Yuan Xi rode on his horse, staring at a locust in his palm in silence.
At the end of the Han Dynasty, locust plagues often occurred, causing great harm to the whole country, sharply reducing grain harvests and seriously damaging local production.
Last year, Yuan Xi accurately predicted the locust plague in Jizhou in front of Yuan Shao, and with the assistance of Tian Feng, minimized the damage caused by the plague, thus preserving the vitality of Jizhou. This became the confidence and capital for Jizhou to send troops against Gongsun Zan later.
Although the locust plague in Jizhou has been put out, it is impossible to completely eradicate it. Reducing the losses by half would be a great success.
The remaining locusts are stirring again this year. Although Jizhou has taken some measures in advance, the locust eggs left over from the previous year still fly in all directions and cause harm after hatching, which is hard to prevent.
This naturally includes the direction of Youzhou. Yuan Xi has now entered Youzhou, but he has found a lot of locusts along the way, which makes him quite worried.
In the past two years, Youzhou has developed water conservancy projects and has had a bumper harvest of grain. However, a side effect is that the locust-infested area has begun to move northward.
The areas where locusts are prevalent are the lower reaches of the Yellow River, especially in Jizhou, Yanzhou, Yuzhou, and Qingzhou provinces. They gradually decrease south of central China and are basically non-existent along the southeast coast.
From 700 BC to 1900 AD, during these 2,600 years, there were 508 locust plagues recorded in historical books, including 436 in the Yellow River Basin, 69 in the Yangtze River Basin, and 3 in south and southwest China.
The places where locusts lay eggs are mostly low-lying areas with stagnant water and growing aquatic plants. Unless the grass is cut and the water is drained, it is extremely difficult to prevent and control them.
Unlike Youzhou a thousand years later, the Youzhou area in this world has a very rich water system and most of the terrain is swamp wetlands. Although it will become excellent farmland after draining the water, this process, even if accelerated artificially, may take more than ten or dozens of years.
Before this, the only way to reclaim wasteland was to farm near wetlands and swamps, which invisibly formed a breeding ground for locust plagues.
This is related to Youzhou's reclamation of wasteland, vigorous development of water conservancy, and cultivation of grain. Without grain, there would be no locust plague.
But people cannot starve to death. If they want to increase grain production, they must face the dilemma of frequent locust plagues. At the same time, they cannot give up eating because of choking. They can only find ways to reduce the damage caused by locust plagues.
There are quite a few methods, including timely discovery of locust breeding grounds, driving out newborn nymphs and burying them, finding egg-laying sites and turning the soil in winter, and catching adult locusts.
These measures are already quite well known, and even without Yuan Xi's later knowledge, they are recorded in great detail in the agricultural books of this era.
What often hinders locust control is human factors. For example, the theory of correspondence between heaven and man proposed by Dong Zhongshu is a huge obstacle to locust control.
They believed that Heaven was the sovereign of all gods and that the Son of Heaven ruled the world by mandate from Heaven. This gave rise to the theory of "change and restoration", which held that all heavenly disasters were God's will and that only through sacrifices and prayers could disasters be transformed and things restored to normal, which was called change and restoration.
Under the advocacy of this theory, it is generally recognized that the ultimate means of controlling locusts is sacrifice.
This idea is reflected in Bai Juyi's poem "Catching Locusts": "What is the benefit of catching locusts? It only makes hungry people work hard. Even if one insect dies, hundreds of insects will come. How can human power stop natural disasters?"
They believed that human efforts to catch locusts could not overcome natural disasters, and that the root cause of the problem could only be solved by the emperor swallowing locusts as a sacrifice to appease the wrath of heaven.
Under the advocacy of this idea, the measure taken during the locust plague at the end of the Han Dynasty was for the emperor to write a letter of self-blame and then wait for the locust plague to disappear.
Of course, this would have no effect in the eyes of later generations, so the locust plague became more and more severe year after year.
However, the locust control situation faced by Yuan Xi has actually improved. This is not only because the war has caused the abandonment of production, but also due to the weakening of imperial power.
The Han Dynasty lost its virtue. After the Yellow Turban Rebellion, the emperor was unable to intimidate the world. The prestige that the Han Dynasty had built up over four hundred years almost collapsed. In contrast, when it came to controlling the locusts, the princes of the world no longer relied on the emperor to blame himself, but began to find ways to control it themselves.
This matter has two sides, just like the contrast between the previous locust plague and grain planting and land reclamation, which is quite ironic. However, the good thing is that now Yuan Xi can eliminate the negative impact of the theory of the correspondence between heaven and man to the greatest extent and mobilize the people of Youzhou to control the locusts.
He took the locusts to Guo Jia and discussed with him how to prevent the locust plague. Guo Jia listened and gave some suggestions.
After he finished talking, the two men realized that Yuan Xi now had more than one counselor under his command. In Youzhou alone, there were Ju Shou, Chen Gui and others. This kind of matter was originally the responsibility of Chen Gui and was no longer under Guo Jia's jurisdiction.
Yuan Xi couldn't help but laugh and said, "This is my fault. In the past two years, I relied on you for everything. Now that there are suddenly more people around, I am a little uncomfortable. I always subconsciously come to you for advice."
Guo Jia smiled and said, "It's the same for me. People's habits can indeed affect their actions. Fortunately, it's not on the battlefield."
The two looked at each other and laughed.
After Yuan Xi got on the horse, Lu Lingqi came over, also holding a locust in her hand, and said, "When I was a child, there was also a locust plague in Wuyuan, Bingzhou. It was really overwhelming."
