Every year of disaster, a large number of foreign victims who fled to famine must flock to Bianliang City.

The victims are just hungry, not stupid. They know where there is food, where there is food, where there is food, and where they can survive.

To put it bluntly, even if you have to sell yourself as a slave, being a slave to a wealthy family in Bianliang is more cost-effective than being a cattle and a horse for landlords in the countryside?

Therefore, when the north encounters drought, the victims will try their best to cross the Yellow River and run south.

The drought this year is particularly severe. The Yellow River has been cut off directly. There is no sign of the spring flood that has been agreed upon. A large number of victims have walked directly from the bottom of the Yellow River, blocking more than ten gates of Bianliang City tightly.

If you could take aerial photos at this time, the scene would have been spectacular, just like a siege of a zombie.

After Chen Jinbai came back from a medical business meeting, he said that there were at least 500,000 victims outside the city.

This number scared the people of Bianliang in the city. You should know that there are only more than one million people in the city, and the number outside the city is half that in the city. The key is that the victims outside the city are all proletariat and are hungry.

At this time, if anyone stuffs a yellow cloth into the carp in the Yellow River, or digs a stone at the bottom of the Yellow River, and then says it is God's guidance, "Will the kings, princes, generals and ministers have a seed?", it is a complete civil unrest.

This kind of rebellion team composed of disaster victims has no discipline or organization.

Not to mention the distance, just say that the Huang Chao Uprising, which was covered with golden armor all over the city, was eaten by people and used human flesh as military rations. This period of history has not been many years.

So more than one million people in Bianliang City began to tremble. The emperor shook, the officials shook, and the wealthy families shook.

Of course, the ones who shake the most are those big grain merchants. They shake, they are just too excited and happy because the opportunity to make a lot of money has come. They have been preparing for half a year, just waiting for this day?

The unit of measurement in the Dazhou, one stone of rice, was about 59.2 kilograms from later generations, and the value was about 1,000 yuan during the Yuanjing period.

Rice prices have been rising slowly since last year. By the Chinese New Year, it costs about 1,800 yuan per stone of rice.

After the Chinese New Year, spring plowing is the spring plow, but because there is almost no rain and it is impossible to cultivate, the rice price will take advantage of the situation and continue to rise, and by March it has risen to 2,500 yuan.

As a result, when the victims siege this time, the price of rice was one per day, and the highest price had risen to 4,000 yuan per stone, which was 4 times higher.

But this is not the first one. All grain stores in the city have begun to be restricted. Each person is allowed to buy only one liter of rice at most, which is equivalent to 1.5 kilograms in later generations.

You should know that ordinary people in Bianliang have only a monthly income of 4 or 5 guan. This is equivalent to having a monthly income of only one stone of rice, which is about 60kg. If the family has a little more people, they will be out of food.

The people in the city have surplus money and food, and they can still make up for a long time. The farmers outside the city worked hard all their lives, but in the end they found that their rice jars were empty, and their bark and weeds were all gnawed. In the end, they had to escape from famine to other places.

The so-called prosperous times, a drought and a plague, were all exposed.

The Great Zhou court was still relatively kind. As soon as the victims arrived, the court immediately started to serve porridge outside the city. Unfortunately, facing the 500,000 victims, it was just a drop in the bucket.

At this time, the major business banks and wealthy families in the city will open their own porridge shops outside the city to do things like accumulating virtue and good deeds.

The porridge shop of the medical store is built outside Guangli Gate, the south wall.

The medical business is just an organization, and the porridge shops inside are handed over to each clinic to run by themselves, and they also have to provide them with the amount of food, grass and firewood needed.

So the clinics were not open at this time, and the whole family was full of men, women, young and old, and everyone wanted to accumulate good deeds, right? Especially Jingshitang Medical Center, which was originally a Taoist priest, was more active in this kind of charity activities.

Jingshitang took out 40,000 taels of silver and originally planned to buy 10,000 shi of grain, but in the end he only bought 1,000 shi.

This is because the clinic has a wide interpersonal relationship and a large grain merchant gave him extra face.

One thousand stones is just one thousand stones, which is better than nothing. Jingshitang quickly set up four large pots to start making porridge, but he could only make porridge. If he cooked rice, he would probably have no rice in just two days.

There is a regulation in the interior that the porridge must be kept standing, otherwise the disaster relief officials will be cracked.

But in reality, how can such a good thing be done? The government-run porridge factory, let alone the chopsticks that cannot fall down, can you put a few grains of rice out of the pot, that is, Master Qingtian.

The normal operation is that the court allocates 100,000 stones of grain, and it would be good if it could get 10,000 stones at the porridge factory. Most of them were greedy by officials, and then they appeared in the rice shop they opened in the city.

Relatively speaking, the porridge shops organized by the private sector are more conscientious. After all, this is a good time to earn a good reputation and a time to accumulate blessings. No one dares to be careless and do it seriously.

There were four long queues in front of Jingshitang’s porridge shop. The two on the left are men, and the two on the right are women and children.

The advantage of doing this is that it allows vulnerable women and children to have the opportunity to get a bite of food fairly. After all, in the face of hunger, human nature is often not so glorious.

The old lady of the Chen family brought all the female family members in the family to put on blue cloth shirts for thick work, and also wrapped a piece of blue cloth on her head. This outfit was the work clothes of a female worker in Jingshishan workshop.

The men in the Chen family also took off their Lan shirts, all of which were short-sleeved and short jackets, which were convenient for work.

Young people with strong strength go to do heavy physical work such as carrying rice, washing rice, splitting materials, and carrying water, while women engage in relatively relaxed porridge.

Chen Buer was a little bit hot, so he kept a big stove and burned the fire. The heat was a little hot, but it was easier to work. Moreover, the big firewood stove was different from the big straw stove, so there was no need to add firewood every moment.

Next to Jingshitang Medical Hall is Quanmingtang. In the past, Quanmingtang was the Baoyao Forest, Xuanxingtang, Gushengtang and other major medical clinics in Bianliang City.

Chen Buer was still interested in greeting friends from other clinics not far away, but saw him throwing a small piece of firewood on Pan Mingguang:

"Hey, Brother Pan, I haven't seen you in the past few days. Have you been gambled again? How much is left of the five hundred taels of gold I gave?"

Pan Mingguang raised his head, looking black:

"Stop talking. After I got home, I saw that my father was pitiful. I gave him 100 taels of gold and then went to a small bet. I had already won, but I didn't know what the bad luck had happened. I lost all the night before yesterday."

"Damn, you are a prodigal son. Four hundred golds are enough to raise a room in Bianliang City to have a mistress. You lost all of them in one night. Why didn't your wife beat you to death?"

"I didn't dare to go back to my room to sleep, and I just hid in my eyes when I saw her."

The two of them were having a lot of fun, but they didn't know that Pan Mingyue, who happened to be behind the rice pile, heard it. The little girl was thinking about it:
Chapter completed!