Having grasped the crucial point, his restless turning gave way to complete wakefulness.

Pei Shaohuai rose from bed, lit the oil lamp on the writing table, sat down, and began to sort through his thoughts, his expression fully focused.

Yang Shiyue did not want to disturb her husband’s train of thought. She draped a layer of outer clothing over his shoulders, poured him a cup of warm water that would go down easily, and then returned to bed.

Though the table held neither paper nor ink, it was as if a river were rushing through his mind. In half an hour, Pei Shaohuai had run through countless calculations without a single written stroke.

The Maritime Trade Superintendent’s Office in Quanzhou and the Salt Transport Bureau had been sending great quantities of silver northward. At that time, sea routes had not yet been opened, so everything had to move by inland canal — and no matter which route was taken, any shipment necessarily had to pass through Yingtian Prefecture, Jinling, at some midpoint.

Three senior officials were stationed along the Yangtze and Huai River waterways: the Governor of Fengyang, the Governor of Yingtian, and the Governor-Censor of the River Operations. With such thorough inspection under their watch, how had that wealth managed to pass through without any of these three noticing, and made its way smoothly to the capital?

Could it be that the opposition had already brought all three of them under their control?

That was unlikely. Over the span of more than a decade, even with rotations every six years, the officials in those positions had changed two or three times over. Furthermore, having three officials jointly overseeing the Yangtze and Huai was itself intended to ensure mutual oversight and mutual restraint. Given the Emperor’s mastery of the art of checks and balances, would he really appoint three officials who were “all in it together”?

This was an unresolved puzzle that Pei Shaohuai had not yet worked through.

What he had worked through was what happened after the funds entered Yingtian Prefecture.

In any era, ancient or modern, the fastest way to accumulate wealth is not through buying and selling along trade routes, but through the manipulation of money itself — using wealth to generate more wealth is far faster than exchanging goods for coin.

In this Southern Metropolitan Region, where merchants from every corner of the realm gathered and wealth surpassed all others under heaven, the funds flowing steadily in from Quanzhou Prefecture passed through like a fountain, spinning and churning countless times along the way, generating froth upon froth of wealth in its wake.

Pei Shaohuai was confident that those on the opposing side, with their mastery of financial dealings, were fully capable of leveraging the Quanzhou funds to generate even greater wealth, in pursuit of even larger “enterprises.”

And so, if one compared the outgoing accounts from Quanzhou against the incoming accounts of the Eastern Palace, and the figures were roughly comparable, at first glance it might seem like a closed loop — with both outflow and inflow, and the amounts matching up. But if one thought in terms of “money generating money,” such a perfectly balanced ledger might well be designed to deceive.

Pei Shaohuai thought to himself: if the Eastern Palace was not a case of great wisdom concealed behind apparent simplicity — hiding something deeper — then the Crown Prince truly had been used as a shield by someone else.

As for who would dare to use the Crown Prince as their front, Pei Shaohuai’s thoughts inevitably turned to the Huai Prince in Raozhou Prefecture.

Though these two brothers were both legitimate sons — the eldest and the second — they were not born of the same mother. The Huai Prince’s mother was the Empress, but not the Crown Princess Consort of the Eastern Palace’s time. Affairs within the imperial palace had always been more complicated than those among ordinary families.

But if it were the Huai Prince who had set all this in motion — such an enormous game of pieces — who had laid the groundwork on his behalf, taking the risks and going ahead of him?

To establish each of these connections one by one would take not ten years, but perhaps several decades. If the scheming to seize the throne had begun when the Huai Prince was still a small child, did the Empress harbor designs this deep?

The sound of the night watchman’s drum came from outside the compound. Pei Shaohuai finished running through all of this, and his mind slowly grew calm. All of it was nothing more than his own speculation. He knew he was still far from the truth.

When surrounded by schemes and deception, a person must speculate — yet must not put too much faith in their own speculation.

Pei Shaohuai glanced back and saw that his wife was lying on her side, facing toward him, her head resting on her arm, already fast asleep. It seemed she had drifted off while, in some sense, “watching” the silhouette of her husband bent in deep thought at the desk.

Pei Shaohuai smiled softly, extinguished the lamp, and crept quietly back to bed.

The autumn morning dew was heavy. Xiao Nan and Xiao Feng wanted to sit on the steps reading as they usually did, but Shiyue stopped them, saying, “The morning dew brings cold air — go inside to read.”

