The chill was not just from the autumn night.
The next morning, Zhāng Yuǎnshēng was woken by the cold. The thick cotton quilt felt as if it had absorbed all the dampness, pressing down heavily on him yet locking in little warmth. He curled up, the comfort of the heating and air conditioning from his modern memories becoming a sharp irony.
His mother, Zhōu Shì, brought him breakfast: a bowl of millet porridge so thin one could see their reflection in it, and a small dish of pickled mustard greens that were salty and bitter.
His elder sister, Zhāng Xiǎoyú, stared longingly at the porridge in his bowl, swallowed hard, then quickly lowered her head to fiddle with the worn hem of her clothes.
Was this how landlords lived? Zhāng Yuǎnshēng’s heart sank. Their family’s situation was probably even worse than he had imagined.
“Brother Sheng, after you eat, rest in the house. Don’t go out into the wind again,” Zhōu Shì said, touching his forehead, her eyes full of worry.
“Mother, my whole body aches from lying down. I want… I want to go to the backyard to bask in the sun,” Zhāng Yuǎnshēng tried to make his voice sound weak.
Zhōu Shì hesitated, looked at the rare autumn sunlight outside the window, and finally nodded. “Let your sister accompany you. Just sit under the eaves. Absolutely do not climb high or low again!”
The backyard was not large. The ground was compacted earth, with firewood piled in a corner. On the other side was a chicken coop, where a few scrawny hens were pecking at the ground. Most importantly, against the east wall was a small patch of vegetable patch, planted with some wilting Chinese cabbage and scallions.
This would be his “experimental field.” Zhāng Yuǎnshēng’s heart beat a little faster.
He pretended to bask in the sun, but his gaze was like the most precise scanner, scrutinizing the patch of land inch by inch.
“Soil compaction, severe lack of organic matter… Overly dense sowing, competing for water and nutrients… This leaf color clearly indicates insufficient nitrogen and phosphorus… And damage from leaf miners…” Professional judgments flashed through his mind at lightning speed, bringing a strange sense of calm. Facing problems, analyzing problems, solving problems—this was a scientific instinct etched into his very bones.
“Sister,” he called softly, “where do we keep all the chicken manure?”
Zhāng Xiǎoyú was taken aback for a moment, then pointed to an inconspicuous corner behind the woodpile. “There… Father said it’s smelly and doesn’t allow it in the yard. Every few days, he asks Uncle Zhang to take it to the village’s large cesspit to be fermented.”
“Direct fermentation leads to severe nitrogen loss; the efficiency is too low…” Zhāng Yuǎnshēng mused. He knew that the first step was to get better fertilizer. Composting techniques were not complicated, but he needed an opportunity to suggest it.
In the afternoon, his father, Zhāng Shǒutián, returned from outside, his brow furrowed even tighter, carrying the mixed scent of low-quality tobacco and dust.
“…The county yamen is demanding the autumn grain again. The harvest this year is already bad, and this…” he whispered to his mother in the main hall, thinking the children couldn’t hear, “…Steward Wang’s family wants to buy the thirty mu of irrigated land west of the river at a lower price. They are bullying us too much!”
“…Just endure it. Someone in their family works in the prefectural yamen; we can’t afford to offend them…” His mother, Zhōu Shì, replied with a tearful voice.
The landlord’s predicament: exploitation by officials, oppression by local gentry, and the threat of natural disasters. Zhāng Yuǎnshēng listened silently as a tapestry of survival struggles in the Late Ming Dynasty’s lower strata slowly unfolded before his eyes. Saving the family would be no easy task.
Two more days passed, and Zhāng Yuǎnshēng’s health was “greatly improved,” allowing him to move around the yard. While his family wasn’t paying attention, he slipped into the front gatehouse and found the old servant, Uncle Zhang. Uncle Zhang was a long-term laborer in the family, an elder who had been with the family since Zhāng Yuǎnshēng’s grandfather’s time. His face was deeply lined, and he was a man of few words, gnawing on a hard bran biscuit with cold water.
“Uncle Zhang,” Zhāng Yuǎnshēng squatted beside him, playing with pebbles on the ground, “for one mu of millet, how many dou can our fields yield?”
Uncle Zhang’s cloudy eyes glanced at him, seemingly surprised by the young master’s question. He rasped, “In a good year, on fertile land, we can get one stone and two to three dou (about 180 catties). This year… alas, I doubt we’ll even get eight dou.”
Zhāng Yuǎnshēng’s heart sank again. This yield was outrageously low. Modern dryland millet yields in northern China easily exceed 600 catties per mu.
“Why so little? Is the land poor? Or are the seeds bad?”
“The land, it can’t accumulate fertility. The seeds are all the same,” Uncle Zhang shook his head. “Mainly, the heavens don’t give us food. From spring until now, there have only been a few heavy rains. The well is almost dry; we can’t irrigate enough.”
Water! Another core problem surfaced. Guanzhong was a plain, but the drought of the Little Ice Age was deadly.
Just then, a commotion came from outside the gate, mixed with cries and sharp scolding.
Zhāng Yuǎnshēng and Uncle Zhang both stood up. They saw their neighbor, the tenant farmer Sūn Lǎoqī, being helped back by his wife, limping. Blood trickled down his forehead. Behind them followed several cursing strong men.
“…You owe rent and dare to talk back? Beating you is light punishment! Three days! Just three days! If you still can’t pay, we’ll take your daughter as payment!” The burly man at the front spat on the ground and strode away.
Sūn Lǎoqī’s family collapsed by the doorway, weeping in despair. Neighbors peered out from nearby houses, then silently retreated, their faces etched with the sorrow of shared misfortune.
Zhāng Yuǎnshēng recognized the group; they were the lackeys of the village’s largest landlord, Steward Wang. Steward Wang and Scholar Wang were from the same clan.
“Uncle Sun… what happened?” he couldn’t help but ask.
Uncle Zhang sighed and said in a low voice, “Brother Qi’s ten mu of slope land, this year it was almost a complete failure. Where would he get the rent money… This world makes it hard to live.”
Bloody oppression, naked survival crisis—all of this was brutally displayed before a twelve-year-old child. The terms “land annexation” and “class contradictions” from books had transformed into the blood on his neighbor’s head and the tears of despair before his eyes.
Zhāng Yuǎnshēng felt a cold anger and a great sense of powerlessness. Agricultural technology could increase yields, but could the increased grain offset the yamen’s exorbitant taxes and levies, or the plunder of the wealthy and powerful?
His plan to save his family and the village, unstarted, had collided with a cold, hard wall—this man-eating era.
That night, he lay on the kang, staring at the ceiling. The sights and sounds of the day churned in his mind. Fertility, water sources, seeds, heavy-handed governance, gentry… a myriad of tangled threads, each problem immeasurably difficult.
But the light in his eyes had not dimmed; instead, it had become more focused due to the cruelty of reality.
Don’t aim too high. He told himself.
First step: survive. Let himself and his family eat a little better. Second step: accumulate a little strength, even if it’s just to make the vegetable patch in the backyard a bumper harvest. Third step: find the fulcrum that can move everything… like those three non-existent “auspicious omens.”
His gaze turned to the window again. The autumn wind still wailed, but this time, he seemed to hear the dry groans of the earth in the wind, and the silent cries of countless hungry people.
His first battle would not be on the battlefield, but in the barren fields beneath his feet. And his weapon would not be a sword, but the “Science” that was about to quietly unfold on this land, defying the common sense of this era.