Across the Water Margin: Officials of Ximen

Page 460

Who is Master Uncle Ximen Qing?It seems omnipotent!

Yue Fei and the others looked at Ximen Qing with admiration, secretly rejoicing in their hearts.Traveling around the world with my uncle, it's really good to gain knowledge!

Jiao Ting has long been accustomed to brother Ximenqing's supernatural powers and omnipotence.He looked at the expressions of Yue Fei and the others, and said with a smile in his heart: "A group of ignorant young people! How can you understand Brother Ximenqing's ability? In this life, you can get the attention and support of Brother Ximenqing. It is really a blessing from several lifetimes of cultivation!"

At this time, Ximenqing was not in the mood to deliberately show off his knowledge in front of Yue Fei and others, so that these rural youths in Tangyin County would be overwhelmed with admiration.

Ximen Qing rode a horse on the land of Liyang County, looking at the countryside and wheat fields on both sides of the road, lost in thought.

Ximenqing, who has studied in university and has been exposed to relevant knowledge, remembers that since the prosperous Tang Dynasty, the economy of the Yellow River Basin has gradually declined, and the economy of the Yangtze River Basin has risen.China's political and cultural center of gravity moved eastward, and Chang'an lost its status as the capital.

Since the Tang Dynasty, Chang'an has never been able to become the capital of the national regime.

The ancient Chinese civilization originated in the Yellow River Basin. The Guanzhong area where Chang'an is located was once the most affluent area in China, and it was known as the land of abundance in ancient times.

However, after Qin unified China, the dynasties of the past dynasties showed a tendency to continuously tilt towards the Yangtze River Basin.

By the Ming and Qing dynasties, the economy of the entire country was almost entirely dependent on money, food and taxes from the area south of the Yangtze River.

Why does this happen?

Many historians say that this is because of the frequent wars in the north and the destruction of the economy, so the regimes of successive dynasties had to gradually shift the economic center of gravity to the south.

However, the wars in the north were not all due to the invasion of nomads, and many times it was civil strife.

Why are wars prone to occur in the north, but few large-scale civil unrest in the south?

Ancient China was a typical country dominated by agricultural economy, and the development of agriculture and land issues often determined the strength of the country and the stability of society.

Ximenqing remembers a saying that the change of China's political and cultural center from west to east and from north to south in the past 2000 years is nothing more than a relay of two crops, wheat and rice.

In ancient China, almost all the outbreaks of peasant uprisings in the past dynasties were concentrated in Henan, Shandong, Shaanxi and other places.

And these areas happen to be in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, and are the areas with the longest history of wheat cultivation in China.

China's wheat cultivation is mainly concentrated in the Yellow River Basin.Since the Han Dynasty, the cultivation of wheat has been promoted in the north.By the Tang Dynasty, wheat had become the main crop in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River.

In addition, other major food crops such as millet and sorghum planted in these areas are also dryland crops.

Wheat, millet, and sorghum are crops that consume a lot of land fertility. They are not suitable for continuous planting on the same piece of land. Usually, one season of planting has to be fallow for one or two years.

This means that only about one-third to one-half of the land in these areas is harvested for food every year.

Therefore, since the unification of the Qin Dynasty, the dynasty based in the Yellow River Basin has been under tremendous pressure on food supply.

To make matters worse, the Yellow River Basin has a dry climate and insufficient rainfall, and agricultural production mainly relies on diverted water for irrigation.

The dry environment makes water evaporate very quickly, and the alkaline loess is prone to compaction after losing water, resulting in salinization of the land, which becomes barren year by year, so that it cannot be cultivated.

The arable land with low yields has been continuously reduced, and the grain output has also continued to decrease.

In ancient China with agricultural economy, food was wealth.In order to maintain the original grain output and prevent their wealth from shrinking, the big families must acquire more land.

The contradictions of land annexation in northern China became more and more acute, and eventually led to a fierce social and political conflict—peasant uprising.

In every war, after years of wars, the land has recovered a little after being abandoned, the population has also dropped sharply, and the contradiction between grain shortages and land annexation tends to ease.

As a result, the society settled down again, and the troubled times returned to the ruled ones, and a new cycle of land consumption began.

But overall, the fertility of the land in the Yellow River Basin is still gradually declining.

In the 2000 years before Qin unified the six countries, China's agricultural development was not high and the scale was not too large.At that time, the ecological situation in the Yellow River Basin was good, and there was no contradiction between land and population.

With the emergence of a unified country, the large-scale development of agricultural production in the Yellow River Basin began immediately.So the problem of barren land caused by wheat cultivation began to become a confidant of one dynasty after another.

