Volume 4: Hot! The whole world is a warring state Chapter 661 The Changes of the Nobleman
In 1638, on the fifth day of the Lunar New Year, at six in the morning.
On the streets of Beijing , as the morning light gradually brightened, a number of people wearing thick cotton clothes, but with a yellow vest over the clothes, appeared one after another, and each of them was holding a dustpan and a broom.
These are the sanitation workers under the newly established Urban Management Bureaus in some large and medium-sized cities in the Ming Dynasty.
In recent years, as the Ming Dynasty entered the steam age, more and more factories were built in large and medium-sized cities, resulting in a large number of agricultural population entering the cities.
With the emergence of real industries in cities, workers in the secondary industry can no longer take care of their own food, clothing, housing and transportation as they did in the countryside. After they get their wages, no matter how much they earn, they have to spend it. Therefore, in cities with more factories, the tertiary industry naturally becomes more prosperous due to the surge in the number of consumers.
The prosperity of the secondary industry will promote the prosperity of the tertiary industry, which will promote a sharp increase in the GDP of a city or even the entire country. This is a good thing, but it also brings a problem: the amount of domestic garbage in the city is increasing, and the environmental sanitation of the city is getting worse and worse.
As a result, the Urban Management Bureau and sanitation workers came into being.
A considerable number of the current generation of sanitation workers in the Ming Dynasty are remnant soldiers: the frequency of Ming Dynasty's foreign wars in recent years is not high, but the widespread use of modern weapons has made the cruelty and disability rate on the battlefield far greater than before. As wars accumulate, the number of remnant soldiers increases. Relying on various officials and government offices to recruit remnant soldiers as gatekeepers is no longer enough to solve the problem of this huge group of remnant soldiers.
Although there are pensions for disabled soldiers, in Zhu Youdong's opinion, if a person only eats and does nothing all day long, just waiting to die. Needless to say, such a person will soon be useless and become a factor of social instability. So at his suggestion, the Ming Dynasty established a disability rating system. For those who have completely lost their labor force, needless to say, the state has set up disabled soldier farms to recruit ordinary people to farm: disabled soldier farms do not pay taxes to the state, but must support a certain number of disabled soldiers. Officials from the General Administration of Military Service also have to visit these disabled soldiers regularly every year to see if they are doing well. If the disabled soldiers are not satisfied, the farm manager will be punished. If the disabled soldiers die, resulting in insufficient support, the farm will have to pay taxes to the state.
As for some disabled soldiers whose injuries were not too serious, they were absorbed into the Urban Management Bureau and became sanitation workers.
This measure is currently very effective. Industrially developed places such as Nanjing, Suzhou and Hangzhou, Songjiang, Zhenjiang, and Tianjin have even sent officials to line up in front of the General Service Administration with only one request: please give priority to sending disabled soldiers to our cities to serve as sanitation workers.
The reason why these local officials prefer disabled soldiers to be sanitation workers instead of giving these jobs to locals is mainly because disabled soldiers are also soldiers, and their sense of discipline is much stronger than that of ordinary people. Moreover, these people have pensions and sufficient spending power. The most important thing is that the number of disabled soldiers a city accepts is linked to the annual assessment!
This is the case everywhere. In Beijing, the capital of the country, the sanitation workers are naturally a bunch of remnants.
With a creaky sound, two heavy wooden doors painted red slowly opened, and a young man wrapped like a dumpling walked out with two followers.
"Hey, Master Zhang, why are you sweeping the floor so early?"
"Good morning, Mr. Mao. Alas, there is nothing we can do. Although there were fewer people setting off firecrackers last night than on New Year's Eve, there were still some. The scraps of paper all over the floor are really an eyesore. I will feel uncomfortable if I don't sweep them up."
"Hahaha, Master Zhang, you've worked hard. Um, there was no fire last night, right?"
"I didn't hear the night watchman mention this when I got up this morning. I guess that's not the case."
"Well, that's good. It's dry this time, and it's not safe to set off too many firecrackers."
"That's not true! Hey, after so many years, this little ice age hasn't ended yet? There's not even a snowfall during New Year's Eve. The firecrackers may have set the house on fire by accident!"
"So, the court is preparing to implement relevant regulations on the scheduled lighting of fireworks and firecrackers in cities. I, Mao Xiang, will be the first to raise my hands in support!"
After a few words of small talk, the other attendants had already signed the carriage over from the backyard. Mao Xiang bowed to the worker named Zhang and said, "Master Zhang, you have worked hard. I will leave first."
"Where are you going, Mr. Mao? Isn't this a little early?"
