Riot
Historically, wars—or armed disturbances of equivalent scale—have not infrequently been sparked by incidents of almost absurd triviality.
Consider the First World War, touched off by the assassination of a crown prince and his consort. Or the Sino-Japanese War, which began because a single soldier, stricken with diarrhea, reported late for roll call.
Such ridiculous catalysts work because, by the time war erupts, the spark itself has ceased to matter. Decades of tangled causes have already piled up beneath it—emotional, economic, social contradictions and injustices, the shifting weather of international politics—until some pretext finally sets the stacked kindling alight.
In short, war is nothing more than the release of fuel that has been gathering for generations.
The present peasant unrest was no different at its root.
For decades the landlords had bled the farmers dry. Some landlords would surely bristle at the word “exploitation.” A few might even believe they had shown kindness, offered help in hard times, and lived side by side with the people. Yet looking at the society as a whole, Jing was a realm in which the peasantry was squeezed by the landed class. Indeed, had any pre-modern state ever existed in which farmers were not exploited by the aristocracy?
Most farmers owned no land of their own. They tenanted the fields of landlords, surrendered the greater part of their harvest as rent, and still found themselves compelled, on any pretext, to hand over labor or produce. Freeholders who possessed their own plots fared somewhat better—but their numbers dwindled with every generation. Even when a new dynasty, eager for early tax stability, proclaimed the principle of land to the tiller—granting ownership to those who opened new fields—within a few generations those freeholders’ lands had been swallowed by neighboring landlords.
The most common method was to lend grain in a lean year, then strangle the borrower with usurious interest until the fields changed hands. Others monopolized watercourses so that freeholders’ crops failed. The more brazen colluded with county magistrates and simply seized land by force. The great landlords who boasted of a thousand or ten thousand bushels of grain might claim clean hands themselves, yet most of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had piled up exactly that sort of karma.
Thus the unrest was inevitable.
“Give us water!”
“What does a jinshi title count for? Out with the bloodsucking landlords!”
“We demand the right to live!”
“Guizhou’s clean water belongs to everyone!”
Farmers rolled up their sleeves and surged toward the landlords’ mansions. Their shouts and curses left the landlords stunned; they had never seen their tenants like this. Human nature is always the same: at first one steps carefully, but after two or three unpunished violations the fear of consequences evaporates. Yet when a creature long trampled underfoot suddenly rears up and bares its teeth, the emotion that floods the oppressor is not regret—it is rage.
“How dare you! Filthy dogs, clear off at once!”
The gatekeepers, flustered yet scowling, roared threats. Farmers who once would have grinned and bowed now only bellowed louder and pressed forward.
“Who the hell do you think you are, barking orders?”
“Proud of being a rich man’s lapdog, are you?”
“You—you bastards?!”
The stewards, servants, and household fighters who had swaggered for years on their masters’ prestige—behaving as if they themselves were officials—stared in bewilderment at the mob rushing them with bloodshot eyes. The usual slap across the face now carried the risk of real catastrophe. Still, the landlord side could not yield, so they resorted to the only weapon left: louder curses and bluster. The farmers, already past the breaking point, no longer flinched.
In any such clash of wills, the balance is usually shattered by one or two hot-tempered souls. An old man lunged at the chief steward of Scholar Hwang’s house.
“You dogs! You rotting dogs! In the famine year you lent me a few scoops of barley, then stuck me with an insane interest rate and robbed me of the fields my ancestors handed down! Finally I thought I could scrape by planting sugar cane—and you not only cut off the irrigation water, you smashed the new wells and the purification devices so we couldn’t use them either! Are you even human?!”
“This… this crazy old bastard’s lost his mind!”
“Aaagh!”
The servant shoved the old man hard by the collar. The gaunt elder flew backward and crashed to the ground. Several unlucky coincidences overlapped. First, the servant was large and powerful while the old man was aged, emaciated, and light. Second, the old man, already half-mad with fury, could not break his fall. Third, the back of his skull struck a protruding stone on the ground.
