1 where does the military expenditure come from?
In 685 BC, in the first year of Qi Huangong, Guan Zhong was in power.
From a street vendor at the bottom of society to today's Qi Shangqing, more than ten years of ups and downs and humiliation have made Guan Zhong feel a lot. However, the reality did not give him much time to lament. At the beginning of his tenure, he made a passionate and ambitious promise that within 30 years, Qi would become the overlord of the north. However, at present, this country faces two major problems. If we don't solve them first, its survival will be in trouble. Due to the lack of military expenditure, Qi has repeatedly reduced the size of the border guards, while Lu, just south of Qi, took this opportunity to repeatedly harass the border of Qi. What's more, in the southwest, a big country and a small country separated by a wall, the thriving Chu State is coveting the land of the Central Plains.
Of these two problems, the latter is the most difficult. Chu is the biggest stumbling block to Qi's hegemony. Chu people have strong cohesion and rich experience in military operations. King Chu Wen and Qi Huangong have the same ambition. Once its wings are full, it will be its best choice to seize and consolidate the grain-producing areas in the north, which will undoubtedly deprive Qi of the development space-Chu must not preempt!
To prevent Chu from developing northward, it is necessary to build a strong enough army to compete with it or even overwhelm it; To build a strong army, we must first revitalize Qi's economy. Without a solid national economy as the foundation, hegemony gained solely by military force is just bellicose and difficult to last. Military expenses! Military expenses! Military expenditure has become the bottleneck of Qi's development. Even if the generals have the best wisdom and tactics, they can't command an underfed army! Similarly, the best way to restrain Chu's military power is to restrain Chu's economy. The weakest link in Chu's economy is salt, which is what Qi has!
A grand blueprint for the trade war is taking shape. Exhausted by the natural advantages of Qi, the Chu people were forced to spend a considerable part of the national labor force on producing silk and tea in exchange for salt. At the same time, Qi also exchanged a lot of materials and enriched the national treasury through trade with other countries.
2 salt as a strategic material
The first decree issued by Guan Zhong after he took office was to register and manage all salt-making workshops in Qi State. This is the first step to revitalize the salt industry in Qi State. Gradually, the salt-making sites in Qi developed from small workshops into large-scale salt-making sites with compact production links and detailed division of labor, and the salt-making technology as a whole has been greatly improved. However, subordinates are quite dissatisfied with these achievements. They are puzzled by the unorthodox way of doing things of the new Shangqing: one is not in charge of the army, the other is not authorized, and he is busy studying and cooking salt every day!
Guan Zhong has no time to explain his plan to others, but he has the full support of the King of Qi behind him. The King of Qi did not understand Guan Zhong's practice, but he knew Guan Zhong and believed that he had his reasons for doing so.
In the history of human civilization, salt is almost as important as fire. The main component of salt is sodium chloride, which releases sodium ions and chloride ions to maintain the osmotic pressure of extracellular fluid and affect the movement of water in the body. In addition, chlorine is an important component of gastric juice. Chloride ion enters gastric juice from blood through parietal cells, maintains electrical balance and forms hydrochloric acid, which is the main component of digestive juice. More importantly, salt can also maintain the normal excitability of nerves and muscles. A combat unit may not have enough to eat for various reasons, but soldiers must eat enough salt before fighting!
During the Spring and Autumn Period, Chu had the largest territory among all countries, covering today's Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and other places. Even today, these three provinces have many similarities, such as humid climate and spicy folk customs. Chu has not produced salt since ancient times. At that time, Chu was not near the sea and could not produce sea salt. There is well salt in Bashu in the west, but the transportation cost is too high. Today, people in Hunan love to eat Chili. Many people think that this is because peppers drive away the tide. However, Fujian, Zhejiang is also humid, but residents like sweets. So there may be another reason why Hunan people like to eat Chili-perhaps because the price of local salt is high, Huxiang people can only use Chili instead of salt. Of course, the Chu people in the Spring and Autumn Period were even more pitiful. Pepper originated in South America and spread to China in the Ming Dynasty, so Chu people didn't even eat pepper, so they had to bite the bullet and buy salt at a high price in the "international" market. In this exchange, a lot of silk and lacquerware made in China were consumed. This shows that the lack of strategic resources is a terrible thing for a big country seeking to rise.
The production process is not complicated.
The coastal area of Qi is rich in mineral resources-brine, which was born out of the sea, and its salt content is much higher than that of seawater. Today, there are still a lot of underground brine in the south bank of Laizhou Bay, with an estimated total area of 1.500 square kilometers, and the salinity is four or five times higher than that of normal seawater.
At that time, the way of making salt in the State of Qi was called drenching and frying. Besides brine, plant ash was also used. The main components of plant ash are potassium carbonate and sodium carbonate. Salt-making workers first dig two communicating pits on the clay layer, one deep and one shallow, and then spread several layers of fine straw or reeds on the holes connected with the deep pit at the bottom of the shallow pit, compact them as a filter net, sprinkle a layer of plant ash on the net, and then pour plant ash with the collected concentrated brine. Magnesium chloride and calcium chloride in the brine react with sodium carbonate in plant ash, which precipitates and is intercepted by the filter, while sodium chloride dissolves in the brine and flows into the cellar with the brine to become a high-concentration sodium chloride solution. Salt workers scoop out the concentrated brine in the deep pit, and then there are two main treatment methods:
Firstly, the concentrated brine is boiled in a large pottery pot to promote the evaporation of water, and then the brine is naturally cooled in the pottery pot. Due to the great reduction of water, salt precipitated from the solution. Because it contains magnesium chloride, the salt produced in this way is slightly bitter. The second is to pour the brine into a shallow pot and boil it. Before long, high-purity sodium chloride will precipitate from the bottom of the pot; At the same time, during the heating process, magnesium chloride will be decomposed into gas and white and odorless magnesium oxide. The salt made in this way is not easy to deliquesce and tastes good, and is mainly supplied to nobles.
4 monopolize the "international" market
Yan has a long coastline. However, located in the relatively cold northern shore of Bohai Sea, the coast that can really meet the salt-making conditions is very limited.
Vietnam's coastline is equally long. However, due to its location in the south of the Yangtze River, Yue was busy with the transformation of domestic topography and the construction of infrastructure during this period, and had no time to vigorously develop salt industry. What's more, there are not many shallow brine deposits in the coastal areas of Zhejiang and Fujian where Yue State is located. So the salt-making method in this country is to boil seawater directly. But the salt content in seawater is not very high. Boil seawater to evaporate water, concentrate the solution to 265g of salt per kilogram of seawater, and the salt begins to precipitate. Therefore, the efficiency of salt making process in Vietnam is very low; In addition, there are too many impurities such as magnesium chloride and calcium chloride in the salt. They are important water absorbents. Therefore, Vietnamese salt is easy to harden and the market is not good.
Only Qin attaches importance to salt production and has rich lake salt resources. However, the salt of the State of Qin was "sold by the government and the people". The government organizes salt production and then sells it through agents. After the agent raised the price, Qin Salt lost its price advantage in "international" trade. Qi's model is just the opposite, private salt production, official acquisition. With the encouragement and support of the government, the salt industry in Qi developed rapidly. Qi became the monopolist of the "international" salt market.
In the following years, the salt trade of Qi quickly became an invisible hammer in its hands. This played a decisive role in Qi Huangong's hegemony.