Hou Er was already a bit drunk, and there was a big black patch on his front. He didn't know if it was wine or something else. He staggered up to Wang Wenzuo, crossed his hands and sang a fat song: "Wenzuo, I have something. I beg you for something, and please accept it!"
"Can you ask me for anything?" Wang Wenzuo was a little tired: "Sancho, you will give him ten coins later!"
"No, no!" Hou Er waved his hands repeatedly: "I don't want money!"
"Ten guan is less? Then let's have 30 guan!"
"Wen Zuo, I told you I don't want money!" Hou Er's tone rose a bit, attracting the attention of everyone around him. Someone laughed loudly: "Hou Er, you don't want money, what else do you want? Thirty guan." ! Enough for you to marry back the widow from the neighboring village who is in love with you!"
"You fool, you can sleep with a widow regardless of whether you are married or not. Wen Zuo comes back this time and I don't know when he will come back next time!" Hou Er retorted loudly: "I missed this opportunity and I don't know if there will be a next time. !”
Hou Er's answer aroused Wang Wenzuo's interest. He looked at the man in front of him again. He was in his early thirties, of medium build, with a dark face, a mole on his right cheek, and a scar on his left cheek. His eyes were full of dissatisfaction with the current situation. , a sleek, typical rural idle man.
"What do you want if you don't want money?"
"Can you give me an errand? Anyone who can lead a horse will be fine. I've been staying in this village for half my life, and I'm really tired of it! I just want to go out with you to open my eyes!"
"Come out with me to open your eyes?" Wang Wenzuo laughed. Why are the people in this village so arrogant and ridiculous? They all think that the outside is a smooth road and there is gold everywhere. When he was in Baekje, he climbed on ice and snow, climbed over mountains and ridges, and shot arrows like arrows. They didn't see the rain at all. They only saw that they were now dressed in gold and purple, surrounded by people, rich and glorious?
Since they want it, give it to them!
"You want to be an errand? Okay, what can you do? Draw a bow and shoot an arrow? Pierce a spear? Or settle accounts?"
"Are you kidding again? How could I, Hou Er, an idle guy in the village know this?" Hou Er said with a smile.
Wang Wenzuo's patience has almost been exhausted: "You don't know how to do this, and you don't know how to do that. I don't have such an errand for you!"
"Hehe!" Hou Erqian laughed twice: "I heard someone say that there are no useless people in the world, just see if they can do it. I have stayed in this village for thirty years, poking the cow every day I've had enough of this kind of life with my ass going from one end of the field to the other. Anyway, as long as I can go out and see things, I'm willing to lose my life!"
"Aren't you afraid of death?" Wang Wenzuo asked in surprise.
"Afraid? But what's more, I'm afraid that I will just live in a muddle-headed way in the village! Then one day I will die inexplicably behind the cow's butt while plowing the fields!" Hou Er said: "I can do anything from cutting grass to leading horses, as long as I can leave the village. !”
Wang Wenzuo looked at Hou Er's mediocre face. He tried to remember, but time had long blurred everything. The only impression he had was that the people in the village despised him. He was originally from a middle-class family, but he didn't like working in the fields since he was a child. , wandering around all day, doing everything but spending energy in the fields. After the death of his parents, the family fortune fell quickly, but he was not a bad person. Even when he was just a slave of the Wang family, Hou Er did not bully him very much. He quite liked listening to what he said in his spare time about "the outside world." "Gossip. Looking back now, this person is not bad in nature, but he was born in the wrong child.
"Then why don't you leave the village and see the world by yourself?" Wang Wenzuo asked.
"Are you kidding me again? I, Hou Er, am not an official, and I am not a merchant or scholar. Why don't I leave the village and be captured as a runaway slave?" Hou Er said with a smile.
"That's true!" Wang Wenzuo was stunned and then laughed. From the middle of the Tang Dynasty to the Song Dynasty, Chinese society underwent a profound change, which history calls the Tang and Song Dynasties. Generally speaking, the tax law changed from renting and granting land to the two-tax law, cities changed from small towns to mixed-city residents, and farmers also gained the freedom to move.
Under the land grant system in the early Tang Dynasty, the state granted each farmer corresponding land according to Dingkou, and the farmers were responsible for rent and other obligations. After the farmer died, most of the land must be returned to the state, and then granted to other farmers. Obviously, the farmers at this time were bound to the land, otherwise it would be impossible to talk about granting and recovering the land or collecting rent. The war of the Anshi Rebellion destroyed the old land grant system and household registration. So starting from the first year of Jianzhong (780), Yang Yan, the prime minister of Tang Dezong, began to implement the Two Taxes Law. Simply put, the original land grant system and household registration were abolished and replaced with Land tax and household tax are collected twice a year in summer and autumn. The principle of expropriation is that "if a household has no owner or guest, it is based on seeing where it lives; if there is no family, it is based on wealth and poverty." That is to say, there is no longer a distinction between native households (original households) and customers (non-local households). As long as they have assets and land in the local area, they are considered locals and are subject to registration tax. Obviously, the imposition of the Two Tax Law recognizes the reality of population mobility and gives people the right to move freely.
