Before Li Long could ask, Gu Boyuan spoke:
"Where did you dig up these cash coins, old fellow? These don't look like they were kept in storage. They look like they came out of the ground."
"Heh, boss, you've got a good eye." The man who had brought the coins was in his fifties and slightly hunched. Baring a mouthful of yellow teeth, he smiled at Gu Boyuan and said:
"I'm a shepherd from Letuyi. A while ago, when I was grazing my sheep, I found that a flood had washed a stone slab clear in the place I usually took them. These cash coins were piled underneath it. If they hadn't rotted, there would've been several sacks! I picked through them, and these were all that were still usable."
Well, it really was a coin cache!
Letuyi, also known as Camel Post Station, was a traditional post station with a long history. Historical figures such as Lin Zexu, Zuo Zongtang, and other notable people who had visited Northern Xinjiang had mentioned it in their travel accounts and notes.
Where there was a post station, there were households. The northern slopes of Heavenly Mountain in Northern Xinjiang were different from Southern Xinjiang, nothing like the endless Gobi and desert that people in Inland China imagined. Rivers flowing down the northern slopes of Heavenly Mountain crisscrossed the area, and marshes and oases were everywhere. Making a living here was relatively easy.
When the Corps first began reclaiming wasteland here, they mainly worked on marshes and uncultivated land covered in weeds. Even into the eighties, few people touched the saline-alkali land. After all, nothing would grow there.
That only changed after cotton came along.
In the eighties, Letuyi had once been called Northwest's First Township-the Northern Xinjiang Daily had said so, and