Qin Official

"Brother Zhong, just take me with you, little brother, please!"

After getting up early in the morning, Jing became Hei Fu's follower, trying to persuade him to take him with him when he took up the post at Huyang Pavilion. In Jing's view, it was a very prestigious thing for his brother to become the pavilion chief and govern the whole place. How could he do it? Can be absent.

"Don't even think about it!" Heifu rejected him flatly.

"Do you think I run that pavilion and can take whoever I want? Let me tell you, even if you went to the pavilion and ate the rations that were supposed to be provided to me and were sued to the county, you and I Everyone will be punished!"

Hei Fu is not trying to scare him. In other dynasties, they were cruel to the people and lax to the officials. Among the officials, there were countless people who took benefits and received kickbacks. The court also turned a blind eye and even came up with the concept of "Yang Lian". Things like silver "fire consumption" come. Moreover, when one person becomes an official, it is often the case that one person achieves enlightenment, chickens and dogs ascend to heaven, and family members can also benefit from it.

Only the Qin State has a unique mind. Not only is it extremely ruthless to the people, but it is even more ruthless to the officials. It is as guarded against thieves...

For example, when it comes to rations, there are regulations on the daily rations for officials of any rank and title. They will be distributed to each pavilion according to the amount every month. If someone pretends to receive it, they will be punished. Using public funds to treat guests to dinner is very risky in Qin.

There is also "private use of public cars." The Qin State explicitly prohibited the use of public cars to carry family members: "How can you pay Erjia to carry a woman in a car?" Erjia's money is enough to buy a bad horse, so he uses a public car to carry his family members. The price for girls racing is so high that most Qin officials dare not violate the ban.

This problem, which has persisted until modern times and has been repeatedly suppressed, was actually solved in the Qin State. Heifu thought about the drastic rectification of similar situations at the beginning of his reign. Without public funds for meals and stored-value cards, he had to buy moon cakes and rice dumplings by himself. He could no longer take the bus home to celebrate the New Year... which offended local officials. There are so many complaints, it’s called a mass feeling of indignation. They felt that this was cutting off their own benefits, and in the end they even complained, "If this continues, who will be willing to be a civil servant?" It's really funny.

It is easy to change from being honest to being corrupt, but it is difficult to change from being corrupt to being honest. However, when "officials are not making a living", ordinary people are applauding.

Qin's emphasis on honest government was even greater than that of later generations. The people of Qin were indeed conscientiously implementing the sentence "Integrity must not be slandered" in "The Way of Being an Official".

So Hei Fu didn't want to go to the pavilion in shock and give people excuses, so he said: "Just stay at home and take care of your mother and help your uncle. Besides..."

He pulled her away and said in surprise: "There is only one word in this matter. Don't go out and talk nonsense before the matter is settled!"

"With Brother Zhong's ability, being the pavilion chief is an easy task."

Although Jing was a little discouraged, he had no reason to be confident in Heifu. At the same time, he rubbed his hands and said, "Brother Zhong, if you can really take office, you will be the first person to become an official in our family for generations!"

"Probably."

It was precisely for this reason that when Heihu explained the matter yesterday, my mother agreed, and even talked about going to pay homage to her late husband's grave and thank him for his blessing. When they were in the Chu State, they were common people without a surname. In the three generations after entering the Qin Dynasty, they never held an official position. It was just that the cheap father became a public servant for the first time, gained some savings, and also taught his son how to read. , Now that Hei Fu has the opportunity to serve as an official, the ancestral graves are really smoking...

Heifu asked Jing to do whatever he had to do, and he walked towards the kitchen.

In Zhongzhong, every household has a kitchen. The front door leads to the front yard, and the top is usually uncovered to allow the black smoke from the fire to disperse. The stove is in the kitchen, with a cauldron set up, and there are several three-legged pottery pots next to it.