As a latecomer, of course, we cannot simply use "good" or "bad" to evaluate this change, because historical development itself is not good or bad. It cannot be said that the early Tang Empire, which implemented systems such as land equalization, military service, and rent transfer, had a strong military force and overpowered all parties, and the Tang Dynasty was at its peak. However, after the implementation of the Two Taxes Law in the middle and late Tang Dynasty, it was the Five Dynasties and Two Song Dynasties, the Central Plains Dynasty. The military advantage in border areas has been greatly reduced, and it has even been invaded and overrun by border forces. Therefore, the former is good and the latter is bad. We even need to promote restoration, build wells and fields, build military forces, and restore the military grandeur of the early Tang Dynasty.
This idea is very common among Confucians in the Song and Ming dynasties. If interested readers can look through the collection of letters from literati in the Song and Ming dynasties, they can often see various ways of restoring the ancient system, conferring land to soldiers, and self-cultivation. Eat, farm and fight, and restore the old system of the Han and Tang Dynasties. This shows that when it comes to things like opening up imaginations, political figures in ancient and modern times are actually pretty much the same. It’s just that people in the Song Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty wanted to learn from the Han and Tang Dynasties, while people today learn differently.
So why didn’t people in the Song Dynasty and Ming Dynasty succeed in retrospecting? Some people say that it was because of the outflow of technology from the Tang Dynasty that the border ethnic minorities in the Five Dynasties and Song Dynasty also made great progress. Their military and political power was no longer comparable to the Turks and Goguryeo that the Tang Dynasty faced. Therefore, even if the Song people restored the Tang system, they would not be able to defeat the border dynasties of Xixia, Liao and Jin. This is not wrong, but there is a more important reason that they did not think of - no one can put the grown-up child back into the baby's package.
What really forced Tang Dou to change the tax law and household registration law was that socioeconomic development made the original system obsolete. The war destroyed the centers of the original empire such as Hebei, Henan, and Guanzhong, causing a large number of people to migrate southward, which opened up the With the loss of large tracts of land in the south, the economic center of the empire moved southward. For this floating population, the newly opened land will not appear in the imperial household registration and field registration; and under the rent adjustment, the people who bear the tax and labor are farmers, to be precise, small farmers, while merchants and handicrafts even if they are No matter how much capital or workers there are, since they did not receive land from the country, they naturally do not need to bear taxes and labor. As peacetime normalizes and the economy develops, commercial activities will inevitably become more prosperous. Wealth is also increasing, and it plays an increasingly important role in the economy. If we continue to allow it to remain outside the scope of national taxation, this will not only be unfair, but also dangerous.
Therefore, the imperial government made reforms and recognized the current situation of people's mobility and economic prosperity. As a result, starting from the middle of the Tang Dynasty, the economy and culture of ancient China achieved rapid development, and large areas of land in the south were developed. By the time of Huizong of the Northern Song Dynasty, the number of household registrations increased. It has almost doubled that of the Tang Tianbao period, and the government's taxes and private wealth are far superior to those of the Tang Dynasty, and all this was achieved while the territory was much smaller than that of the Tang Dynasty.
But this reform was a failure, because the reforms during the Tang and Song Dynasties were only from the perspective of increasing government revenue, satisfying the greed of the upper class and government military expenditures, but they were not as successful as the reforms in the Western Wei, Northern Zhou, Sui and Tang Dynasties. , attracting powerful people from the emerging classes of society to the ruling class, exerting their power, and establishing a new empire. The new reforms failed to form new pillars of the empire among the classes in the Tang and Song Dynasties who had gained huge wealth and power through new production methods. This was the real reason for the decline of the Northern Song Dynasty's military force.
"In a sense, restless elements like Hou Er are also the hope of society!" Wang Wenzuo looked at the slovenly idle man in front of him: "When society is functioning normally, they are indeed harmful rather than helpful, but when a When society has no way out, people like him might be able to find a new way out. After all, Magellan, Columbus, and Pizarro were not honest and good people."
Thinking of this, Wang Wenzuo nodded: "Hou Er, since you think so, don't blame me for dying outside?"
"No blame, no blame!" Hou Er saw Wang Wenzuo relaxed and said with a smile: "Life and death are determined by destiny, wealth is in heaven, and it is my destiny to die. How can I blame others!"