Thud.
“Guh—!”
Eyes rolling white, the old man landed, nose bleeding, convulsed once, and went still. An absurdly accidental instant death.
“Hey… old man? Old man?”
“H-he’s not breathing…”
“He’s dead…”
“Old Jeong from Chestnut Hollow is dead!”
“Scholar Hwang’s servants beat a man to death!”
The rage that had been compressed to its final limit detonated the moment the crowd saw the corpse with their own eyes.
“The landlords’ dogs are killing us!”
Dozens of bodies crashed forward; even the strongest servants were overwhelmed. Once violence began, the other side did not simply endure it.
“What’s all this racket?”
“Die!”
The hangers-on who had fattened themselves on the landlords’ patronage—men of low scruples, figures who hovered between orthodox and unorthodox, half-outlaws, mercenaries—seized weapons the moment their benefactors were threatened. Before their swords and sabers the unarmed farmers fell like cut straw. Blood sprayed; entrails spilled; the peasants screamed and scattered for home.
“Aaaaaagh!”
“They’ve drawn weapons! They’re murdering people!”
One retainer flicked the blood from his blade and sneered at the farmers fleeing like a flock of terrified sheep.
“You ought to know your place before you stretch out your legs. How dare you forget yourselves.”
“…And who exactly forgot their place?”
“What?”
The warrior spun, irritated by the voice at his side. A powerfully built man stood glaring at him with a twisted expression. He carried no weapon, yet his frame was so imposing a bear would have looked small beside him. Even the shabby hemp clothing could not hide the slabbed muscle; the retainer felt a flicker of intimidation.
“W-who are you, brother? Come to protest to the Scholar as well? If so…”
He flicked a glance at the other retainers—armed with spears, sabers, swords—who exchanged looks. The silent message was clear: no matter how strong you think you are, don’t be a fool. Leave while we’re still asking nicely.
Im Deok-sul, King of the Green Forest, nearly barked a laugh at the sheer gall of it. Instead he swallowed the bitterness and clenched his teeth.
“With that stupid blade-work of yours, the chance to walk away without blood is over. A great deal of blood is going to flow now.”
He turned on his heel and left Scholar Hwang’s compound; he needed to hear Hwi-yeom’s account.
“…Hmph. All bulk and no substance.”
One of the retainers watching the broad back recede raised his voice to dispel the unease.
“Blood? Nonsense! We just stopped a bigger fight from starting! A small scrap can always be crushed by overwhelming force—”
His head burst. More precisely, his forehead cracked open and blood fountained. The man clutched his skull and screamed.
“Aaaargh!”
“What the—?!”
A second stone hissed through the air and smashed into another man’s mouth, scattering teeth like corn kernels. The farmers who had fled had returned and begun to hurl stones.
Never dismiss a mere stone-throwing. Stone combat—seokjeon—produced casualties every year and, in ancient times, had been a legitimate weapon of war. The earliest strategy of prehistoric hunters facing beasts was to form a pack and fling rocks. Even a thin strip of cloth or leather sling turned a pebble into a missile capable of dropping a Goliath. A Peak master, or even a First-rate martial artist, might casually deflect dozens or hundreds of stones and then slit every peasant’s throat; but the retainers here were ordinary Third-rate at best, Second-rate if they were lucky. What caliber of fighter, after all, ends up as a rural landlord’s hanger-on?
Several warriors died under the barrage. That was enough to drive the rest into a frenzy.
“How dare you!!”
One fighter whirled his saber like the wind, batting away four or five stones, then streaked forward and in an instant beheaded six or seven farmers. Yet while he paused to catch his breath and turn, a pitchfork slammed into his back.
“Keuugh?!”
As he stiffened from the ambush, a flail used for threshing barley crashed down on his shoulder and shattered bone; the saber dropped from his hand. Farmers with sickles and hoes closed in. In moments he was reduced to a lump of meat no longer recognizable as human.
The fury of the people proved far stronger than the landlords and their retainers had imagined.