The back door of the kitchen leads to the backyard. When you step over the threshold, you can see a small vegetable patch. The ashes produced by cooking are sprinkled on the vegetable patch to make fertilizer. As the saying goes, "Sunflowers grow in the green garden, and the morning dew waits for the sun to shine." On weekdays, sunflowers, also known as winter amaranth, are planted here as the main vegetable of this era. Unfortunately, the vegetable patch is now bare, with only some green onions that can survive the winter hard to pull out tender white seedlings.

On the left side of the vegetable patch is a hut filled with firewood, and on the right is a small barn, which is as tall as a person and more than ten steps square. It stores the millet that the family will eat throughout the winter, as well as seeds for the coming year. Between the woodshed and the barn is the well, which are the two places most afraid of catching fire.

The sound of pounding rice that Heifu heard came from the side of the barn...

When rice, millet and other grains are recovered from the fields, the grains and stalks are still mixed together. First, the bamboo sieve made by my mother yesterday is used to thresh the grains, sieve out the grains, store them in the barn, and eat them every day. Now pounded. The husks of millet and rice can be broken by pounding them in a stone mortar, and then shaking and sifting them several times to remove the bran and husks, which can then be separated and cooked into fragrant rice.

There is also a very poetic description in the Book of Songs: "Some are pounding or tearing, some are winnowing or trampling. The old man is released, and the old man is floating." But this process is not poetic at all. The hard work of pounding rice is that later generations will just buy white rice. The pot is unimaginable to modern people...

After walking around the barn, Heifu saw his sister-in-law, a peasant woman in coarse clothes that barely touched the floor. She was wearing an apron-like "knee covering" and was struggling to lift a heavy wooden pestle. Pound the grain into a stone mortar driven into the ground.

My eldest sister-in-law is named "Kui" and she is from the neighborhood. She married her eldest brother Zhong when she was eighteen. It has been almost eight years since she was married. She was beautiful when she got married. Unfortunately, she gradually lost her beauty through life. Fortunately, her eldest brother has a good temper. Okay, the couple is in love.

And the six-year-old nephew Yang was squatting next to the stone mortar, yawning, holding a stick in his hand, and following the rhythm of his mother pounding rice, he fiddled with the millet in the stone mortar from time to time.

The children of the poor have to take care of their families at an early age. In rural areas, they have to take care of the family at a young age, and it is difficult to have a good night's sleep. Although Yang seems to always bully his sister on weekdays, every morning when his mother calls them, he quietly gets up and lets his sister continue to sleep peacefully. He is a good brother.

Hei Fu couldn't help but feel a little sorry for this sensible child.

"Sister-in-law Qiu."

He then walked forward, bowed to his sister-in-law, and said, "Let me pound it."

As he spoke, he took the wooden pestle. The wooden pestle was made of solid wood and was quite heavy in his hand. No wonder that pounding millet with a pestle from morning to night was a hard labor used by the Qin State to punish women. It is comparable to the Chengdan performed by male prisoners. The black husband of Chengdan had just done it a few days ago, and his hard work was evident.

The sister-in-law drove Yang to have a good sleep, while she pinched her sore arm and held a wooden stick aside to tease the grain for the black husband. She said at the same time: "Uncle Zhong (referring to the husband's brother) is not going to visit Yan's father-in-law in Banli. What?"

Yesterday, after Hei Fu told his family about his plan, they told him that, unfortunately, Mr. Lu Ying went to his son's house in the county town at sunset, and he might not be back until the twelfth lunar month, so if Hei Fu wanted to learn the laws and regulations, he had to go nearby Find another retired official Yan Zheng in the plaque.

"I can't go empty-handed." Hei Fu said with a smile while pounding the rice with a pestle: "I have to trouble Sister Qiu to prepare four dried meat sticks for me. I will give them to Mr. Yan as bundles."

"There are still two sticks left of the dried meat your uncle brought back from the county for you."