She reached into their collars to feel the temperature of their clothing, found it a bit chilly, and added another layer of garments for each of them.

After Pei Shaohuai finished breakfast, there was still some time before the hour of Chen. He went to look in on Elder Zou, then went out of the residence on his own, intending to walk along the Qinhuai River banks. He wanted to stretch his legs and also to take in the look of Jinling in the early morning.

Coming to a small ferry dock, he saw several “boatmen” in hemp-cloth grey jackets sitting at the prow of a vessel, gnawing on dry provisions. When they had finished, they disembarked, squatted at the water’s edge, and were about to cup their hands to drink from the river.

“You shouldn’t drink the river water raw,” Pei Shaohuai cautioned them. “Be careful — it could give you a stomach upset.”

The men laughed in an unaffected way. The one in front, speaking with a Jinling accent, said with a grin, “We’re all from farming families, sir — we’re not the fussy sort.”

“It’s best to be careful when you’re away from home,” Pei Shaohuai said. He got a large pot of savory tea from a nearby stall and asked the vendor to pour it into big ceramic bowls for the men.

The boatmen accepted without ceremony, straightforward and at ease.

One exchange led to another, and Pei Shaohuai fell into casual conversation with them.

“From the sound of your accent, young master, it seems you’ve come from the north?” The man, seeing that Pei Shaohuai wore a clean, neat robe in the color of tea-and-jade, and that he had a refined and pleasant look about him, assumed he was not very old, and so addressed him as “young master.”

Pei Shaohuai was no sage — he touched his chin, which he had just shaved clean the night before, and found he was quite pleased to be called “young master.”

“Well spotted, elder brother — I am indeed from the north,” Pei Shaohuai said. “It’s still early, and the cargo vessels out on the big river haven’t started their work yet. How is it that you’re already getting ready to push off?” He had assumed these boatmen were doing the work of transporting goods into the city.

“You’ve got the wrong idea, young master,” the man said with a hearty laugh. Now that they were inside the city, with its good order and security, he saw no reason to conceal anything, and said, “We’ve come from Jiangning, under orders from the county magistrate, to deliver this year’s tax quota to the grain depository.”

So they were village grain captains.

A grain captain was a kind of “captain,” making him something like a half-official position. In the early days of Da Qing, it had been a lucrative post, most often held by the wealthy households of rural communities. As time went on, however, grain captains were expected to personally make up for shortfalls and losses out of their own pockets, leaving them continuously in debt — and so it had become a burdensome duty that everyone fled from as if it were a plague.

After all, nine out of ten households ruined by the position of grain captain.

The authorities, with no other recourse, eventually changed it to a rotating system.

Another man picked up the thread and said, “The sooner we get to the grain depot, the sooner we can report in and be done with it, and get back to our work.” He smacked his lips and added, “Thank goodness the court changed the tax quota from grain to silver coins. If it were still our turn to serve as grain captains under the old system, our whole family might as well not bother living.”

When the topic turned to silver coins and paying taxes in silver, Pei Shaohuai followed up with a question: “Elder brother, why do you say that?” After all, both of those new policies had been implemented through his own efforts, and he was curious to hear what the common people thought of them.

The man pulled a one-qian silver coin from his breast pocket — it had some soil on it — and said, “When the court requires one qian of silver coin in tax, I hand over this one coin, and the matter is settled cleanly. Nobody can claim this coin of mine isn’t worth one qian.”

He paused, then went on: “But if you’re paying in white rice or beans — there’s a surcharge for crossing rivers, another surcharge if the rice is coarse, and after you’ve spent a full half month drying the grain, they still say it’s not dry enough and add yet another surcharge. The number of charges is beyond counting. And even that would be bearable — but here’s the worst part: whether one shi of white rice actually measures as a full shi can only be known after it’s passed through the official measuring vessel. Rice that measured a generous shi at home, once poured into the official measure, doesn’t even fill to the brim. And if a yamen runner gives it a few kicks, the rice settles further down… A full shi of white rice ends up being only seven and a half dou in the end.”

“So paying with silver coins — cash and goods settled cleanly at the time of exchange — is much better, wouldn’t you say, young master?” the man concluded.

Pei Shaohuai nodded. “That’s exactly right.”

