Chapter 15: Family Property

 

 

Zhou Shuren sat up and watched as Zhulan rummaged around the room, pulling out soil lumps and cloth bags from the corners of the kang bed, walls, and even the floor. The cupboards and beams were within her reach, and the entire room was covered in holes. There were more hiding places for rats than for money.

 

After Zhulan’s search was over, she was panting and gasping for breath. Her body was really weak. No wonder she stopped working at the beginning of the year. After a while, her back was soaking wet, and her legs were suddenly soft. She sat on the kang for a while to relax.

 

Zhou Shuren remembered that his wife’s body was really bad. He asked in a worried tone “Are you alright?”

 

Zhulan waved her hand, “It’s alright, there’s still a clay pot in this room. I can’t pull it out. It’s full of copper coins. I counted a bunch of them, and there were five taels. Everything else has been taken out.”

 

While talking, she got on the kang with her slippers. Looking at the pile of cloth bags, she regained her strength.

 

Zhou Shuren’s gaze was also on them, “All of these?”

 

“Well, these are all the funds in the family. There was chaos at the end of the dynasty, and chaos at the beginning of the new. The owner of this body may not look like she has great wisdom, but she was very cautious. There are no banknotes at home. All that is here are cash and silver.”

 

Zhou Shuren thought to himself, “Isn’t that smart? She only dug holes in one room and found the main stash.” He paused for a moment and asked, “Are you saying that the money at home is enough to exchange for silver bills?”

 

“Oh, there is really a lot of money at home. As far as I can remember, there are no one tael, five taels, or ten taels of small-denomination banknotes. The minimum amount is fifty taels, which are all large.

 

Looking at Yuan shi’s (1) memory, when the dynasty was established, she took out a sum of money to build a house and purchase land. The family has 20 acres of small land, of which 10 acres are paddy fields, and 10 acres are dry fields. The family thought they had spent all their savings.

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At the beginning of the new dynasty, the tax was exempted for three years, and life was a little better. But with many children in the family and the high expenses of their education, as well as the cost of marrying off their sons and daughters, the original owner thought that having a surplus of a dozen or so taels of silver in the family in the next few years would be good enough.

 

But now, listening to Zhulan’s meaning, and looking at these cloth bags and money boxes, he had to think of the original owner’s mother. What an ability she had!

 

Anyway, he didn’t believe that the original owner’s wife had this ability.

 

Zhulan counted the cloth bags, there were eight in total. Then she first opened the money box, and poured out all the contents of the money box, “Here is the land deed for twenty acres of land, the house deed, fifteen taels of silver and copper coins. One thousand three hundred and five, there is still one or two silver taels left, and that’s all I have in the money box.”

 

Zhou Shuren nodded, the money in the money box was similar to the original owner’s estimate, and looked at the cloth bag, “What about these?”

 

Zhulan put the money box back and began to unpack the cloth bag. There were three different colors of bags, and there were bite marks on them, indicating that rats had gnawed on them. Although she was not afraid of rats, she still felt disgusted. In fact, she had never seen a rat before, but the silver taels motivated her to continue.

 

Zhulan opened all of them, and the two of them could see clearly. Each gray cloth bundle contained ten taels of silver, and there were three of them, totaling thirty taels. There were two red cloth bundles, each of which dazzled the eyes of both Zhulan and Zhou Shuren. Wow, gold! In modern times, no one would buy more than ten gold ingots and put them together, right? Each bundle contained five one-tael gold ingots, totaling ten taels of gold.

 

One tael of gold was equivalent to ten taels of silver, so in total, the gold was worth one hundred taels of silver.

 

Zhulan had a good idea of what was going on. These were the five biggest bundles, each of which required digging into the mud. The remaining three were smaller, two of which had been retrieved from the ceiling beams and one from the ground.

 

Zhou Shuren looked at the remaining three cloth bags with anticipation. Zhu Lan opened them one by one. One cloth bag contained two pairs of silver bracelets, a few pairs of silver earrings, and a few silver hairpins. In the other cloth bag was a pair of gold bracelets dragon and phoenix bracelet, two rings, and a few small gold earrings, and the last bag had a jade pendant. The jade pendant was the best type, mutton fat jade.

 

1. The surname of the original body of the FL. Shi as said before means Madam.

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