"Okay!" Wang Wenzuo said to Sanqiu: "You take thirty guan of money and give it to him!" He didn't wait for Hou Er to refuse, and said: "Don't you have a beloved widow in the neighboring village? You didn't know that you were going out with me this time. When you can come back, I will let you use these thirty strings to keep your relationship, so as not to worry about you after leaving!"
"Thank you, Lord!" Hou Er knelt down, his cheeks already filled with tears.
It was getting late, the drunken villagers supported the elderly and the weak, and left separately. The drying field was mostly empty. Wang Wenzuo ordered the leftovers to be removed and rearranged so that his followers could eat.
"Congratulations on the return of Ming Gong to his hometown with wealth and honor!" Cao Wenzong raised his glass.
"Okay!" Wang Wenzuo took a sip of wine and put down the glass: "Wenzong, you are also a seventh-grade military attache now, can you go back to your hometown to have a look?"
"Going back to my hometown?" Cao Wenzong looked embarrassed: "I left my hometown when I was young, and I have long forgotten the things in my hometown. It's okay if I don't come back!"
Wang Wenzuo didn't say anything. He could naturally tell that Cao Wenzong didn't mean what he said at this time. If he remembered correctly, a big reason why Cao Wenzong went to Chang'an was that he had offended someone and he was afraid of hurting his family if he returned home. He thought that his current official position was enough to erase the past, but he didn't expect that it was not enough in Cao Wenzong's eyes.
Wang Qu sat next to him. As Wang Wenzuo's "father", he was theoretically the most respected person at today's banquet. But he had no sense of being a person of high status. He only felt that the chair under his butt seemed to have many spikes growing out, which was extremely uncomfortable. He wanted to plead for his son, but he didn't know how to start.
Just when he was in a dilemma, there was a noise from below, but it was the Yaqiandu soldiers who were eating below who got drunk and started gambling and fighting. Wang Wenzuo heard this and was not worried. He took the gold belt from his waist and said with a smile: "Tell the boys below that the gold belt that comes first in today's bet will be rewarded to him as a gift!"
The gold belt around Wang Wenzuo's waist is the girdle belt. Since the Northern Qi Dynasty, Hufu has been mostly used in Chinese clothing. Narrow sleeves, scarlet green, short coat, long boots, and a crocodile belt. He wears a bow, a sword, a bag, a knife sharpener, etc. It is made of leather and wrapped in black or red silk, with a knife, a flint bag, and a syringe hanging on it. and seven other items.
Naturally, the belt worn around the waists of high-ranking officials like Wang Wenzuo was not just made of leather, but was made of mutton-fat jade woven with gold foil and gold wire. It was a treasure worth hundreds of dollars. Everyone was overjoyed when they heard this and got up to clean up.
After a while, a large open space was cleared in the grain drying field. A total of two archery targets were set up: one was a hundred and twenty paces away, and a two-foot-square thick wooden board was erected on the ground, with a circle the size of a cantaloupe drawn with charcoal in the middle as a target. Another one farther away, on top of a pile of sand dunes, had the same wooden sign, a charcoal bull's-eye.
Wang Qu, who had served as a soldier, knew at a glance that it was not easy to hit an arrow target in front of him. When he was young, he could barely shoot that far, and it was even more difficult to hit it. The second archery target, according to his visual inspection, was at least two hundred and twenty steps away.
At that time, there was only one person in his military mansion who could shoot at a distance of 200 steps. I heard that only someone in Guanzhong, Hedong, could shoot at a distance of 250 steps.
The young soldiers came to shoot arrows one after another, and went to receive awards or punishments one after another, in order. They were on the firing line, in position, and the arrows had just been unloaded.
His companions started shouting loudly, and it was not until he fired five arrows that the shouting subsided. At this time, the target observer hidden in the cellar behind the arrow swan rushed out, checked the results, pulled out the arrows, and waved a torch to report the shooter's results to people.
Overall, the results are amazing. Generally, three or four arrows are hit. Even if they don't hit the bull's-eye, they can still hit the target. In fact, they have already hit the target on the battlefield. Those Mohe boys even have five arrows. All hits.
A poor archer will shake his head and sigh every time he shoots an arrow, indicating that an accidental miss has caused him to lose his usual skill.
First of all, I would like to thank the Galaxy Host for eating steak. Life is so lonely. I am waiting for the reward from book friends. I usually have a lot of things to do, updates are irregular, and there are few interactions. Book friends who are willing to pay for rewards must be true love. Thank you in advance. .
I basically read the discussion forum, but my work and writing books have taken up most of my time, and I don’t have that much time to reply one by one. You are welcome to leave more messages and discuss more.
(End of chapter)
