Dominate the Country

Is the emperor's arrival important? Of course it is important. Whether it is the officialdom or the people, it is a shock. For example, in the people, in just a few days, the prices of eggs, poultry, cattle and sheep have doubled.

And with Chen Ming's arrival in Baoji, a resolution that has been discussed in Fengxiang Prefecture for more than half a year was successfully passed. Allowing individual key towns in Baoji, a key county, to increase public positions, all civil servants in various county agencies who are willing to support the townships will be promoted by one level [those who have not been promoted within a year].

Chen Ming did not know that this fluctuation, which was instigated by his arrival, was deeply affecting the fate of some families. He had just received a message from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Nanjing that the Ottoman Empire sent a prince as a special envoy to come to China to meet the emperor, which marked that the relationship between the two countries had entered a new stage. After the Ottoman Empire's embassy was built, His Royal Highness the Prince would stay in China for a long time as an ambassador.

"Master, you should know this. County officials are not as good as current managers."

"Returning to the town will not only get you promoted by one level, but also be more convenient."

"Son, returning to the town will not hinder your future. If you are promoted by one level, you can also take care of the hotel at home..."

"It's so good to go back to the countryside. How long will it take you to get promoted in the city?"

An old couple and a shrewd and capable wife aimed their firepower at the man surrounded by them. They were very determined to let their son and husband return to the town from the county.

This is a very rare thing.

There have always been many Chinese who would rather be the tail of an ox than the head of a chicken, just like the sand in the river, countless. Especially those in the officialdom! Who is willing to go from a high level to a low level? They would rather be the first point of the position than be transferred to the local level. The idea of ​​the seventh-rank official in front of the prime minister is still very influential.

This person is called Li Chunhong, a government official in Baoji City. He is from Xirenbao, Baoji, and Jiacun Town. He is currently a clerk in Baoji County Government. Jiacun Town happens to be one of the key towns in Baoji County.

Li Chunhong is not a veteran, and there is no one in his family who has anything to do with military families. Li Chunhong was able to become a government official entirely by his own hard work - he is very good at abacus, and he was an apprentice in a money house in Baoji before.

For a countryman, it is a very honorable thing to have a person who eats official food in the family.

The income of government officials is not cheap, especially when the court used land instead of salary before, the income was really not low.

Li Chunhong's income alone is enough to support their family, old parents, and a pair of children.

But Li Chunhong has been very unhappy since the beginning of this year, not because of work, but because of his wife.

His wife didn't know what she was thinking, and suddenly wanted to do a small business, and she couldn't stop it. Baoji is now a big construction site, with so many things and government agencies are very busy. Li Chunhong is sometimes so busy that he doesn't go home for three or five days.

How can he have time to control his wife?

Li Chunhong's wife's surname is Zeng. She doesn't do much business every day. She just cooks tea eggs, tofu skewers, tofu skin, and takes away steamed buns and boiled water, but her business is very good. Baoji is a big construction site, with a large flow of people. Not everyone is willing to go to a restaurant for dinner. Or there are many people who want to eat something to fill their stomachs. If they can't bear to eat tea eggs, they can just pick up tofu skewers and tofu skin.

Zeng's business is booming. When Li Chunhong found out, his parents at home had already been dragged into the water.

Li Chunhong is a face-saving person. Letting his wife go out to earn money at home is too embarrassing for him.

But Zeng is not a good and obedient person. At the beginning, he agreed on the surface, and when Li Chunhong went out, he still went out to do his own small business. But in the end, he just twisted it.

The old couple of the Li family were hesitant to make money.

The money Zeng earned from setting up a stall was certainly not as much as Li Chunhong's monthly income, but compared with the income of the Li family in previous years, it was very generous, and even for the current Li family, it was not something that could be ignored casually.

The old couple of the Li family was wavering between money and their son's face. Zeng was obsessed with money. Li Chunhong couldn't divorce because of this. Now Chen Handian didn't say divorce or divorce, it was just a divorce. But there was no divorce in Baoji.

Li Chunhong didn't want to be the first to try this.

But a man who wanted to save face would not let his wife lose his face. That day, Li Chunhong took his family back to his hometown. Before that, he specifically persuaded his parents, using the gimmick of being affected by promotion, and successfully fooled his parents.

"Hey, Chunhong, you're back!" Zeng Daxing, a small landlord in Xirenbao, greeted Li Chunhong with a smile. This person is on government payroll, just like the yamen runners in the past, and he is the son-in-law of their Zeng family.

Last year, Zeng Daxing also used Li Chunhong's relationship to buy five injured cattle and horses from the construction site in the north for 150 yuan. None of them were seriously injured. After three or four months of careful feeding and care, each one recovered better than the other. Even if they are not kept for their own use, they can still make hundreds of yuan by selling them to the construction site.