"Later, all the food was eaten up, and we had to eat locusts to fill our stomachs. I was forced to eat them a few times."
Yuan Xi was surprised and asked, "When there are too many locusts, they will turn from green to yellow, and then they will be poisonous. Did you eat them and be okay?"
Lu Lingqi scratched her head and said, "Is there such a thing? Now that I think about it, I did have diarrhea a few times, and some people even died from eating too much."
"But I was going to starve to death anyway. If I had a full meal, I would have a better chance of survival, right?"
Yuan Xi was silent. Lu Lingqi was right. Just like what the poem said, if people are eaten in famine, how could they not eat locusts?
Sometimes when people are about to starve to death, they will drink poison even though they know it is poison. If people are drowning, they will grab a crocodile even if they see it.
For most people in this world, there are not many options for survival.
Yuan Xi and Lu Lingqi rode side by side. The road they were taking back to North City had been paved several times and was in much better condition than before.
In ancient times, road paving, compared with the low production capacity, was actually partly done by cutting down trees, leveling weeds, and making a dirt road. If the road surface could then be compacted, it would be great.
As for leveling the roadbed, filling it with cement, and placing gravel or stone slabs on top to make the road surface, this is not widely used in big cities, let alone in the wild.
Therefore, the roads between different places are made smooth by the frequent walking of people and animals, and the surface is then covered with layers of animal feces, which slowly pile up and become part of the road.
If there is a flood or heavy rain, this loess road surface will be washed away, becoming bumpy and muddy, making driving extremely difficult.
In the past two years, when Yuan Xi mobilized civilians to build roads, he also considered these problems. Although he did have solutions, he ultimately faced the same problem.
Economic costs.
To build a road of better quality and mix it with hardened materials would require an astronomical amount of manpower and material resources for a small peasant economy society, especially since such a road would need frequent maintenance after it is built!
The road maintenance costs in later generations sometimes often exceed the construction costs, not to mention in ancient times. People could not even get enough to eat, so where did they get the money to do this?
Therefore, in ancient times, all large-scale construction projects required massive conscription of laborers and the death of countless laborers to succeed. They also had great negative effects, often leading to social unrest, and the aftermath would take many years to subside. This was a typical case of "the previous generation plants trees, and the next generation enjoys the shade."
Yuan Xi considered cement, lime, and asphalt, but later gave up on them all, especially asphalt, as the problem of heating fuel alone could not be solved.
You know, Yuan Xi has been vigorously promoting drinking boiled water in Beixincheng for three years and often distributed some firewood, but even so, more than half of the people still often lack firewood for cooking, let alone boiling water.
In an era when people cannot even have enough food to eat just by farming, blindly carrying out wasteful labor projects is tantamount to courting death. All new technologies cannot be separated from productivity, otherwise they will only be a pipe dream.
This is the helplessness of the times. The productivity in ancient times was so low. The two major problems that restricted development were food and energy. Without sufficient supply of these two, any other means would be empty talk.
Yuan Xi sighed inwardly. In an age of great strife, if one only stores food but not guns, they will be robbed and killed. Focusing on farming is just a beautiful vision.
Now all the princes in the world are engaged in war. In this situation, Youzhou is considered to have a good environment. At least it has Jizhou in the south to protect it, so it has fewer worries.
But Yuan Xi also knew clearly that relying solely on farming could only provide him with a basic standard of living. If he wanted to obtain more land and wealth, the most effective way was to go out to sea.
He already had a blueprint in his mind. The next step was that the western part of Youzhou would enter a period of stable development, but Liaodong and Liaoxi in the east of Youzhou were still wild lands, and there were many places where he could start.
The first step is to build ports and develop shipping and fisheries.
Youzhou has a long coastline, from Yuyang to Youbeiping, and then to the Liaoxi and Liaodong vassal states, Liaodong County, and Lelang County. This series of coastal counties all have extremely convenient port addresses.
Youzhou had developed salt and iron industries and lush forests, and also had the conditions to develop a shipbuilding industry.
In recent years, relying on the Zhen family's maritime trade routes, Youzhou has built many ports. As long as Yuan Xi finally occupies Lelang in Liaodong, he can go south to the Korean Peninsula, establish a springboard, and shorten the sailing distance to the Wa Islands.
Yuan Xi's ultimate goal was to completely digest and deal with these minor problems of later generations in this era of flourishing martial virtues and incorporate them into the territory of China.
Since these two places in later generations want to steal Chinese culture so much, it would be better to transform them into the shape of Chinese culture now.
Of course, the Gongsun Du family, which now occupies the Liaodong Peninsula, is not an easy target either. Their power is extremely stubborn. If you want to deal with them, you still have to come up with something that can tempt them.
Thinking about his future self dying at the hands of this family, Yuan Xi felt quite complicated, but in this life there was no grudge between the two sides, and it would be best if the issue could be resolved peacefully.
After all, in Yuan Xi's view, Gongsun Du is a Chinese citizen after all, and no matter how the two sides fight, it is an internal conflict.
Yuan Xi strongly disagreed with Sima Yi's later practice of killing the Gongsun family and relocating their people to the interior.
This move was tantamount to giving up the Korean Peninsula. As a result, Goguryeo, which had been suppressed by the Gongsun family, took advantage of the situation to rise and occupied the territory that originally belonged to China.
Thinking of this, Yuan Xi sneered in his heart. It was impossible for him to give in. It was absolutely impossible for him to hand these places over to others.
Now that I have come to this era, there is no reason for China to cede land. From now on, whether by sea or by land, China's path will only be outward!