The other side of Yue Fei: The tenants of the big landowners in the Southern Song Dynasty had to pay tens of thousands of dan in rent every year

Everyone knows that Yue Fei is a great national hero and the most outstanding military strategist in Chinese history, but few people know that Yue Fei is also a big landowner and he also worked as a developer for a period of time.

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Why is Yue Fei a big landowner? Because when Yue Fei was alive, he owned "one corner of seven hectares of land, one corner of eleven hectares of land, and a triangle of ninety-six acres" in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province. One hectare is 100 acres, one corner is 1/4 acre, and one step is 1/240 acre. If all the above area units are changed to "mu", it equals 788.25 acres of paddy fields and 1196.75 acres of dry land. If these two units are added together, Yue Fei *** has 1,985 acres of land.

You must know that the area south of the Yangtze River in the Southern Song Dynasty was very large. One mu is equivalent to 1.2 acres today. Yue Fei’s 1,985 acres is actually more than 2,300 acres today.

Yue Fei, a senior general, holds many positions. He was not only the "Deputy Commander of Shenwu", but also the "Commander of the Jinghu East Road Appeasement Capital" and the "Prefect of Tanzhou". He is in charge of the military defense and part of the civil affairs of nearly two provinces, and has high power and treatment. As the saying goes, one person is blessed and one person has a house. Yue Fei's status was high and his family basically got rid of farming life. They did not need to cultivate more than 2,300 acres of land, so Yue Fei rented most of the land to tenant farmers, charging tens of thousands of dollars in rent every year.

According to the custom of the Song Dynasty, "a family is named after the land, and the limit is one thousand acres." If a family can own 1,000 acres of land, it is already a great "potential family." Yue Fei's family only rents out more than 1,000 acres of land, so it is not an exaggeration to call him a big landowner.

Nowadays, when we talk about "big landowners", it is often used in a derogatory way. It seems that they all like to plunder and exploit, and they are as rich and ruthless as Huang Shiren. Not really. Take the poster Yue Fei as an example. His fortune was clean, derived partly from his generous salary and partly from his business operations.

Let’s talk about salary first. In the Song Dynasty, the higher the rank of an official, the higher the salary. In the early years of the Southern Song Dynasty, the court had to resist the attacks of nomads and deal with peasant uprisings. In order to ensure that the generals will not rebel, the generals are given higher treatment.

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In addition to his basic salary of 200 yuan per month, Yue Fei also had extra money, envoy money, firewood money, food expenses, monthly rations and occupied land. At that time, the price of rice in Jiangnan was 3 per stone. Based on the calculation of 50 kilograms of rice per stone in the Song Dynasty, the purchasing power is at least equal to the current 80 yuan. Yue Fei's monthly salary plus benefits is more than 6,000 yuan, which is equivalent to about 480,000 yuan!

Let’s talk business. After ten years in Shaoxing, Yue Fei "built 38 rooms in the center of Jiujiang and charged 430 Wen per day in rent." "Gallery" refers to the shop facing the street, and "rent money" is the rent. In other words, Yue Fei developed 38 stores and rented them out, with an average daily rental income of 1,430 pence.

As mentioned before, Yue Fei owns more than 2,000 acres of farmland and rents most of it to tenant farmers for farming, charging tens of thousands of dollars in rent every year. This is actually a management method, which is the most commonly used management method by ancient Chinese literati. As we all know, ancient China was a typical agricultural society. Rich or poor, people have strong feelings about the land. Most people in most dynasties regard farming as people-oriented and cultivated land as an investment with the least risk and the greatest return. It can be said that from the Warring States Period to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, and even to the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, after officials got rich, they usually returned to their hometowns to buy land, hoping to use long-term rented rice to support themselves and their children, and then live a life without worries about food and clothing. The same goes for businessmen, including merchants. After most businessmen succeed in doing business, they invest their money in buying officials and land instead of trying to expand the scale of their business.

However, in the Song Dynasty, the situation changed. Some flexible officials, gentry and wealthy businessmen prefer to invest their funds in the real estate industry and obtain more returns by developing shops and renting them out. Cai Xiang, minister of the Northern Song Dynasty, once said: "People who did business in the past did not avoid doing it. Today, many kings buy properties and markets, and get their capital every day." In other words, in the past, dignitaries did not want to do business, even if they did it occasionally When doing business, I'm afraid of jokes, so I do it secretly. Now even the princes are engaged in real estate and collect rent every day to live.

It can be seen that Yue Fei's development of shops is not an exception. He did not lead the real estate development trend of the Song Dynasty ministers, he just followed the trend.

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The reason why people in the Song Dynasty were willing to use real estate development as a new investment method to replace the traditional investment method of buying and renting land was mainly because times have changed and the commodity economy It is more developed than any previous dynasty, and the population of big cities is denser than any previous dynasty, so that the supply of housing and shops exceeds the demand. The return on investment in real estate far exceeds that of other investments. The high profits have shattered backward concepts.

When Yue Fei was developing shops in Jiujiang, it was also the hottest period of the real estate market in the Song Dynasty. At that time, the Northern Song Dynasty had just fallen, and a large number of refugees fled from the hinterland of the Central Plains to the south of the Yangtze River and settled in Nanjing, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Ningbo, Wuhan, Changsha and other places. This led to a sudden explosion of population and hot money in these cities, and they experienced abnormal prosperity in a short period of time. The vast number of new immigrants are in urgent need of housing, and local businessmen are also in urgent need of expanding their business areas. As a result, "rich families have huge houses, and they actually have house-building corridors", "all divisions in front of the army set up mats", houses and shops mushroomed, and real estate development exploded.

Yue Fei caught up with the good times in business management, but unfortunately he failed to catch up with the good times in politics.