Warring States Survival Guide

Chapter 10: That Gunye Castle
That Kuno Castle was a flat mountain castle (a castle built on a hill), not as beautiful as the famous Japanese Warring States castles that were famous in later generations. It was built with stone and wood as its foundation, and earth as its walls. It was painted with white lime, but it was a little mottled due to the passage of time and looked a bit shabby. It also did not have the beautiful castle towers that were seen in Japanese landscape pictures in later generations. Overall, it was unremarkable, and there was not a trace of the important town in Guanzhong in later generations in Japan.

Fortunately, Owari Province was an important transportation route in medieval Japan. It was an important land route connecting Kyoto, Sakaimachi, Shimazu, Atsuta, and Suruga, a prosperous commercial and cultural road. In other words, it was best to take the shortest and safest land route.

Therefore, even though Owari Province itself did not have any well-known specialties, and only its pottery and folk textile industries were slightly better, Furuno Castle was still very prosperous, with a large city area and many shops and travelers.

The streets are paved with gravel, and people in the shops along the street occasionally use wooden spoons to sprinkle water to avoid dust. The business environment is pretty good.

The buildings are similar to those of farmhouses. They are all pillar-type buildings on flat ground, consisting of two parts: an earthen room and an earthen base. However, the earthen base is much more exquisite than that of farmhouses. Most of them are paved with wooden floors, and a few even have tatami mats with patterned patterns made of rush.

The doma faces the road and is the business area. Generally, the doma windows are lowered outward to serve as a counter, and samples are placed to attract customers, or product nameplates and price lists are displayed. Customers who are interested will enter the doma to carefully appreciate the products, and the bantou or waiters will also warmly serve them. Big customers will be invited to sit in the doma and served tea.

The prosperity of business was better than Yuanye had expected.

He took a quick look at the shops along the way, looking at the "house numbers" (store names) and cloth banners (advertisements), and saw whale houses (brothels and bars, and a few also had casinos) doing prostitution, and bathhouses (bathhouses) with cloth banners saying "Kyoto Stone Steaming" and "Water Steaming for Health". He saw many ordinary shops such as rice houses, blacksmith houses, weaving houses (cloth shops), and cooking houses. There were also many open-air performers on the roadside - monkey trainers, storytellers, cockfighting gamblers, dancers and talent showmen, and puppet shows. It was very lively.

He even saw a public toilet, which alone was at least 500 years ahead of India.

Wandering in the city, Yuan Ye seemed to see the scenery of the Song Dynasty. If most of the people coming and going were not the thin and thin Wu Dalang, it would really be a replica of the scene of the Song Dynasty town market in the book.

However, Japan has been trying hard to absorb the essence of Chinese culture since the Sui and Tang Dynasties, so it is not surprising to see this scenery.

Yuanye walked around the city, put away his nostalgic thoughts, and started to do his own things. He came here to sell some things to solve the problem of food during this period, so as not to let the Yayoi family go bankrupt, but he was not in a hurry, and his attention was quickly focused on the prices - if you want to sell something, you have to bargain, you can't just talk nonsense.

Copper coins are used here, and more than 80% of them are Chinese copper coins.

Among them, the Yongle coins of the Ming Dynasty are the most useful, followed by the Song coins, Tang coins and other Ming coins of better quality, then Quanzhou coins (a general term for imported privately minted coins), then the tattered copper coins produced in Japan from somewhere unknown, and finally the tin coins and iron coins whose materials are difficult to identify.

The first two are generally called "good money", and the rest are "bad money". The conversion ratio is...

According to field observations and indirect inferences, one thousand wen of "good money" equals one zheng guan (also called zu guan, which is not generally used in private transactions), eight hundred and forty wen equals one shi guan (a non-fixed value, which fluctuates with the market and is benchmarked against the price of silver), and one hundred wen equals one pi, which can be exchanged for three to four times the "bad money".

If it is the worst kind of money, such as tin coins or iron coins that can be broken with a little force, a conservative estimate is that it can be exchanged for six, seven or eight times the value.

He did not see anyone using silver or gold, probably large-denomination currencies that were rarely used in daily transactions on the market, but could be exchanged. He found a "Ginza" at the end of a street where customers could exchange silver and gold coins or broken silver and gold for various copper coins, but not vice versa. He did not know if this was considered an ancient bank.

As for the exchange rate, one tael of gold can be exchanged for 40-50 coins of silver, depending on the quality; one tael of silver can be exchanged for about 840 coins of Yongle money, which is about one coin, but it still depends on the quality. Inferior silver will definitely not be able to be exchanged for 840 coins.

As for prices...

Using Yongle coins as the standard, the price of one stone of brown rice in a rice shop was 806 wen, the price of one stone of fine rice was one string of 220 wen, and the price of one stone of beans, depending on the variety, was 450 wen (black beans), 490 wen (yellow beans), 550 wen (mung beans), and 700 wen (red beans).

Buckwheat is cheaper, with one stone costing about the same as black beans and soybeans, ranging from four hundred to five hundred wen depending on quality. Old mixed wheat mixed with bran and sand is even cheaper, costing more than three hundred wen per stone.

As for how much is a shi, the shi here is a unit of capacity, originally referring to a container for grain. In ancient times, it was very difficult to weigh accurately, especially in the countryside, so the ancient Chinese used capacity instead of weight, chiseling stones according to size, and filling them up was considered a shi. The Han Dynasty's "rank ratio of 2,000 shi" originated from this.

