Hangzhou in December was rather cold, but a light snowfall had come at just the right time, and the frost seemed to lend the air a touch of warmth instead.
Yet even without that bit of warmth, it would not have dampened the workers' enthusiasm. It was cold, but once they got to work, they warmed up. No one wanted to rest, because even in winter, the prefectural government's projects still provided two meals a day, paid wages daily, and even supplied hot tea and ginger soup to ward off the cold.
The truth was that Wang Yan had confiscated the assets of Hangzhou's wealthiest households. Most of them had been involved in the tea trade, and Wang Yan had kept quite a lot of the spring and autumn teas for private use. The finest grades were used as gifts or supplied to the province's senior officials, with some reserved for himself. The next grade went to middle- and lower-ranking officials, the grade below that to minor clerks, yamen runners, constables, garrison soldiers, and the like. The remaining inferior tea was handed out to the workers as a benefit.
The main reason was that those wealthy households had simply been too rich. Wang Yan had taken down ten of the very richest, and their combined estates amounted to several years' worth of tax revenue from Hangzhou's population of three hundred thousand. The Hangzhou prefectural government was flush with money now. Across all nine counties of the prefecture, not a single place lay idle. Construction sites were everywhere as massive development began throughout the entire prefecture.
Under such circumstances, even though the whole realm knew that Wang Yan was determined to raise commercial taxes and go after the great households, plenty of people still came to Hangzhou to do business. Over