Chapter 1747: The Tofu Workshop
If a lane housed wealthy families, the work was easy—just a handful of households along the entire street. But for streets of ordinary middle-class families where gates crowded close together, it was easy to miscount. Knock on the wrong door, and an earful of curses from the residents would inevitably follow.
Zhang Yu noticed that the tofu shop owner's daughter wasn't at the counter today, so he returned to his own shop. Inside, he found his parents poring over several sheets of paper—the family's house deed and land title. These were the household's most precious possessions; growing up, Zhang Yu had rarely glimpsed them. They were normally locked in an iron box, stored with the utmost care. Why had they been brought out today?
Upon inquiry, he learned that the Australians had not merely come to "register households"—they had also inspected the house deed and land title, and even measured the property's dimensions.
"Look," his father said. "They've stamped a verification seal."
Zhang Yu leaned closer. Indeed, both the house deed and land title now bore a freshly affixed red stamp. This seal differed from Ming official seals—it was circular with a four-pointed star at its center. Zhang Yu recognized this as the "Morning Star." Encircling the star ran a line of flattened Song-style characters: Guangzhou Special Municipality Real Estate Registry Verification Seal.
"Once this stamp is affixed, the house and land are officially secured," his mother remarked with a sigh. Every change of dynasty brought a redistribution of wealth. For petty urban bourgeoisie like themselves, generations of toil had amounted to nothing more than these bits of house and land. Naturally, they valued them above all else.
"How much did it cost?" Zhang Yu knew that all official business came with expenses. Last year, when he'd sat for the Tongzi examination, he had paid to receive his test papers, and once inside the examination hall there were unavoidable tips to "reward" the proctors.
"It didn't cost any money..." Father Zhang's joy was shadowed with concern. He lowered his voice. "I'm just afraid this change of regime won't last."
If government forces returned and the Australians simply walked away, the stamp on these deeds would be indelible evidence. Should the yamen choose to make trouble over it, the consequences could range from minor to catastrophic. A ruthless clerk could use this alone to ruin an entire family.
Hearing this, Zhang Yu's mother grew anxious. "Then—then what should we do?"
Father Zhang had no coherent answer. Of course, when they came to re-register, one could claim to have no documents—but he had heard that the Australians had posted proclamations throughout the city declaring that any property without proper deed or title would be deemed "illegal construction" and ordered demolished within a set timeframe. And this was no empty threat. On Chengxuan Street, whether the structure was a century-old shop or a tiny stall, anything classified as "illegal" had been razed clean.
Zhang Yu, however, spoke up: "In my view... the government won't be coming back."
His voice was very low, but it still startled his parents. This might be the Australians' era now, but it had been barely a fortnight. No one dared declare that the Ming was finished and would never retake Guangzhou.
"Don't talk nonsense!" his father hissed. "Don't say such things outside!"
Zhang Yu nodded. "I understand. But based on what I've observed these past days: the Australians maintain strict discipline, and from top to bottom they work with selfless purpose. The whole realm will surely rally to them, carrying their provisions and following like shadows." Seeing his parents struggling with his literary flourish, he added plainly: "When the Australian police came into our shop to conduct business, they didn't eat a single pastry or take a single coin. On this point alone—the Ming won't be coming back."
Liu San stepped from the narrow, dim shop onto the bright street and felt immediate relief—it had been suffocating inside. The shop floor, barely ten square meters, contained not only a counter but also a massive kneading table and a sizeable oven. Tools and raw materials crammed every remaining inch. Once the census team had entered, there was scarcely room to turn around.
A strange odor had permeated the room: the distinctive fragrance of roasting confections—rendered fat, dried fruit, and flour; the musty smell of damp equipment; the smoky scent of burning charcoal; and an indescribable human funk. He had noticed bedding stuffed carelessly beneath the large kneading table—presumably where the apprentices and shop hands slept at night. And beside the oven, someone had actually wedged a chamber pot.
He glanced back at the "Designated Supplier of Da Shijie" placard hanging in the shop and couldn't help a rueful inner smile. How had Zhang Yikun managed this arrangement? A designated supplier, indeed—with sanitary conditions like these, it would be strange if the food produced here didn't cause problems.
Liu San wore a police uniform to conceal his status as a Senator. He had proposed to Lin Baiguang that he wanted to venture deep into streets and alleys to inspect Guangzhou's public health conditions. Lin Baiguang had arranged for him to join a different census team each day. This way, Liu San could observe discreetly while using household registration as a pretext to enter places normally closed to outsiders.
He wanted to see the true sanitary conditions of Guangzhou—particularly the scope of the epidemic prevention challenges they faced.
The Guangdong Campaign was not expected to produce many combat casualties. The greatest pressure on the health department actually came from epidemic prevention. Guangzhou was a metropolis of five or six hundred thousand souls; even in the modern era, the burden of public health and disease prevention would be considerable—let alone in the seventeenth century, when sanitary conditions were appalling and infectious diseases ran rampant.