And so, throughout Guizhou Province, landlords’ heads began to appear on stakes, and landlords’ houses began to burn.
“This… this is…”
The Surveillance Commissioner trembled, face ashen. Hwi-yeom asked quietly,
“What do you intend to do? I expect the Regional Military Command will begin to move soon.”
“…Move?”
“Yes. How do you propose to classify this incident?”
Hwi-yeom’s eyes were as cold as glass.
“Is it a peasant revolt born of unbearable landlord exploitation? Or is it a disturbance caused by landlords so blinded by greed that they slaughtered the people?”
“…Academician Dang!”
“Do not lose your temper. Think rationally. You must want something from me. Will you truly allow the Regional Military Command to take the field? Once they start killing His Majesty’s subjects, what do you suppose will follow? Revolt or disturbance—the end result will look much the same…”
The Commissioner grasped the meaning hidden between the lines. Only Hwi-yeom could end this chaos. He alone held both the moral authority to calm the enraged farmers and the martial force to restrain the retainers now half-mad with vengeance for their fallen comrades. Of the two pillars of provincial administration, he was the sole person who could keep either the common folk or the landlord faction from being branded as traitors and massacred—saving both sides with the least bloodshed.
From the beginning he was never a man the landlords could lead about by the nose. Why was the title of hero who would save the Central Plains ever hung on such a creature? This man is less a hero than a cunning overlord…
Even so, the Commissioner could only bite his tongue and bow his head.
“…Help me. I wish to settle this as amicably as possible.”
“And the price?”
“…You’re talking of price at a time like this?!”
“Do not misunderstand me. I still regard us as the injured party, the ones who suffered from the landlords’ greed. Had they simply yielded and allowed the people to use the wells and purification devices I dug free of charge, none of this would have happened.”
“….”
The Commissioner squeezed his eyes shut.
“I will persuade the Provincial Administration to transfer the water rights from the landlords. Whether the promise is worthless by this point, I do not know.”
“That will suffice. I will mobilize the fighters at once. And—though it may sound like an excuse—I never intended this outcome. I judged the risk high, yet I expected the landlords to come to the table over their interests. That much is the truth.”
“…If it is the truth, then hurry—before the situation becomes irreversible.”
“We will move quickly, so that even one fewer life is lost.”
“I am counting on you.”
The Commissioner’s throat felt raw. Hwi-yeom’s urgency matched his own.
Just then a visitor arrived.
“Chairman, I was told you wished to see me.”
“Ah—President Im.”
It was Im Deok-sul, bandit king who sat at the apex of a million Green Forest outlaws—the King of the Green Forest. He had come to Guizhou at Hwi-yeom’s summons to discuss expansion of the Nokshan Road Traffic Safety Management Corporation, only to witness the present upheaval. His expression was grim. Given that the Green Forest itself had been born when, at the end of the Yuan and the dawn of the Ming, peasants crushed by corrupt officials and local tyrants fled into the mountains with farm tools in hand, the Guizhou unrest did not feel like someone else’s affair.
He fixed Hwi-yeom with the eyes of a furious tiger.
“Chairman. Is this disturbance your handiwork?”
“It is the fruit of the landlords’ greed. In truth…”
Hwi-yeom summarized the events. Im Deok-sul listened in silence, then tipped his head back and sighed toward the sky.
“Damn those landlords—they never change, no matter how many years pass…!”
“President Im, did you bring Nokshan staff with you?”
“Yes… to some extent.”
“Time is short. To prevent a larger clash we must deploy the men at once and tear the farmers and landlords apart.”
“…If it were up to me I’d just butcher every last landlord right now…”
Im Deok-sul spat a thick gob of phlegm onto the ground, face twisted.
“…but then ordinary people would become rebels who raised a peasant revolt. Understood. We’ll cooperate.”
“Thank you.”
At the orders of Hwi-yeom and Im Deok-sul, the Dokwadae and the Nokshan staff scattered in every direction like sparks from a forge.