My Apprenticeship to Uncle Jiu: I Was a Warlord in the Republic of China

When Jiang Li led his men back to Nanxi County, he directly gave the task of counting the harvest and distributing the rewards to Zhao Hong.

He himself was concentrating on arranging disaster relief and material allocation work, because as the drought intensified, it would definitely not be possible for each county to carry out disaster relief on its own.

We need to allocate supplies and manpower ourselves to survive this natural disaster.

Fortunately, Jiang Li has been working in Guangdong for many years, and the irrigation network in Guangdong is quite excellent at this time, so it was basically not affected much by this drought.

In addition, since there were sufficient supplies and the roads were unobstructed, he could easily deliver the supplies to the victims with just one order.

So even though Guangxi and Hunan provinces both suffered disasters to varying degrees, he was able to quickly allocate supplies. Not only would he not completely protect them from the drought, but he was able to at least save people.

The supplies were transported to Guangxi and Hunan in truckloads, and then distributed to various counties and towns under the supervision of the Intelligence Bureau.

This allowed the people of the two provinces to gradually feel at ease, and under the arrangement of the county chiefs, they began to save themselves.

Not to mention digging wells, building roads and digging canals, helping the transport team to transport relief grain is also a natural thing to do.

The days passed one by one. Although the drought was still continuing, the people of the two provinces were able to hold on with the help of Jiang Li.

On that day, disaster victims in a county in Guangxi were helping to carry relief food when a dark cloud appeared in the sky from nowhere.

The victims who were moving supplies felt the sky suddenly become gloomy, so they looked up and were surprised to find dark clouds in the sky.

So they immediately ran around telling each other in joy, and as everyone was expecting, the raindrops fell as expected.

Seeing that the rain that they had been looking forward to for several months had finally arrived, everyone began to cheer and celebrate, and many people even ran directly into the rain to have fun.

The scene is even more lively than the Chinese New Year.

...

However, as time went by, the smiles of the people gradually disappeared.

Because the rain was getting heavier and heavier, it even covered up their cheers, and the people in the rain returned to the house dejectedly, looking at the heavy rain with worry on their faces.

Many elderly people prayed in their hearts, "God, please have mercy on us. Don't let a flood come right after the drought!"

However, the weather is often not what we wish. The heavy rain continued to fall until the river could no longer bear so much water. Finally, it overflowed the river bank and formed a flood.

At this moment, everyone's heart sank to the bottom. They all knew that the drought had just passed and floods were coming again.

...

Jiang Li was at the temporary headquarters of Nanxi County. He looked at the increasingly heavy rain and a small whirlpool on the drain in the yard, and sighed helplessly.

The Chinese people have suffered so many disasters. The drought has just passed, and now comes the flood. I don’t know how many people will be affected this time.

He shook his head and went back and forth between the offices in the office area. After all, there are more people here now, and it seems a bit inappropriate to work in the study all the time.

So he specially had someone set up a cubicle in the hall so that it would be convenient for him to communicate with others, so as to avoid wasting time by having others pass messages.

As for why there are so many people, we have to talk about what happened after Jiang Li left for some time.

It turned out that ever since he went to Pingshan, the handling of government affairs had become somewhat troublesome.

Because the nine people he had recruited before were nominally his clerks, specifically to assist him in processing official documents.

But as soon as Jiang Li left, the official documents they handled lost their legitimacy. Since Jiang Li was not there, it was naturally impossible for these documents to be approved by Jiang Li, so the people below simply refused to recognize them.

This directly resulted in the documents sent in from various places being processed in a timely manner, but due to authority issues, they were never sent back for proper processing.

After Jiang Li came back, he felt a headache when he saw the pile of documents waiting for his approval.

Then after two days of overtime, he finally reviewed all the government affairs in various places and made the final decision.

Fortunately, although there were a lot of documents about the drought during this period, Jiang Li had a telegraph machine with him when he left, so he was still on time and had not received the news.

However, since he was in Pingshan at the time, he had no way of understanding the full situation of the drought. So he waved his hand and directly ordered a nine-member clerical team to take full responsibility for the matter, which ensured that these most urgent matters were properly handled.

As for the remaining less urgent matters, they were properly handled after he returned.

When he had dealt with all this, he put the matter of regularizing the nine clerks on the agenda.

As for the specific situation, they were naturally given special workstations, and then a few people were recruited to be responsible for carrying various documents.

The last and most crucial point is to give them slightly more authority, so that these tasks will not be suspended again when I am away!

...

Let’s talk about what Jiang Li has been doing during this period. In addition to reviewing documents, he also carefully reviewed the gains from this trip to Caipingshan.

He discovered that in addition to 30,000 kilograms of gold, this trip to Pingshan also yielded more than 400,000 kilograms of oxidized silver, a large number of gold and silver ornaments, many bronze artifacts, and piles of expired copper coins.

In addition, there are 18,000 gold bricks from the Yuan Dynasty. Each brick is 2 feet 2 inches in size. When measured with a ruler, they are all square floor tiles with a side length of about 66 centimeters.

It is naturally impossible to sell so many newly unearthed cultural relics immediately, so Jiang Li’s income this time was only gold and silver.

But the amount of gold and silver was not much to begin with, and it was barely enough to deal with the drought. Now there was a flood, and it was far from enough.

There was no other way, Jiang Li could only change the original development route and change his previous plan of occupying as much territory as possible before the Japanese pirates launched a full-scale invasion.

The development route was changed to suspend the use of troops first, actively carry out disaster relief and develop people's livelihood, and build a stable rear area.

In this way, a large portion of the funds used for military purposes can be used for disaster relief. However, the price is that the number of troops cannot be expanded within one or two years, which will be a disadvantage when fighting against Japanese pirates in the future.

But there was no other way. When he thought about his own capital chain not being able to turn around, he had no choice but to do this, so as to avoid having to have neither the fish nor the bear's paw.

When he thought about being able to divert a large amount of military funds for civilian use, he simply slapped his thigh and made a major decision, which was to directly order the issuance of his own currency.

An interesting story happened in this process. Jiang Li found machines and personnel for making silver coins from various channels.

He ordered the production to begin, asking them to make coins with the newly unearthed gold and silver, but they encountered problems right from the start.