Now the cattle and horses in Baoji are unprecedentedly numerous and tense. The government has liberalized the purchase of cattle and horses, and the phenomenon of cattle and horses being cut off has generally appeared among the people.

The injured cattle and horses on the construction site were slaughtered directly if they were seriously injured, and those with less serious injuries were the targets of the people's desire.

Take the two cattle and three horses purchased by Zeng Daxing as an example. The average price was 30 yuan per head/horse, which is 3 silver dollars and 2 taels of silver. What kind of price is this? The price that the Mongolians sold cattle and horses to Zhangjiakou was also a little higher than this. [驽马]

However, Zeng Daxing looked enthusiastic, and Li Chunhong could still see very clearly that Zeng Daxing was in a hurry to go out. It was an unfortunate time for me to come.

Zeng Daxing could also see that Li Chunhong had something to ask him, so he took the initiative to ask.

"Fifth uncle, I came here this time to ask about the production team." At that time, Li Chunhong immediately got straight to the point.

The smile on Zeng Daxing's face immediately disappeared, and Zeng Daxing became nervous, "What happened to our production team?"

"Uncle Wu, don't get me wrong. It's not the government's business. I just want to ask. Uncle Wu, isn't your production team doing well? I want to ask if I can still join this production team now?" Li Chunhong took the initiative to hand Zeng Daxing a cigarette.

Zeng Daxing's face immediately improved, "You kid talked without a clue, and you scared Uncle Wu. It's this matter, it's difficult." Zeng Daxing was very happy that the production team he led had a loud "name", which was a kind of affirmation.

"Chunhong, don't you work for the government? Why are you asking this?"

"My parents are going back to their hometown, and my wife is coming back with them to farm. Uncle Wu, you know that my family now has three plots of land, large and small, about twelve or thirteen acres. I don't feel comfortable letting her, a woman, farm with my parents. I want to find a production team to join in and make it safer."

"This..." Zeng Daxing listened to Li Chunhong's explanation and showed a very embarrassed look on his face, "Chunhong, it's not that I don't want to help you, but our production team is very tiring. In addition to farming, we also do odd jobs and transport goods for others. When it's busy, there is no distinction between men and women. I'm afraid your wife won't be able to handle it after she comes. Why don't you contact the farm?"

The small landlords didn't have any surplus food. When the opportunity to make money was in front of them, none of the foremen who led the production team would push the money out because of the hard work. Although when they got the money, thinking about the hard work and suffering they had endured, many people cursed that it was not worth it. But when the next business came, they forgot about the hard work again.

The farm was mainly engaged in planting. Even if they also took care of tofu shops, oil mills, and mills, they were all in one place, unlike the production team. Zeng Daxing drove a bullock cart to deliver iron bars to Baocheng at the farthest point, and Hanzhong was one step further south. Don't mention how much food and how much fatigue he suffered on the road.

Zeng Daxing's words made Li Chunhong grin bitterly. He did contact the farm, which also included the military-civilian company. However, the Li family was neither a soldier, nor a big landlord, nor a formal official. The total land area of ​​the Li family was only twelve or thirteen acres, and it did not match the boundaries of those company farms. Even if they wanted to join, they could not join.

They could use means to "exchange land" - land use rights, but for a little Li Chunhong, for just twelve or thirteen acres of land, is it worth it? Since it is not worth it, Li Chunhong has nowhere to turn to, and can only turn to the production team.

Li Chunhong found the changes in the countryside incredible. Not only did the factories in the city implement the so-called system management, but also the construction sites were disciplined, and the farms were the same.

Before looking for Zeng Daxing, Li Chunhong went to find his relatives to learn about Xirenbao. There were three production teams in his hometown, one of which was led by the Zeng family, one by the Li family, and one by the Wu family. However, the leader of the latter was a retired soldier and a disabled soldier who lost two fingers. That was a big face. Everyone in the production team joined the construction site of the Baoyin Line and obtained the qualification of a fifth-level construction team last fall.

It was completely different from the production teams of the Li and Zeng families.

And if you compare the Li family's production team more closely, it was unknown and unwilling to include newcomers, but only wanted to get the right to use the land. If Li Chunhong went to "invest", the production team would definitely be happy, but what was the difference between this and the past when Li Chunhong's family rented out the land?

What Li Chunhong wanted now was a "job" that could trip up his wife. But this job must not be too tiring, because Li Chunhong has two elderly people and two children to take care of at home.

It is also easy to transfer schools after the children's school registration is established in this era. Xirenbao, as a town station in Baoji, also happens to have a school.

"Mom, does Dad not want us anymore?"

At this moment, Zeng was busy burning firewood and cooking at the Li family. The eight-year-old son ran to his mother and asked timidly and in a low voice.

He heard people say in school that some people sent their wives and children back to the countryside, and then found a younger one in the county town.

