Spring gave way to autumn, winter passed, and spring came again.
Across Henan, the land was filled with the hopeful sight of spring planting. Officials from the Ministry of Agriculture, along with specialists devoted to agricultural research, busied themselves everywhere guiding the people in cultivation. Households toiled in the fields, pouring out their sweat. In some places, even yamen runners and soldiers were organized to help poor families plow and sow their land.
In this bright spring weather, with hope everywhere, Wang Yan held a fan and led several minor officials to inspect the spring plowing outside Xia Prefecture City.
Henan's administrative seat naturally belonged in Fushi, but to better manage the front lines, Wang Yan had moved it to Xia Prefecture. He had to stand at the forefront; he could not hide in the rear.
With Western Xia to the west and the Khitan to the east, this gave him a greater advantage in the transmission of information, as well as in accelerating regional prosperity, population integration, and other such matters.
Though the Song Dynasty was incompetent and lacked the power to expand outward, that did not stop its scholar-officials, from top to bottom, from treating foreign peoples as less than human. They did not treat their own people well, and they treated the people of other races even worse...
The policies he implemented here had, in fact, drawn no small amount of criticism. But since he had not spent the court's money and had instead made this place prosper, they had not made too much noise about it...
The soil here was relatively poor. Over the years, Wang Yan had passed down every agricultural method he knew: composting, deep plowing, crop rotation, intercropping, and the like.
He had also brought in cotton for cultivation. After so much time,