Although the road from Dashan Pass south to Fengxian County is dangerous, it is not far away, a total of thirty or forty miles. But for Wu Sangui and his officers and soldiers, it was like entering another country from one country. This is a land that is both familiar and unfamiliar to them, and full of challenges and surprises.
And the first thing that appeared in front of them was an unexpected surprise!
When the Anxi Army brigade led by Wu Guogui carefully passed through the steep and steep Qi Road built along the mountain, they arrived outside Huangniupu Town, Feng County, which has a slightly wider terrain. What appeared on both sides of the official road were not the heavily armed Dashun soldiers, but thousands of people under the rule of the Shun Dynasty who appeared from nowhere. They all prostrated themselves on both sides of the official road, crying, shouting, and singing. It’s Master Ying Wang, no, it’s King Ying Ming!
"Eat his mother, wear his mother, open the door to welcome the Ming King. When the Ming King comes, he does not pay food. When the Ming King comes, he does not serve. When the Ming King comes, he does not pay tribute. When the Ming King comes, he opens the imperial examination. When the Ming King comes, he divides the fields... "
Wang Youwen, an old man whose ancestral home is Huayang County, Chengdu Prefecture, is the organizer of this "Yingming King". He has experience in this area!
The jurisdiction of Huayang County is within the city of Chengdu. Wang Youwen was born and raised in the old city. His ancestor was a guard of the Prince of Shu. However, it was passed down to Wang Youwen's generation that he had nothing to do with the Prince's Palace, and instead switched to opening a restaurant. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all cooks for three generations, and they were also well-known in Chengdu. However, he did not learn to cook. Instead, he took the path of study and advancement, hoping to gain fame through examinations. It's a pity that he is not good at studying. He started taking the scholar examination at the age of 16, but he didn't pass the examination until Zhang Xianzhong entered Chengdu at the age of 27...
It was in that year that he experienced the important event of welcoming the king's division for the first time - welcoming Zhang Xianzhong, the King of the West!
Fortunately, Zhang Xianzhong chose to go north to Shaanxi because of Li Guo's entry into Sichuan. As soon as Zhang Xianzhong left, Ma Shiying, Zeng Ying, and Yang Zhan regained Chengdu. Wang Youwen participated in welcoming the king's division for the second time. That time, he was full of sincerity in order to welcome the king's division. The people of Chengdu experienced Zhang Xianzhong's madness and began to miss the Ming Dynasty!
But the Ming Dynasty once again disappointed them. Before Ma Shiying could gain a foothold in Chengdu, Dashun and Daxi joined forces at Yangping Pass. The peasant army entered Chengdu again and defeated Ma Shiying.
Wang Youwen had no choice but to follow the others to welcome Master Wang for the third time. This time, the demands were too high. It was not enough to just eat the milk from the pot. He was also asked to sing. He had to sing the song "Welcome King Chuang" to kill King Chuang who was still pretending to be alive. Li Zicheng's army entered the city.
Because of Zhang Xianzhong’s experience, everyone sings beautifully but their hearts are hanging on their shoulders!
God finally opened his eyes. The new intruders were much more normal than the previous ones. Not only did they not kill people indiscriminately, but they were also highly disciplined. The army passed by them without committing any crimes. They were better than the Ming armies of Ma Shiying and Zeng Ying. But there are more rules.
However, there is something about this intruder that makes Wang Youcai dissatisfied...these intruders are too bumpkin and take too much control!
After Sichuan was pacified, it began to focus on agriculture and suppress commerce, prohibiting people and businesses, and also drastically reduced the population of towns in Sichuan. In the political ideals of Li Guo, Sun Kewang, Niu Jinxing and others, the commercial activities in Dashun should be Reduced to the minimum, the working population should be reduced to the minimum, and it should be under the strict control of the Dashun household government and the Jiedushi Department in various places!
In addition, handicrafts and agriculture should be separated from commerce as much as possible. Farmers and handicraftsmen can only sell their products in areas designated by the government at prices lower than the government price limit. And they have to accept the government's "Hebuying Order" at any time - that is, the government sells products to Dashun at a low price.
Under such circumstances, Wang Youwen's family, who had lived in Huayang County for generations and owned a restaurant, had no choice but to leave the city and become farmers. After all, the restaurant industry is considered second- or third-class in business and is dispensable. Moreover, after the Dashun Dynasty came to Sichuan, profiteers, landlords, and bureaucrats in Sichuan Province who loved Sichuan food were all defeated. The new military master of Dashun Prefecture who came to power likes to eat meat buns, water basin mutton, etc. Even the cooks of the Wang family can't cook it, so he can only farm.
