Foreword: In recent days, there has been a continuous torrential rain in the south, especially in Guangdong, Guangxi, and even strong convective weather, and now it is the spring ploughing season, and the occurrence of heavy rain or floods has a very huge impact on spring ploughing. So, if there were floods in the ancient Ming Dynasty, how would the fate of those tenant farmers living at the bottom change?
Author: Ling Hu Chong
You live in a county under the jurisdiction of the Guangdong Provincial Government of the Ming Dynasty, and your ancestors have been tenant farmers for three generations, and they have bought an adobe tile house with the savings of three generations of hard-working, which is rare among local tenant farmers.
You work every day at sunrise and return at sunset, relying on the incense accumulated by your ancestors and your honest and hard-working energy, you have rented two acres of land with the largest landowner in the county, and with these five acres of land, you think that this year's harvest will definitely be better.
Fortunately, there is a virtuous wife at home, who respects the old and loves the young, and you are very grateful that your parents used the only sheep in the family as a bride price to marry her home, and gave birth to a boy and a girl.
On this day, you have just finished dinner at home, coarse porridge and wild vegetables, you drank three bowls, and the only little chicken you left for your elderly parents and young children. At this time, you sit at the door and drink the wild tea picked on the spring mountain this year, although it is very bitter, but it is really refreshing, and you come back from work every day to drink a pot of bitter tea, which is your most leisurely and enjoyable time.
You look up at the sky, and the dark clouds are like a big hand grabbing at the bright moon, and the moonlight shines through the dark clouds to your village, and the bamboo forest behind your house is blown by the wind and hunting. It's going to rain, you silently think in your heart that the rain is not too big, otherwise the seedlings that have just been planted will only complete the first fertilization, and the roots and seedlings have not yet grown, and the heavy rain and wind are the biggest natural enemies of these seedlings that hold the hope of the whole family.
Go back to your room and sleep, your wife has calmed the children and comes over and pats you on the shoulder. You look at your wife's swarthy and handsome face, nod, and you get up and walk into the room. You are still chanting to your wife before going to bed, and your wife is so tired from going to the field during the day to help with fertilization that she is already snoring slightly.
Boom ~ boom, a few big thunderbolts wake you up from your sleep, you look up half of your body, and hear the thunder outside after the torrential rain densely hits the roof tiles, like thousands of drums sounding rapidly, endless; You put on a sackcloth and just pushed open the window to observe the rain, but a gust of wind and torrential rain blew in through the window, and the oil lamps on the table were knocked to the ground, and you quickly closed the window.
At this time, your wife also woke up at some point, and in the haze, she saw her squatting on the ground to clean up the oil lamp. It's raining so hard that I have to go to the field to see the seedlings, you whisper. The wife stood up, picked up the fire from the bedside table, and lit the oil lamp, the flames of which were swaying in the wind that blew through the window. Just fertilized, your wife muttered.
That can't be helped, the water should be released, you say as you get dressed. You know that your wife is worried that the rain will be too heavy and the fertilizer will be wasted if the water is released in the field, but you are more worried about the wind and rain that will blow the seedlings and destroy them. With your heart in mind, you walked into the hall and picked up the cloak and bamboo cloak hanging on the wall, put them on, opened the door, and resolutely groped and walked towards your field with your memory......
Wait until the sky is slightly bright, and your wife still hasn't seen you come back, and she is very worried about your safety. Your wife wakes up your parents through the door to take care of the children, puts on rain gear and turns out to look for you. You are lying near the ditch not far from your farmland, which is used for the drainage of tenant farmers and is covered with stones, and you are in a hurry to check the rice field, and before you can reach the rice field, you accidentally slip and fall off the ridge, the blood on your forehead has been washed away by the rain, but the swollen calves and stinging spine make you unable to move.
You hear your wife's uneasy cry, and you respond loudly, and your wife follows the sound to find you, and sees you lying by the ditch, and runs down the path by the ditch in a panic. You lie on your wife's back, and the two of you finally return home, and your parents see that you are injured and hurry to find Lang Zhong in the village.
After drinking the herbs prescribed by Lang Zhong, watching you lie on the bed and sleep soundly, your wife walked out of the room and silently wiped her tears, your parents sat in the hall at a loss, and the children sat unusually quietly on their chairs at this time, and the family fell into a deathly silence for a while......