"It's getting late. The National Library is outside the city. We can drive slowly over there and take a nap in the car. It's perfect."
"Sir, you have a good plan. Please take your time."
After politely greeting the other party again, Mao Xiang got into his own four-wheeled carriage, which had an ordinary appearance but a very luxurious interior and was equipped with all kinds of heating equipment.
The Mao family had been officials for generations, so their wealth and other things were already extremely rich. Of course, the rich and powerful in the Ming Dynasty are very low-key now: Who in the world is richer than the emperor? Haven't you seen that the emperor doesn't enjoy much?
Of course, we don't have the ambitions of the emperor. We still have to enjoy ourselves, but we should be low-key and not show off our luxury.
Specifically speaking of Mao Xiang and Mao Pijiang, as a nobleman , he was a typical example of someone who could criticize others without any instruction, but would immediately give up when faced with practical matters. He was also a bad person in terms of emotions. Chen Yuanyuan had pursued him for so long, but he made promises to her, but when it came to concrete actions, he broke all the promises. When he was in his thirties, he found Dong Xiaowan, who was the same age as Chen Yuanyuan - but this time he did not abandon her.
Of course, although this young man Mao did not perform well in the early stage of history, he still kept a bottom line in the later stage of his life: shaving his head was fine, but being an official in the Qing Dynasty was not. Not only that, he also adopted many orphans of anti-Qing heroes, and lost all the family property of Mao's family for this. In the end, the young man who was extremely luxurious in his youth died in poverty in his later years.
In this dimension, although it was already 1638 (the historical dimension was the 11th year of Chongzhen, and the Ming Dynasty had fallen into a dilemma of bandits and the Qing Dynasty). However, the Ming Dynasty at this time was completely prosperous. So at this moment, Mao Xiang's father Mao Qizong was working steadily as an official in Shuntian Prefecture in Northern Zhili. The Mao family's industry in Jiangnan also changed from purely purchasing land and collecting rent to reducing the number of manors and investing funds in the business community, making it richer than the historical dimension.
Because his family was not short of money, the romantic Mao Gongzi had no intention of becoming a civil servant. After following his father to Beijing, he spent all day making friends: Beijing was the center of East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia at that time. The elites from all over the Ming Dynasty and many vassal states gathered here. If they really wanted to communicate, as long as they had enough money, they could do this for the rest of their lives.
However, Mr. Mao has seldom gone out to party with friends recently. Not only does he rarely party with friends, he also rarely goes to his favorite places, Qinlou and Chuguan.
The reason for this was that he had read two new books recommended to him by two of his more than two-year-old friends: "Botany" and "Zoology".
The authors of these two books are Zheng Guangyuan and Xu Hongzu. Speaking of which, these two people are really amazing: starting from the second year of the Tianqi reign, they spent a full 17 years traveling all over Asia and America, and even to Australia, a completely wild place, and experienced countless hardships and dangers before they wrote and completed these two masterpieces.
It took the people who wrote the books a very long time, and the people who wrote the prefaces for these two books were even more extraordinary: the Emperor Taihuang, the Current Emperor, and Xu Guangqi all wrote prefaces for the books at the same time!
Of course, after opening such a book, Mao Xiang felt that it was meaningful: more than meaningful. After opening the book, Mao Xiang was quickly fascinated by the various unique properties, growth and living habits of the magical animals and plants shown in the book, as well as their mutual relationships.
It turns out that the animals and plants around us are so interesting and so wise in survival!
Although the whole nation of Ming Dynasty had opened their eyes to the world under the leadership of Zhu Youdong, such a book still had a huge impact on the intellectual class in this era. A well-informed nobleman like Mao Xiang was completely attracted by the book after he opened it. He locked himself in the study for more than two months before and after the Spring Festival, reading the book like a possessed man... Not only that, he also conducted experiments according to the explanations in the book: it was freezing cold in Beijing at that time, and there were too few animals and plants to observe, otherwise Mr. Mao could have turned the Mao Mansion into a large laboratory.
Now, on the fifth day of the Lunar New Year, Mao Xiang finally went out: after reading the two masterpieces, he was still very excited. He heard from his good friend, Chen Huizhen, who is now the deputy director of the Education Bureau in Shuntian Prefecture, that there is another magical book in the National Library, also written by these two authors. This book is not for sale to the public for the time being, and can only be read in the library.
At eight o'clock in the morning, Mao Xiang finally arrived at the gate of the newly built Daming National Library. After completing the registration, he found a librarian.
"Excuse me, may I ask if there is a new book called "The Theory of Evolution" in the library? If so, how can I borrow it?"
