The Mid-Autumn Festival, which began in the Tang Dynasty and reached its peak in the Song Dynasty, has passed.

The Song people did not like to engage in other people with heavy anger, but they had the strongest humanistic atmosphere. No matter what festival, the Song people always had the most active holidays.

Of course, it is called late autumn after the Mid-Autumn Festival. At this moment, the grasshoppers did not jump around much. All the breaths in the world lurked and were no longer restless. According to superstitious sayings, the murder caused the least resentment after the autumn, and it was not easy to be entangled by evil spirits. Therefore, the registered death row prisoner named Song Jiang in the death row is about to be executed.

In view of this situation, Shi Wengong had already secretly moved south and should be able to arrive in Jiangzhou soon.

It was Gao Fangping who sent a secret letter to summon Lao Shi. He was not Gao Fangping's subordinate, but the procedures were very simple. After Gao Fangping sent a letter, Shi Wengong asked Shi Wenbin for leave and could leave alone.

After Gao Fangping was cut off from the Yongle Army, Shi Wengong's troops were governed by Shi Wenbin, and Shi Wenbin was the chief general of the Yongle Army.

Earlier, Gao Fangping had a secret order to give Shi Wengong a secret order to closely monitor the movements of Shuibo. For this reason, Shi Wengong had also had a confrontation with Shuibo small groups of scattered soldiers. However, there has been no news of Shuibo recently, and it is impossible to determine whether Chao Gai and others left Shuibo and went south to rescue Song Jiang.

Gao Fangping analyzed that perhaps there was a Yongle army in Jeju to be closely monitored, so Chao Gai and others landed in Yunzhou and left the water pond. Perhaps they were on the way and they were about to implement a plan to rescue Song Jiang.

Gao Fangping was uncertain about this, but it did not affect his preparations for it. The reason was that Dai Zong had disappeared and could not be seen in Jiangzhou. Gao Fangping had reason to suspect that after being fired, Dai Zong's calf was really in trouble and wanted to go to Liangshan to drink and eat meat. His disappearance is likely to go to Shuibo to report the news and study the details of saving Song Jiang.

Chao Gai is a loyal person, and Wu Yong is hard to say. However, for their "legality of the Juyi Hall" and for the sake of their "supervision and flag", it is very likely that Wu Yong can only support the proposal to rescue Song Jiang, otherwise the existing leaders of the parable may become centrifugal. This is also a political issue, and politics is always everywhere.

At the same time, Yang Zhi had already brought Gao Fangping's documents to the north and mobilized grain to Beijing.

The confidants in Beijing were arranged to organize their troops to purchase grain near the capital of the capital, and work day and night to produce them as compound feed, and then they began to organize the transportation to Jiangzhou.

The current Jiangnan East Road disaster relief center is in Jiangzhou. Before winter comes, food is the lifeline, and we must win this battle to defend Jiangnan food at all costs.

For the time being, this is the only way first, and the court may not be able to count on it. Given the system problems and the Song Dynasty did not have a sound "reservation method", Zhang Shuye actually had a limited amount of surplus grain available in his hands. Life in the northwest was still difficult. In addition, Zong Ze judged that the battle between Song and Xia might be reopened, the court had to prepare for this to a certain extent.

There is surplus grain in the north, but if the Ministry of Revenue takes the lead and organizes the transportation of grain from the north to Jiangzhou, due to the transportation capacity of this era and the inefficiency, laziness and corruption of the bureaucratic organization, the cost is too high. The cost paid by the court may be higher than the black-hearted grain in Jiangnan.

So Zhang Shuye has already argued with Gao Fangping: The court no longer has the ability to take care of you in Jiangnan East Road. I am trying to resist the position of Jiangdong Transportation Engineer, which means that you can achieve "impossible tasks" and not refuse, and swear to resist the food crisis in Jiangnan to the death. With this as a prerequisite, you will not need to pay grain back to the Ministry of Revenue this year. The silver and money will be reduced to a certain extent. In addition, at an extraordinary time, I allow you to use certain cruel means to cause trouble.

No matter what the reason is, although the flood was not caused by Gao Fangping, history has never been gentle and has always judged heroes by success or failure. These are what Gao Fangping faces below.

If this battle is lost, all Gao Fangping's previous victory will be useless, and as many people starve to death, there will be no prestige.

So it is inevitable that Gao Fangping went to Beijing to believe in this time and also went on the battlefield as a "debtor", vowing to pay money to win this food defense battle. Economically, Gao Fangping would lose money, but politically, it is a vital interest. Damn this is the correct use of political funds. Other uses are actually not just.

This time, it is a political and economic preparation.

Relying solely on authority, threatening those officials to reach a compromise with their dog-legged grain merchants is not insurance enough, and Gao Fangping does not fully trust those sharks. If the form is wrong, they still have the chance of turning against the water.

However, while suppressing them through power, they were on the other hand, and using economic means to move south from the civilian organization of the capital to the south, it was double insurance. In terms of momentum, it was possible to suppress them. Once there was no such thing as Gao Fangping could unilaterally withstand the food crisis. Some merchants who had accumulated too much food in Jiangnan grain merchants would have a shaken position and might start to secretly release grain.