He noticed that the boat was loaded with quite a few burlap sacks that appeared to contain grain, so he asked, “If you’re already paying taxes in grain converted to silver, elder brother, why do you still have grain loaded on the boat?”

“Ah, young master, you may not know,” the man explained with a smile. “If everyone pays in silver coins, the grain depot can’t have no grain at all, can it? The depot also buys grain from people with silver — at a fair enough price. Since we’re making the trip anyway, we brought along some grain on behalf of the folks back home to exchange for silver — it covers the cost of the round trip and leaves a little something for the trouble.”

Collecting tax silver on one hand while purchasing surplus grain on the other — that was also a directive from the court.

“Silver?” Pei Shaohuai thought he had misheard.

Both the northern and southern capitals had been the first to implement the silver coin policy, and five or six years had passed since then. The fact that the grain depot was still paying for grain in raw silver was something worth thinking about.

“Yes, silver,” the man said, as if it were nothing remarkable. “When we get back to the village, we just take it to a money exchange and have it changed into silver coins — doesn’t take any effort.”

Pei Shaohuai quietly noted this in his mind. He restored his smile, clasped his hands in a bow toward the boatmen, and said, “It’s getting late, little brother won’t trouble the elder brothers any further in your work.”

“No trouble at all — thank you for the savory tea, young master.”

Pei Shaohuai turned back and returned to the Zou residence. There were still two quarter-hours before the hour of Chen, yet the carriage sent by Huang Qingxing had already arrived early.

Accompanying the carriage to the outer gate of the palace city, Pei Shaohuai found Huang Qingxing just emerging from within.

“Would Your Excellency Pei prefer to visit the Nanjing Ministry of Revenue first, or go to the grain depot?” Huang Qingxing asked.

As Deputy Minister of the Nanjing Ministry of Revenue, Huang Qingxing oversaw every granary and warehouse in the city — large and small alike — which was by no means a light responsibility. Matters concerning official salaries and military provisions for the garrison were major affairs; then there were the day-to-day tasks of maintaining the granaries, turning and restacking the stored grain to minimize losses, and dealing with everything from rainwater seeping through walls to birds and rats pilfering food — constant, pervasive, and trivial.

The sort of post where doing it well earns no praise, and doing it poorly is a serious offense.

“Let’s go to the grain depot first,” Pei Shaohuai said, keeping his thoughts to himself. He smiled and said, “Truth be told, it’s a bit embarrassing — I have so often discussed grain and financial matters with Elder Zou, yet I’ve never actually visited a proper grain depot. In a way, that is its own form of ‘armchair strategizing.'”

“Your Excellency is too modest. Then let’s follow your preference and go to the grain depot.”

Huang Qingxing thought for a moment and said, “There are forty-nine granary compounds within Jinling. The military granaries are adjacent to the garrison posts, all of them in the outlying areas. The community stabilization granaries are nearly abandoned — only caretakers have been left to watch over them. It might be best to visit the main granaries first… If there’s still time afterward, we could also have a look at the stabilization granaries — they aren’t too far apart.”

The “main granaries” were the compounds specifically for collecting tax silver and tax grain from the common people, and were the largest in scale.

The military granaries were dedicated to supplying provisions for the garrison, numerous and dispersed.

As for the community stabilization granaries — their operating principle was described in the phrase from the Book of Han: “When grain is cheap, raise the price and buy it up; when grain is dear, lower the price and sell it out.” The idea was to purchase and store grain when prices fell, and release it for sale when prices rose, thus maintaining stable grain prices — hence the name “stabilization granaries.”

“Deputy Minister Huang has thought this through very well,” Pei Shaohuai said.

As the two men rode together in the carriage, conversation turned to the stabilization granaries — fallen into disuse and disrepair, empty of grain. Huang Qingxing spoke with considerable feeling, saying, “For the nation, the main granaries bear the weight of the national treasury; for the garrisons, the military granaries bear the weight of provisions. But for the common people’s ability to eat, it is the stabilization granaries that matter most. With the stabilization granaries empty, there is nothing obvious to worry about as long as there is no great disaster or crisis — but once grain becomes scarce among the people and prices begin to rise, if the stabilization granaries have no grain to release, those prices will be impossible to suppress. Your Excellency surely understood this all too well from your time as an official in the Fujian region.”

