The summer rainy season arrived on schedule, and turmoil duly followed in the Eastern Capital.
Just as Zhang Xing had expected, this round of turmoil began in the prosperous commercial districts on either side of the Luo River. Absurdly, the Southern City escaped the first stroke of the knife precisely because its paupers, uncertain where their next meal would come from, could not possibly have any gold or silver.
The first to act were indeed the Street-Cleaning Tigers.
There was no helping it, truly no helping it. They ordinarily did similar business, always skimming profits from commerce, and many Chief Banner Officers even ran established gold and silver businesses. It was, so to speak, their professional specialty... Meanwhile, constant contact with commerce and street life had naturally left the Eastern Pacification Office's Street-Cleaning Tigers lax in discipline-or, to put it bluntly, riddled with corruption. Pick out almost any of their Chief Banner Officers or Squad Leaders, and you essentially had a gang wearing an official skin.
This left them without the slightest qualm about choosing, almost as a matter of course, to pass their gold and silver quotas on to the merchants in their jurisdictions.
A Chief Banner Officer oversaw three or four wards and several dozen actual Commandants. Their monthly salaries amounted to a few taels of gold and several dozen taels of silver, or a hundred-odd strings of copper cash. Going around the merchants to collect it, even if the collectors could not resist extorting a little extra, still seemed to make no ripples once the burden was divided among all the shops and gangs without powerful backers in their jurisdiction. It simply drifted past quite naturally.
But if the Street-Cleaning Tigers could do it, why couldn't the Jinwu Guard? Why couldn't the constables and yamen runners?
Why