The sister-in-law raised her head and said in confusion: "I heard that most people go to Mr. Yan to ask for advice. Don't they only need two sticks of dried meat?"

"I'm going to bring double the number because I want to take Jing along with him so that he can learn to read, write and understand the laws and regulations from Yan Lao's son. Anyway, there's not much farm work to do in winter, so instead of letting him idle around and cause trouble all day long, it's better to take him with us Learn something useful." This was a vague plan in Heifu's mind, but he couldn't explain it clearly yet.

Sister-in-law nodded: "I'll go to Wu's house and ask. I'll prepare it for you tomorrow."

Mr. Wu is the person in charge of their "Five Households as Neighbors". Although he is not an official, only the richest of the five households can be appointed.

Wu's family keeps several pigs, and every winter they kill one and dry the meat. Because these days, the more dried meat is dried, it means that the life of this family is better. Heifu and his family can only eat a fish during the Chinese New Year and drool at the smell of meat coming from next door. Although the pigs of this year are not castrated. However, the taste is not as good as that of later generations, but it is still meat.

After that, the two of them were speechless. Heifu pounded rice for about half an hour. When it was already dark outside, he finally finished pounding the day's rations for the five, two, and seven people. His arms were already sore and he was very tired. .

He is a strong man like this. No wonder my sister-in-law, who often does rice pounding work, always has sore arms.

"Sister-in-law Qiu, how long does it take to grind rice on weekdays?" Heifu asked, wiping his sweat.

"It takes a full hour from Pingdan to sunrise."

My sister-in-law has already started washing the rice for cooking. Even though it took so long, the rice that came out was still the roughest "rice". The cooked rice was mixed with a lot of shelled rice and bran. It took a bite to break. For a long time, I swallowed hard and even had a sore throat.

Heifu looked thoughtfully at the heavy wooden pestle and the stone mortar made of large bluestone in his hand.

"The productivity of these days is really lagging behind, especially rice pounding, which is simply a torture for housewives. After all, men have to be busy working in the fields and have no time to do this. My mother said that she has been pounding rice for decades since she was ten years old, and her arms... They are all going to be crushed to pieces. Now that she can’t lift it, it’s my sister-in-law’s turn. In ten years, it will be my niece Xiaoyue’s turn. This is how the beautiful youth of women is roughened little by little... …”

Heifu sighed. He couldn't control other people's families for the time being, but his own family was so reasonable that he couldn't let them suffer such hard work anymore.

"What should we do? Stone mill? Roller? You can consider it. It seems that stone mills already exist in the north, but they have not spread to South County. But those things are made of stone, the cost is not low, and it is a bit troublesome. I have only seen them in my previous life. I have an impression that I don’t know how to do it. Even if I ask a mason to make it custom-made, it will take less than ten days and half a month to make it, and it may not be usable. Is there something simpler and practical? I have seen it in a documentary. …”

"What's your name?" Heifu scratched his head, forgetting the unfamiliar name for a moment.

At this time, he had moved his steps and walked to the well, where he saw the "jiégāo" placed on the well.

The tangerine resembles a scale beam and was a water-draining tool in this era. A slender wooden stick is added to an upright stand, with a fulcrum in the middle, a stone hanging at the end, and a bucket hanging at the front. When a person puts the bucket into the water After the water is filled, due to the gravity at the end of the lever, the water can be easily lifted to the desired place and dropped together, saving a lot of effort when drawing water.

After seeing this thing, Heifu couldn't help but suddenly think of it!

"Tashi, yes, what I want is Tashi!"

He excitedly clapped his hands and said: "The treadmill is the same as the orange peel. It uses the principle of leverage and has a simple structure. It can be made quickly in three or two days. I remember that my sister-in-law helped to make this orange peel. He He is a craftsman here..."

Hei Fu just did what he said. He walked to the front yard, picked up the gifts he bought from the county town, and said to the man who had just gotten up and was stretching:

"Brother, let's go to my sister's house with me!"