Since ancient times, Jiangnan has been a place with beautiful mountains and rivers and outstanding people. The developed water system in the Jiangnan region and the warm and humid climate are very suitable for crop growth, so it has always enjoyed the reputation of "the land of fish and rice". However, by the late Ming Dynasty, Jiangnan, which had been rich in grain crops, had a rare grain shortage. A late Ming dynasty scholar named Ye Shaoyuan described the situation in Suzhou at that time in the "Records of Qi Zhen": the price of rice per kilogram rose to more than 90 copper coins, there were countless thin beggars on the streets, a large number of people died of starvation, and many houses in the city were empty. As one of the richest places in the world at that time, Suzhou was still like this, and the situation in other parts of Jiangnan was even worse. So the question is, why in the late Ming Dynasty, Jiangnan, as the "land of fish and rice", also had a grain shortage?
Many people may think that the grain shortage in the Jiangnan region in the late Ming Dynasty was mainly caused by natural and man-made disasters. There is nothing wrong with this view, but it is not the whole or even the main reason. Because although natural disasters were frequent at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the overall situation in the Jiangnan region was still good, and it would never reach the point of being green and yellow. At that time, although the phenomenon of land annexation was very serious, the magnates were not fools and would not force most people to a dead end, after all, once the order collapsed, the biggest impact was not the poor and white people but the magnates themselves. Therefore, it is actually a bit untenable to buckle the "black cauldron" of the grain shortage in the Jiangnan region of the Ming Dynasty to natural disasters and man-made disasters. In fact, the most fundamental cause of the grain shortage in the Jiangnan region at the end of the Ming Dynasty was closely related to foreign trade in the late Ming Dynasty.
The ming rulers have always been conservative in their attitude toward foreign trade, often opening up for a period of time and closing for a period of time. But no matter how much the imperial court did not want to do business with other countries, the desire of ordinary people to get rich through foreign trade was difficult to prohibit. As a result, the trade ban spawned a large number of smuggling phenomena in the middle of the Ming Dynasty. Subsequently, the imperial court intensified its crackdown on smuggling, which resulted in the rampage of the Wokou on the southeast coast. If the imperial court did not give a way to live, the smugglers simply robbed it.
In the first year of Longqing (1567), Emperor Ming muzong decreed the abolition of the sea ban and allowed private fleets of civilian ships to sell far and west to the east and west, known in history as the "Longqing Switch". Since then, the ming dynasty's non-governmental overseas trade has entered a new stage of development.
At that time, there was a nearly unlimited demand for tea, raw silk, and cotton cloth from the Ming Dynasty, so as long as these goods were transported to Southeast Asia by sea (the main trading place was Manila), they could trade with the European merchants who occupied the area, thus obtaining huge profits.
As trade continued to expand, the Ming dynasty people in Jiangnan soon found that it was not profitable to sell grain, but they could get a lot of profit from selling mulberry leaves and cotton. As a result, a large number of arable land in the Jiangnan region was no longer planted with grain, but instead planted with mulberry trees and cotton. By the beginning of the 17th century, Jiangnan, the "land of fish and rice", which was rich in grain, needed to solve the problem of food shortages by purchasing grain from other places.
In the time of the Taiping Dynasty, there was obviously no problem with this practice of the people in Jiangnan, assuming that planting mulberry trees could earn three or two silver, and planting grain could only earn one or two silver, then the money from the sale of mulberry leaves could be used to buy enough grain and have a lot of surplus. However, by the end of the Ming Dynasty, natural disasters and wars repeatedly invaded this twilight empire, and the Ming Dynasty experienced a nationwide food shortage, which was tantamount to a catastrophe for the people of Jiangnan. The grain that can be purchased from other places is getting less and less, but the people's demand for grain has not decreased, so the grain price in the Jiangnan region has risen to an astonishing level, and ordinary people cannot afford to buy it, while the large number of mulberry leaves and cotton in their hands has become worthless because they cannot be sold in time, resulting in a large amount of hoarding. As a result, the "land of fish and rice" in the rich Jiangnan Province has caused an overall deterioration of the economic environment due to food shortages, and there has been a human tragedy of ten rooms and nine empty spaces and hunger in the wilderness.
From the bitter lessons of the Ming Dynasty's Jiangnan region, we can see how significant it is for the state to repeatedly emphasize the policy of keeping the red line of 1.8 billion mu of arable land unshakable.
References: History of the Ming Dynasty, Records of Qi Zhen