I don't know who came out with the news that you were injured and that you might be confined to bed and paralyzed for the rest of your life. After hearing about it, the local administrator quickly sent a housekeeper to check, and the housekeeper first went to the field to check the situation of your seedlings. At this time, the field was miserable, a large number of seedlings were floating on the paddy field, uprooted, and the roots and stems of a large number of seedlings had obviously been interrupted by the storm. The housekeeper calculates in his heart that even if your family replants rice this year, the harvest will be reduced by at least three to four percent.
The housekeeper came to your house, pushed away the good tea that your wife offered, which she was usually reluctant to drink, stared at your pale face, and told you with an expressionless face that no matter what, you must do your best to protect the owner's harvest, and if you can't guarantee it, you will pay three times the amount of money and grain according to the contract.
You look at the butler who turned to leave, and a pang of pain wells up in your heart. How should this be good? I regret that I should not have ignored my wife's dissuasion and exhausted the family's meager savings in the previous two years, and insisted on renting an extra two acres of land from Zhang Yuanwai, otherwise even if we lost three acres of land, at least the family still had some spare money.
In a blink of an eye, at the end of the season, with the efforts of your elderly parents and wife, after handing over all the grain, there are still five stones (about 2~3 stones of grain per acre in the Ming Dynasty), although your body has recovered most of it, but because there is no money to grab medicine, you are still limping when you walk, you can't use your strength, and you can't do heavy work. Zhang Yuanwai looked at you kneeling on the ground and pleading, sighed and said, It's not that I don't want to reduce the rent for you, but there are so many tenant farmers under me, if all of them are like you, then what should my Zhang family do?
In the end, it is easy to say that Zhang Yuanwai saw that your ancestors were tenant farmers for the sake of their family's tenant farmers, and gave you one stone, and the remaining four stones must be collected within a month. You have no choice, go home and discuss with your parents and wife, and finally decide to sell the ancestral house, otherwise you can't get enough food, and the defendant will go to the yamen, and according to the contract, you will have to pay at least 12 stone of grain, then you can only pay it back with your life, but how much is the life of a tenant farmer worth?
The money after the sale of your ancestral house is only enough to buy three stones of grain, and once it is still missing, you have no choice, in the end, you can only take the family to kneel at the door of Zhang Yuanwai's mansion, and the door is still closed after kneeling for most of the day. The weather in Guangdong is unusually hot at this time, from morning to afternoon, your parents can't bear it first, and faint directly, you hurriedly help your parents and put them under the eaves of Zhang Yuanwai's mansion to enjoy the cool.
The housekeeper walked out at this time, fanned his nose with his hand, and the smell of sweat on your body in front of your nose, looked at you with disgusted eyes and said, Don't let people die here, you want to blackmail money? The housekeeper pinched his nose and said, Zhang Yuanwai has something to do, you still have food to spare, but it is indispensable, and if you can't get it together in three days, we will sue the official!
The young girl guarding your parents wept in fright when she heard the butler's warnings and threats. The housekeeper looked at your daughter and found that your daughter looked very delicate and pitiful at this time, thinking that her daughter was not lacking a maid? The housekeeper frowned, thought about it and whispered to you, Otherwise, I can help you. When you heard the voice, you raised your head to wipe away your sweat and tears, and asked how you ......can help? The housekeeper looked at your lame leg with disgust, and said, forget it, my daughter lacks a maid, your daughter is just the right age, sell it to me, and I will help you pay back this grain, how about it?
When your daughter heard this, she cried even louder. You and your wife looked up and were silent, and the butler waved his hand and said, "Think about it, there are only three days left in the end."
Back to the thatched house at the foot of the village, your family sighed, it was really a house leak that happened to rain overnight, the hemp rope was broken in a small place, and your parents also fell ill at this time, the weather was too hot, and there was not enough food, and finally your father was so angry that he was dying, and the sky was really falling! Finally, he was forced to be helpless, and sold his daughter to the housekeeper in tears, and your last request was to beg the housekeeper to give him more money to buy his father and bury his coffin......
On the day of my father's funeral, the kind-hearted tenant farmer in the village walked behind with a thin wooden coffin, and you knelt down in three steps facing the coffin with a spirit card in your hand, and you remembered that your father's wish to drink a mouthful of porridge before his death could not be satisfied, and that your daughter cried out when she was sold, and that your son desperately wanted to pull his sister, and his liver and intestines were broken......
At this time, it rained heavily in the sky, just like the one in the early spring ploughing......