Chapter 735 Whoever wins the rice wins the world

In ancient China, as the contradiction between man and land evolved into serious social and political contradictions, once prominent dynasties fell down one by one.After some turmoil, a new dynasty rose again on the fertilized land.

This cycle of chaos continued until the Tang Dynasty, and the agricultural production in the Yellow River Basin finally came to a day of failure.

At that time, the Tang Dynasty formulated a very good land policy and taxation system, which brought the scale of land development in the Yellow River Basin to an unprecedented level and ushered in a fantastic "prosperous Tang weather".

However, the fact concealed by the prosperity scene is that under the large-scale development of the Tang Dynasty, the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River finally reached the limit of land power, and the land was completely overdrawn.

After the mid-Tang Dynasty, the empire once again fell into intense and continuous turmoil. Peasant uprisings and separatism became the theme of the second half of the Tang Empire.

In the end, China entered a period of five dynasties and ten kingdoms that lasted more than fifty years.

Similar to the situation in ancient China, ancient agricultural civilizations all over the world rose and died in wheat fields.

The earliest agricultural civilizations of mankind, ancient Egypt, ancient Babylon, ancient India and China, were all born near large river basins.

Among them, people in ancient Egypt and Babylon, like the ancestors of China, planted wheat extensively in the mother river basin that gave birth to their own civilization.It can be said that these splendid ancient civilizations were built in the wheat fields.

Unfortunately, none of them escaped the decline of wheat agriculture.

On both sides of the Nile River in Egypt, those once prosperous areas were generally deserted, which shows that the local conditions for the existence of ancient Egyptian agricultural civilization have long been lost.

On the Mesopotamian Plain in Iraq, the glorious Babylonian Mesopotamian civilization was born in the past.However, what used to be a fertile field for thousands of miles has since turned into a saline-alkali land that is hard to grow and hardened.

The reason for the decline of ancient Egypt and Babylonian civilization is largely that, under the constraints of the natural environment, the local people had no choice but to adopt irrigation methods to grow wheat.Therefore, the fate of land salinization and impoverishment cannot be avoided, and civilization cannot be maintained.

After the mid-Tang Dynasty, the land barrenness caused by wheat planting in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River could not be reversed, and the Yellow River civilization was already in crisis.

Especially in the Hexi and Guanzhong areas where wheat planting was popularized earlier, the land barrenness has become very serious, and the grain production has dropped sharply.

However, Chinese civilization did not completely decline like ancient Egypt and Babylon, but was passed on from generation to generation, and has continued to this day.Because, there is another big river in China - the Yangtze River.

In the Yangtze River Basin, there is another food crop - rice, which provided another way to solve the food problem for the ancient Chinese who were in crisis.

Because of the decline of wheat farming civilization in the Yellow River Basin, when the Song Dynasty was established and ended the troubled times of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, rice planting began to rise as a large-scale agriculture in southern China.

After the Song Dynasty introduced high-quality Champa rice from Vietnam, rice really took on the important task of carrying Chinese civilization.

The yield of rice is very high, and the seeds sown by farmers can usually harvest about [-] times the amount of rice, which is obviously very impressive compared with the four times the yield of wheat seeds.

Coupled with the warm and humid climate in the south of the Yangtze River Basin, two or even three seasons can be planted a year, which means that the same area of ​​land can grow several times more rice than wheat, and the grain output is ten times more. several times.

More importantly, the land where rice is grown does not need to be left fallow, and it can be cultivated continuously only with proper supplement of nutrients every year.In addition, rice is soaked in tens of centimeters of water all the year round to grow, which avoids the salinization problem caused by repeated irrigation of wheat fields and large amounts of water evaporated.

It can be said that the promotion of rice planting in the Yangtze River Basin has effectively solved the problems of barren land and insufficient food production caused by wheat, and avoided frequent land mergers and conflicts between man and land to a certain extent, enabling the Chinese civilization to continue better.

Under the ebb and flow, starting from the Song Dynasty, the economic center of gravity of ancient Chinese dynasties officially shifted from the Yellow River Basin to the Yangtze River Basin.Chinese civilization, which declined along with wheat agriculture, also revived in rice agriculture.

It is precisely because the center of civilization shifted from the wheat-producing areas in the north to the rice-producing areas in the south that Chang'an City, located in the Guanzhong Plain, lost its chance to become the capital of China.

Even if Song Taizu Zhao Kuangyin created a dynasty with Wu Dingguo, he could not reverse the historical trend of the shift of the economic and cultural center.