Pei Shaohuai nodded in agreement. Huang Qingxing was right — the stabilization granaries were a precautionary measure against future crises, and could not be allowed to fall into abandonment and disuse.

Huang Qingxing added, with a note of helplessness: “In earlier years, I also submitted a petition urging the Emperor to take this matter seriously — but, unfortunately, once the petition was sent up, it sank like a stone, with no word in response.” In front of Pei Shaohuai, he made no effort to conceal his frustration. He continued, “One can only imagine — with the Hexi faction in power at the time, they only cared about their own few hundred shi of salary sitting in the main granaries. The affairs of the stabilization granaries — the affairs of the common people — were pushed off for as long as possible. Not until there was no rice left in the pot and people were dying would anything qualify as a real problem… Otherwise, no matter how many petitions one submitted, they never made it before the Emperor.”

“Deputy Minister Huang might consider submitting another petition — the Emperor takes the hardships of the people to heart, and will surely pay attention to the matter of the stabilization granaries,” Pei Shaohuai said. The Hexi faction’s downfall had, after all, been many years ago now.

It was roughly half an hour before the carriage finally arrived outside the grain depot.

Pei Shaohuai stepped down, looked up to take in the scale of the granary compound, and finally understood why the common people referred to “granaries” as a “grain city” — what lay before him was unmistakably a small city unto itself.

Not only were the walls tall and thick, but the compound occupied a strategic location. Ordinary people were not permitted to build residences anywhere around it, and official soldiers patrolled it day and night.

On the wall above the main gate, large characters in clerical script had been carved, reading: “Jinling Garrison, First Character Granary.”

The grain captains arriving to submit their tax silver entered through a side gate of the grain city by water, their boats queued prow to stern in a long line.

Pei Shaohuai thought privately that in later dramatic tales, someone was always saying “my subordinate will take a squad of men under cover of night and burn down their granary” — it now seemed clear this would be rather difficult to accomplish. He glanced again at the towering walls before him and muttered to himself that it would be more like “my subordinate will take a squad of men and spend the whole night delivering themselves to the granary as a sacrificial offering.”

Burning a granary would be about as easy as taking a fortified city — not something one could simply do at will.

Once inside, Pei Shaohuai entered one of the storage houses and found it spacious and tall, designed to allow heat to escape through the outer walls. The exterior walls were all coated with white alum solution to prevent rainwater from seeping in — every precaution had been taken to the utmost degree.

A site of national importance — no amount of care was too much.

The first several storage houses were piled full of grain. When the officials on duty saw a superior officer come to inspect, they applied themselves diligently and efficiently. But the further Pei Shaohuai went, the more storage houses he examined — and the more the picture began to sour. Huang Qingxing’s expression grew increasingly difficult to maintain, and his face darkened visibly.

Many of the storage houses were completely devoid of grain. The officials inside were thoroughly slack — some had even laid out mats and were snoring away in full sleep.

As they made their way out of the compound, Huang Qingxing considered his words carefully, then walked alongside Pei Shaohuai and said, “In my view, the court’s new policy of ‘paying taxes in silver’ was pushed forward too hastily. As Your Excellency has just seen, even in Jinling’s main granaries, many storage houses have been left empty — all the more so in the smaller granary compounds elsewhere. And one must remember: at its height, Jinling once held reserves of five million shi of grain — enough to sustain Da Qing for five or six years.”

He added, “If only silver coins are collected and stored in the granary, when grain is actually needed, what use is a pile of silver coins sitting there?”

This was a legitimate question — and one Pei Shaohuai himself had given thought to how to resolve.

It was rather like the question of whether grain should be held in the granaries or kept in the rice jars of ordinary households — and when the time came to actually use it, how one could quickly exchange silver back for grain from the people.

As for the matter of the granary attendants sleeping soundly on their mats, Huang Qingxing drew a larger lesson from the small detail, and lowered his voice further to caution, “Society has long been divided into its four classes — scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants. If the state’s treasury does not wish to draw from the farmers, then it can only draw from the merchants… But the merchants of this world are nothing like the farmers, who can be so easily pressed. The further down this road Your Excellency goes, the more opposition will come against you.”

In former times, even a lowly clerk who managed to get a posting in the granary compound could line his pockets handsomely — his every thought would be on squeezing the time for what he could take. Who would ever think to lay out a mat and sleep through the day?

Applied to the court at large, the same principle held.