Zeng laughed, "If your father dared to have such a heart, I would slap him so that he would be ashamed to see people for three days. You are a child, why worry about it? Go read a book."

Zeng certainly knew what her husband was going to do this time when he returned to his hometown, but Li Chunhong persuaded the child's transfer and the elderly, and she had done everything, so she could only go home.

However, Zeng had been cursing Li Chunhong in her heart. There were many women setting up stalls in Baoji City, but why couldn't she set up a stall? Being a government official was very prestigious, and it was really high before the court's salary was changed. But the court's salary change was a foregone conclusion. After the change, without the increase in the value of the land, it was not much more than what she earned from selling tea eggs every day.

Li Chunhong had no place to stay, so she had to go back to the city to work. But he didn't know that just half a month later, after convincing the old couple of the Li family again with the reason that it would cost a lot of money for the children to go to school when they grew up, Zeng set out from Xirenbao with a load on her shoulder and headed for a construction site more than ten miles away.

Zeng was still doing her old business in the county town, with two loads in front and back, one carrying steamed buns, and the other carrying coal for the stove and a pot of egg tofu.

Zeng just collected some eggs from relatives. According to previous experience, eggs were not as fast as tofu.

But later, she found that the people on the construction site seemed to be really rich, and her tea eggs were in short supply. Then she stopped picking steamed buns and only bought eggs, tofu skin and tofu cubes. There was a canteen on the construction site, and steamed buns were not attractive at all.

There were four or five hundred migrant workers on the opposite construction site. If each person sold one egg a day, Zeng would be too busy to handle it. Of course, this was just her beautiful wishful thinking.

However, the tea eggs were not easy to sell, and competitors immediately appeared. Soon Zeng found that a young wife appeared opposite her stall and started selling tea eggs, which immediately took away half of her business.

Hateful!

Originally, Zeng was full of hope that she could make a lot of money by selling tea eggs through monopoly. Tea eggs at five cents each were too cheap, and they should be sold at ten cents each at best. But now that the young wife came out, the dream was instantly shattered!

Just when Zeng was thinking about whether to discuss with the young wife opposite, the two families would jointly raise the price. Not to mention 10 cents, at least 60 or 70 cents! But she found that there were too many smart people - in less than a month, there were several tea egg sellers around the construction site.

No one came to the construction site to buy food before, because people in Baoji knew that the canteen at the construction site had good food. But no one thought carefully that some people wanted to eat better after eating good food, especially after these people had money.

In this era, it doesn't mean that you can eat delicious food and drink spicy food every day at the construction site just because you have money in your hand.

Let alone meat, eggs are something that cannot be guaranteed to be eaten by every soldier every day even in the army.

In China, only a ladder formation of the Boys' Camp and a few key colleges such as Sungkyunkwan Public School have this guarantee. The state subsidizes students to get one egg a day and one piece of salted fish and bacon a day.

Although the canned food industry and dried seafood in coastal areas are booming and the output is constantly increasing, if these quantities go deep into the inland for thousands of miles and are put on the basic figure of 200 million, how much is the average quantity?

Originally, there were only four or five hundred people on the construction site. Two or three tea egg vendors could make money, but five, six, seven or eight vendors would be worse off.

Zeng was not a person without ambition. When she was selling tea eggs, she noticed that the workers were greedy, so she boldly stopped selling eggs. It was becoming increasingly difficult to collect eggs in her village. Because in just one or two months, not only did small vendors appear on the edge of this construction site, but such small stalls appeared on the extended construction sites of Baoji.

Supply and demand immediately became tense.

Zeng upgraded the industry and changed to selling Tianshui stew.

Baoji and Tianshui are still closely connected, and Tianshui's delicacies are also well-known in Baoji. The authentic Tianshui stew is to mix the egg white and egg yolk and spread them into pancakes. Take fresh pork belly and chop it, add salt, flour, and pepper, mix well, add it between two layers of thin pancakes, flatten it, steam it in a steamer, cut it into strips, and it will be made into sandwich meat. The main dish is the pork belly, with crackling strips and meatballs, poured with chicken soup, sprinkled with chopped green onions, coriander, fungus, etc., and served in a soup bowl. The soup is sufficient and the meat and vegetables are matched. It is not greasy and tastes delicious.

Zeng didn't have the means to get fresh pork belly every day, so he used the intestines and stomach, and used everything. He used whatever ingredients he could get, and replaced them with others. He also got a car and pulled the cooking car to the construction site every day. With warm service and customer-oriented, the business immediately grew.

When Zeng upgraded his own cooking car again and opened a hotel along the official road of Xirenbao, and it was no longer just Li Chunhong's family, but Li's relatives and friends also joined in, the calls for Li Chunhong to return home became louder and louder. What's more coincidental is that the government also has a policy to further increase the units and institutions of some key towns...

But it is not easy to let the county officials take the initiative to return to the towns.