The sanitary conditions of ancient cities were extremely poor. In the twenty-first century, Liu San had read countless treatises, monographs, and documentaries about the sanitation infrastructure of ancient cities—all filled with phrases like "the wisdom of ancient working people" and "ahead of its time." If not for the plentiful authentic photographs and written records preserved from the living specimen of late-Qing medieval society, he might well have believed them and assumed that Hengdian Film Studios accurately reconstructed the past.
The reality was far different. Liu San understood that most medieval cities had no sanitary water supply or sewage systems—or only minimal ones. Each spring and summer, epidemic diseases raged unchecked. "Sunstroke"—often caused by contaminated food—was one of the most common causes of death in summer.
This was precisely why the Senate kept its distance from Ming cities and preferred building new towns on vacant land. As Wen Desi put it: "Ancient cities are, in essence, garbage heaps infested with rats, bedbugs, fleas, and every manner of pathogen. No amount of silk, marble, or scenic landmarks can mask the stench they emit."
One of Liu San's tasks was to safeguard this city's health. In particular, he needed to stamp out every latent threat to public health and epidemic prevention—malignant infectious diseases in the seventeenth century were no laughing matter.
But as he followed the census team through the streets, he quickly realized this would be no simple undertaking. Seventeenth-century Guangzhou was not an overcrowded city. Like all traditional Chinese cities, the walled area contained substantial vacant land: some plots left behind when residences and temples fell into ruin, other tracts that had never been built upon at all. These spaces held vegetable gardens, paddy fields, and even the occasional scattered cemetery.
Yet residential dwellings and shops remained remarkably cramped. This strange paradox puzzled him. He asked Jia Jue, a retained clerk from the Revenue Office, who explained that though urban land was plentiful and prices not particularly high, the cost of building was prohibitive. A small plot of land lay within reach of many ordinary citizens, but properly constructing a large house exceeded most people's means—brick and tile were simply too expensive. Even middle-class families building homes had to incorporate scrap brick and salvaged tile. Only grand lineage houses, Buddhist temples, and government offices could afford to build with properly dressed bricks laid in neat, mortared joints.
Traditionally crafted bricks and tiles relied entirely on manual labor, and firing them was both time-consuming and fuel-intensive, resulting in low output and correspondingly high prices.
Bricks and tiles were expensive; timber for beams and pillars was no cheaper. Guangzhou sat in the Pearl River Delta, where no building-quality timber grew nearby. All of it had to be shipped from upriver. The longer the journey, the higher the cost—even tofu would fetch the price of meat by the time it arrived.
Having spent over ten days in Guangzhou, Liu San had gained a deeper understanding of seventeenth-century life. Not only manufactured goods but natural resources were extraordinarily expensive. Compared to the rock-bottom cost of labor, the only explanation was abysmal productivity.
Despite available land, housing remained cramped and residential population density high. Scenes like the Zhang family's pastry shop—where apprentices and shop hands slept on makeshift beds atop the shop floor at night—were ubiquitous among the city's merchants and workshops.
More alarming still: on government-owned land outside the city walls along the moat, there sprawled shanty settlements of the urban poor. These were not the "shanty redevelopment areas" of twenty-first-century Chinese urban renewal, nor the slums of Brazil or India—they were something even more primitive. Almost no structure stood taller than a person, just "rolling-on-the-ground shacks" constructed from bamboo poles, straw, and scrap wood on the damp, muddy banks of creeks. Often these huts rose directly beside potter's fields and mass graves. Some shanty areas were built atop "charity plots"—the living dwelling side by side with the dead.
Crowded conditions; drainage facilities practically nonexistent; no public latrines whatsoever; open dung vats everywhere; crisscrossing waterways choked with years of unscooped sludge and reeking to high heaven... Liu San thought to himself: this was the perfect breeding ground for epidemic outbreaks. How had the Guangzhou of old managed to survive? He would have to investigate when he returned.
He hadn't intended to inspect the tofu workshop—surely its conditions were no better than the walnut pastry shop. But then he reconsidered: tofu production required large quantities of water. The shop couldn't rely on hauled water; there must be a well. He might as well check the water quality.
Walking into the workshop, he saw that registration was in progress. He paid it no mind and surveyed the surroundings instead. This too was a combined shop and workshop. The floor was bare earth, quite muddy from the heavy water use in tofu-making; straw sacks had been laid over it for easier footing. The pot for boiling soy milk, the wooden buckets for holding it, and the boards for pressing tofu looked reasonably clean, covered with yellowed white cloth. But behind the soybean-boiling stove lay a heap of raked-out ashes and a stack of firewood. The soybeans, stored in straw sacks, rested directly on the earthen floor atop nothing more than a tattered reed mat.
(End of this chapter)