At that time, the opening was a trampling effect, and the defeat was like a mountain of defeat. Yes, there was no surprise in the capital market. Just this virtue, a thing that everyone thinks is worth so much, and it is worth so much on the books. Once the form changes, no one of the investors in these trends is a fool, and they all hope that others will take over and they will retreat.

By then, the entire Jiangnan East Road will be full of "selling orders" covered with dark clouds, and the food crisis will naturally be resolved. It is certain that you are not full, and it is certain that the price will still be expensive. But after this winter, next year will be the time for the Jedi to fight back.

In ancient times, the systemic food crisis occurred not in the crisis of food itself, but in the crisis of transportation capacity.

It’s not that there is really no food, but that there was no railway in ancient times, and the shipping capacity was very limited, so there was almost no ability to transfusion blood to the affected areas on a large scale when needed.

If external grain is not transported in, then as the food inside the affected areas becomes less and less, more and more things will be about selling children and women to death, and then the price of ten times the grain is just beginning.

In ancient times, taking the land was a war, especially in the years of disasters. The mountains and fields were full of half-people and half-bandits. Most people who were not ordinary people would become groups who rob food in the years of disasters. In addition, the government was inefficient and ineffective, so large-scale food delivery became a luxury.

Even if public security factors are not taken into account, it is difficult to truly form large-scale transportation due to the labor productivity and transportation capacity in ancient times.

In fact, the maximum cost of transporting materials to a place is not the goods themselves, but all losses along the way. For example, it takes dozens of days to travel to Beijing from Jiangzhou. A one-ton grain transportation team, in the absence of horses in the Song Dynasty, requires six ox carts and at least a dozen manpower. The original transport vehicles operated with loads and long distances, and wear and repair were also very troublesome.

In addition to the accompanying bodyguard costs, the food and money consumed by the livestock, the exploitation of tolerances in various levels, the blood-sucking layer by layer, and the transportation cost of a ton of grain worth 17 jin of coins may be as high as 30 tonnes of coins.

So this is the worst and best era. Even if the godfather who is capable of selling goods is not illegal, he can make a lot of money. He will not be robbed, which is Lu Junyi's productivity and competitiveness.

It is based on these factors that after the flood in Jiangnan, when the food crisis had not really occurred, the price of rice with three stagnant of money per stone was three times that of usual.

This is a question of the way, and it is also the cost price of grain traders from other places.

So in theory, even if the price of grain is tripled, it will not really starve many people to death. Why did Gao Fangping say that triple is just the starting point rather than the end point?

Because the current triple grain price is just an xenophobic way for the local chamber of commerce alliance in Jiangnan to block external grain merchants from entering Jiangnan. Merchants are profit-seeking. For example, when the grain merchants in Tokyo saw that Jiangnan was only triple the grain price, and they had no profit when transported in, so they would not make arrangements in advance.

Once external profiteers are not prepared to compete, this will form a trend, which will lead to less and less food in Jiangnan, and eventually, at some point it will explode ten or even twenty times.

When the price of grain is really twenty times, it is actually the moment when the big profiteer runs away and the rest are trapped. The external grain merchants who had not prepared earlier were not fools and dare not enter the market at that time. At that time, they entered the market at that time, except being killed by a hungry mob, they were not here to make money. They were called a takeover warrior.

This process was a cycle in ancient times, and it was a vicious cycle, with almost no solution. To a certain extent, the Ming Dynasty could also be regarded as dying in this "cycle".

This is the reason why later generations said that if you want to be rich, you should first build roads. Building roads means opening up business. It means that you can break the monopoly environment of local unscrupulous merchants.

Gao Fangping is already working on the monopoly environment of Jiangnan East Road. Relying on the 23rd generation of bearing casting transportation vehicles that are now available, it can save transportation capacity to the greatest extent and reduce transportation costs. In addition, Gao Fangping's grain transport can be avoided by officials from various places and not robbed by bandits. Therefore, after preliminary calculations, Gao Fangping's team may control the grain transported to Jiangzhou to a price of 1:8 to 19 times.

And this is just a price to guarantee capital. If Gao Fangping is more extreme, he will lose a little to earn fame and maintain the price of 1.7 times the usual price, and it is not rice but full nutritional feed. As a result, basically, Gao Fangping's strategy announced at the meeting was formed: the food price is allowed to be slightly higher than usual, but not crazy.

It was just this time. As the Dajiangnan Industrial Base was unfolded, the bearings became more and more mature, the government environment became better and better, the industrial technology was improving, and the shipping tonnage increased. All of this was to fully unblock the blood vessels of the Song Dynasty, and the huge monopoly profits would become fewer and fewer. The price of grain for two or five times may still be before the steam engine revolution, but the price of grain for ten times will definitely become history.

Then the above situation was in the Song Dynasty.

If you want to ask what kind of living conditions were the humans on other continents during this period? After washing and sleeping, they were basically not considered humans. Once there was something to do, they would wait for death one by one. Because in the world of savages, there was no government like the Song Dynasty that would talk about "political correctness".

Yes, the Song Dynasty was very bad and corrupt, and inefficient. But at least the government also regarded not starving people as politically correct, which could indeed alleviate the conflict to a certain extent. This is why the Song Dynasty lived for 300 years and did not have a national peasant uprising until the country was destroyed.
Chapter completed!