comparable to Shuntianfu.

"I approached Hao Ping and told him it wasn't a long-term solution. Unless Dongshan Prefecture can continue to attract local trading houses, no matter how much land in Fifty Cities can be sold, the value of those sold will depreciate sharply. ”

"He said he knew he had a way, and then the gold mine incident broke out."

"At that time, I thought that I had really discovered a gold mine, and I was very excited, so I rushed directly to Jinshan City to find Hao Ping, and there was only one port at that time. When he arrived, he found that Hao Ping was doing urban planning, and he wanted to build a city attached to Jinshan Port. ”

Lu Ge sighed: "I knew at a glance that it was another fifty cities, and I guessed that the gold mine incident might be fake." ”

"Under my questioning, he said that the gold mine was smuggled by your teacher from Fuso, and asked him to find some explorers and say that he had found gold in that location in Jinshan City."

"What is your teacher thinking, I can probably guess that to the east of Jinshan City is the continuous Gu'er Mountain, which is enough for those greedy trading houses and explorers to spend more than ten years in it to prove that there is no gold mine at all, which is equivalent to fighting for Dongshan Prefecture for another ten years. Ten years later, the matter was exposed, and he was just at the age when he should retire. ”

"But at that time, the cabinet will definitely not be satisfied, I told Hao Ping that it will only be him who will take the blame when the time comes, he said that it doesn't matter, a piece of land in Jinshan City is enough for him to help the next Dongshan Prefecture Maritime Safety Bureau Governor earn enough money."

"But now it seems that your teacher should only want the gold mine incident to break out, and the Maritime Administration should not interfere too much, and let the comptoirs and explorers 'dig' on their own. But the appearance of Jinshan City directly disrupted his plan, and the imperial court would find that there was a problem with the construction of Jinshan City, and the truth of the gold mining incident would only accelerate the exposure. ”

Song Yingxing took over the conversation: "That's why the teacher quickly took away Master Hao last year." ”

Both of them were silent, watching the businessman who was hesitant to pay for a piece of land before finally bought it under the persuasion of the master's three-inch tongue.

It can be seen that he was hesitant before buying, but after buying he was very firm.

Ruger sighed, this was not what he wanted to see. There are already more and more businessmen who have come to invest in Dongshan Prefecture and have lost their money, and if this continues, sooner or later no one will have no resources to come to Dongshan Prefecture again.

"Lu Lao." Song Yingxing asked, "Do you want me to end all this?" ”

"No, it's too late, many trading houses are already highly tied to Fifty Cities and Jinshan City, you have stopped buying and selling land, believe it or not, they can go to Shuntian Mansion to sue the emperor."

"What is the purpose of this for Lao Lu to tell me today?"

Lu Ge was silent for a long time before he said: "Dongshan Prefecture is my second hometown, and I want to see it become a part of the Ming Dynasty." Ying Xing, I hope that during your time in Dongshan Prefecture, you will help Dongshan Prefecture find a way to develop. ”