After the Third Prince left, Scholar Meng naturally left in anger. However, Fang Qing was still full of resentment, but was suppressed by Scholar Song. However, Principals Xiao and Xu, as well as the other two Hanlin scholars, still did not leave, obviously they all had something to say. Facing this situation, Zhang Shou smiled at the Fourth Prince and everyone else who stayed behind.
"When I was a child, I met a strange man. His last name was Ye. He was an old gentleman who attached great importance to teaching and educating people. He told me a story about his experience when he passed by a small town. Well, since I want to tell it to everyone, I will give it a title, "Three or Five More Bushels of Pile". Because it is just a story, there are not so many complicated things, and it may not be worthy of being published, but I like it very much."
Zhang Shou first stated that it was just a story, not an article, then paused and slowly recited the article that the teacher had forced them to recite because he liked it so much: "At the riverside pier of Wansheng Rice Shop, open boats from the countryside were parked in a mess. The boats were loaded with new rice, which pushed the boats down very low..."
As he recited slowly, he organized the language at the end, trying his best to remove many things with distinct characteristics of the times. For example, he replaced the silver dollar with the copper coins commonly used in those days, removed the foreign rice and foreign flour, and replaced it with rice shipped by ship from other grain-producing areas, and replaced the two bureaus that farmers had to go through when selling rice with two customs offices...
Fortunately, he recited slowly and made corrections smoothly along the way, so he didn't make any big mistakes. However, even so, the atmosphere of first joy and then sorrow after a good harvest came to the fore under his simple words. As he listened, Fang Qing, who came from a poor family, couldn't help but have red eyes. Some students from the Jiuzhang Hall whose families were farmers also turned their heads to hide the sadness on their faces.
Of course, Zhang Shou did not copy Mr. Ye Shengtao's entire article. After all, the part about small vendors selling foreign goods and small commodities, although it echoed the transnational dumping of foreign rice and flour in the previous article and brought a greater impact, was another matter after all and had little to do with the central idea he wanted to express at this time.
Therefore, he changed the so-called banknotes into two-thirds IOUs and one-third of the grain merchants' money. The grain merchants promised that they could use these IOUs to buy things at a 5% discount in other nearby shops.
So, after the harvest, the farmers used IOUs to buy cloth, salt, and various necessities from the merchants. The IOUs they worked so hard to get in exchange for grain were torn to pieces in a moment after they were exchanged for cloth and bags of salt. They even had to add their hard-earned copper coins. In the end, when the boat returned, they only had a little money left in their pockets.
When he finally said that in order to pay the rent, many people even had to make up for the rice they originally intended to eat. The sentence that farmers could not eat the rice they grew immediately attracted several sighs.
Although there are the two famous lines in "The Silkworm Woman" that have been passed down through the ages, "Those dressed in silk are not silkworm breeders", and the two lines in "Song of Pity the Peasants" that are well-known among scholars, "Who knows that every grain of rice on the plate is the result of hard work", the poems are concise and abstract, while the stories are vivid and specific. At this time, Zhang Shou's storytelling is naturally more appealing.