As for why it is now read as Shi (dan), it is because of Zhu Yuanzhang.

He was from Fengyang, and in Fengyang dialect, "石" is pronounced the same as "担", so he pronounced this word "dan". Presumably, his officials would not dare to say, "Your Majesty, what are you talking about? As the emperor, you should speak elegantly. Do you still think you are a peasant?", so as to avoid being skinned and stuffed with straw in advance. Therefore, after Hongwu, this word was pronounced "dan".

Without going into details, ancient Japan also copied the Chinese character "koku" as a unit of capacity, but the size of the capacity was changed many times. At the end of the Muromachi shogunate, Yuan Ye estimated that one koku was equivalent to a little more than 120 kilograms in modern times, which was not light and difficult for one person to move.

Of course, the weight is not very accurate. 1 shi = 10 dou, 1 dou = 10 liters, 1 liter = 10 he. He estimated the weight of 1 dou and 1 liter. The feel of this thing is only roughly correct.

But it should be about the same. He remembered the information he had seen in the Nagoya City Museum before. The daily ration of the foot soldiers in the Japanese Warring States Period was generally 5 go of brown rice. 1 go = more than 120 grams, and 5 go is equivalent to more than 600 grams today. A staple food of more than one catty and two taels should be able to guarantee a certain level of athletic ability - the rice will become more and heavier once cooked, especially at that time Japan usually used the dry-scooping method to cook rice, so the portion would only be heavier. Moreover, the foot soldiers did not only eat rice, but also had distributed sauces, pickles, dried radishes, dried taro, miso and the like. During the march, they would also grab some side dishes such as chickens and ducks, so they could barely eat enough.

In addition, 5 he is the daily ration for training, and 10 he of rice is distributed during wartime. Sometimes, wine and various side dishes are also given.

So by this calculation, two dan of rice a year is enough for him to eat, which can guarantee his basic survival. Adding one patient, it is four dan of rice. So as long as he can get more than three guan of Yongle money, he can have no worries for the time being?
If you want to live a better quality life, at most you need to double your income, so six or seven strings of cash will be enough to eat for a year?

It's easier than you think...

When playing "Taikoku 2" before, Yuanye thought that he had to pay a thousand kan to be considered as money.

He heaved a sigh of relief, and walked out again under the strange gaze of the rice shop assistant, looking at the roadside stalls along the way. Some were traveling merchants selling needles, thread, and rags, while others were nearby villagers, hunters, and fishermen selling mountain products and seafood.

Two crucian carps, loaches and the like cost 1 wen, a carp about the length of a forearm cost 10 wen, a torn wolf skin cost 150 wen, a large bird of unrecognizable species cost 15 wen (the large feathers had been plucked and sold separately), a small bamboo basket of dried mushrooms cost 25 wen, and also came with a large piece of dried bamboo shoots.

Hmm, the dried bamboo shoots at this time are probably last year’s stock?
There are also the odds and ends of the traveling merchants.

Needlework of various colors cost about 10 wen each, a bamboo tube fire starter cost 5 wen (there is a small hole drilled on the bottom side of the bamboo tube, and straw paper, cotton wool and sulfur are placed inside. After it is lit and the lid is closed, it can smolder for one or two days, and will catch fire when blown when used), a copper ear pick also cost 5 wen, and there were some strange things.

For example, there are headscarves woven with ramie stems in the shape of a roof, conical hats with veils woven with thin bamboo strips, straw sandals woven with straw to look like boots, four-buckle straw sandals, six-buckle straw sandals, lucky-buckle straw sandals, straw sandals without buckles and backs that are shaped like socks, Xuta woven with thick straw ropes with very thick and high bottoms, short straw sandals without heels woven with fine straw, and straw rope clogs, etc. Most of them cost between 5 and 20 Wen.

In addition to these strange and peculiar daily necessities, there are also some small jewelry and toys such as silver-plated copper bracelets, silver-plated copper magatama, Kiriko jade, copper hairpins, wooden hairpins, and wooden hairpins. The prices usually range from a dozen to over a hundred wen. There is even a store that sells a set of wooden combs. Several large and small combs are packed in a lacquered box, carved with a complete set of Seven Lucky Gods patterns. They can be used as a hair comb and can also be used for daily combing. A whole box costs three hundred and fifty wen.

In addition, Yuanye also found a complete set of tooth dyeing tools, including copper bowls, copper kettles for boiling juice, copper gallnut boxes (boxes for gallnut ink) and copper ear washbasins for rinsing the mouth. The whole set has uniform patterns, is light and decent, and looks antique. It is quaint and may be an antique. It is being sold for five strings of coins, but the seller looks like an old farmer. Yuanye suspects that this is stolen goods or burial objects.

The horse market was not within the city limits. It was said that it was moved away by order of the city lord for some reason. However, when Yuanye asked casually, a stall owner told him that a good ordinary pack horse would only cost about two strings of coins, which was roughly equivalent to the annual income of an ordinary man - if he was an orphan and had no wife or children, and could sell all the food provided by the owner of the family, he could buy an ordinary pack horse after working for a year.

Pack horses are quite cheap, but as for war horses and famous horses, it is harder to say. They range from a dozen strings of cash to dozens or hundreds of strings of cash, so ordinary people don't need to think too much about it.

Yuanye had an idea of the current prices, determined his bottom price, then found a "earth warehouse" and went in.

(End of this chapter)