Of course, the Wang family has lived in Chengdu for more than a hundred years, and they no longer know how to farm! Even if the Dashun court allocated land to them, they didn't know how to cultivate it.
Therefore, in the first few years when they first went to the countryside, the Wang family basically rested on their laurels. If it weren't for some of the property they saved from opening restaurants that could be sold privately to the villagers, their family might not have learned how to farm, and they would all have starved to death.
Wang Youwen, who had never learned a trade and was solely focused on his career, dreamed of taking the imperial examination in the Shun Dynasty during the first two years when he went to the countryside to farm. It's a pity that his dream came to nothing in the end... Only soldiers of the imperial family could take the imperial examination of the Shun Dynasty!
Wang Youwen, who was not a soldier and had no way to become a soldier, had no choice but to give up his studies and become a farmer and learn farming from scratch.
However, his reading was not in vain, because his knowledge helped him find a position as a tutor in the Fubing Academy in the town (of course there was no establishment, but he was a teacher in the name of doing corvee service). And he also got permission to bring his eldest son in to study and practice calligraphy with the children of the Fubing family - he didn't give up completely and wanted his son to realize his dream of becoming a scholar.
In his opinion at that time, the matter of "taking advantage of exams" would not go on forever, right?
But he thought wrong again. Until the first year of Dashun's Dongping Daxing reign, only soldiers from the imperial family could take the imperial examination in Dashun!
The Wang family's family situation has also declined again and again in the past ten years... There are three reasons for the increasingly difficult life of the Wang family. First, the Wang family's land has been "equalized" and they have been reduced from farmers to tenants of the military clan. .
Second, the population of the Wang family doubled. Wang Youwen and his brother Wang Youcai both married wives before moving to Chengdu from the West. In the first ten years after going to the countryside, their family's life was relatively comfortable, so both brothers had a child. Pile of children.
The third reason is that Wang Youwen lost his "corvee" as a tutor. With this "corvee", the Wang family did not have to perform other corvee, and the students of Fubing Academy would give him some "cure". But such good days are gone forever as the "second generation of the government" grows up. Because the second generation of the government have all gone to school, and there are so many of them, not everyone has the opportunity to be a soldier, so they start to squeeze out other good positions. Fubing schools in various places were the first to bear the brunt, and they were all occupied by second-generation people who had studied but could not become fufu soldiers.
Wang Youwen and his sons, who lost their positions as private tutors, had to bear increasingly heavy corvee duties starting from the fourteenth year of their rule.
Later, when his eldest son was serving on the front line for fifteen years, his legs were broken by Ming cavalry. He could no longer do heavy work, which made the already difficult life even more difficult. As for his third son, because his elder brother was disabled and his family could not afford to marry him, he had no choice but to become a son-in-law. Only the second son and the young fourth son, who are in poor health, can barely bear the heavy farm work.
As for Wang Youwen himself, although he was quite old, his body was still strong, he could read and write, and he could keep accounts (accounts) and do calculations, so he had to serve as a corvee on the front line of Shaanxi for a long time. As a result, he just obeyed and met the king's master for the fourth time in his life!
It turned out that when Li Dingguo's army retreated, they abandoned all the civilians from Dasanguan to Fengxian County. They just took their own troops and fled with the Fengxian soldiers and their families.
Wang Youwen was serving at a transfer station in Feng County at the time, responsible for accounting and counting. He had a little power, but he was considered a respected figure among the people.
So when he discovered that the Da Shuntian soldiers were running away and the Da Ming soldiers were pursuing them, Wang Youwen, who was quick-thinking, immediately organized the civil servants in Feng County and went to the scalper shop outside the city to sing "Ying Ming Wang".
Because they were relatively poor people and had trouble eating by themselves, they did not eat from the pots and just sang in Sichuan dialect... Therefore, most of the Wu Jiajun who passed by did not stop, and no one understood why there was a group of people. Will Sichuan people kneel on both sides of the official road and sing?
It wasn't until Wu Sangui's Chinese army arrived at Huangniupu that they figured out that the group in front of them turned out to be the White Lotus Cult because there were staff members in the army who knew a little bit of Sichuan dialect!
