The children looked at the mother with uncertainty, mulling over her statement that they could bribe anyone with money. How were they going to bribe them? Mother’s words were really profound!
Qi Qingyao downed the chicken soup in one big gulp then said slowly, “But it does seem that even if our house in the village is essentially complete, we won’t be able to stay there often.”
“Why not?” Erniu asked.
“Living in the village together with people like that would only invite trouble.” After all, if one issue was to crop up daily, it still would annoy the hell out of her even if she could easily handle it. “My retirement plan is about to be ruined.”
The children made eye contact with each other but said nothing.
They only looked at their mother quietly.
Some time passed and Qi Qingyao finally made a decision. “We still need to earn money, so let’s buy a house in Qingzhou City! If we live in a city, we will have plenty of good food to eat and also a clay stove for the winters. It’d be convenient to get some coal too. Ah, I want to go drinking and watch pretty girls dance. I heard there are even pleasure boats. A pleasure boat in our hometown would probably only be some yacht! How wonderful would it be to have a yacht that we can occasionally bring round the Jiuli River and take in the street sights!” Anticipating their bright future, Qi Qingyao smiled as she asked the children, “Don’t you guys think so?”
“….Uhh.” A yacht? The children could not understand a word of their mother’s whimsical musings but they still blinked their big eyes and nodded seriously, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”
“If Mother says so, then it definitely is,” Xiaobao also supplemented seriously.
“The next step is to think about how we’re going to get the money to buy a house. Didn’t we talk about this with Jiang Bai before? He said the housing prices in Qingzhou City were quickly catching up to the housing prices in Capital City. Heir Pei’s mansion is beautiful but it’s almost half the size of the palace. We can’t compete with that. Our objective is just to buy a ten thousand-ping mansion. It’d be great to have a living pond in the garden as well.” Qi Qingyao began planning their future.
The children listened to her and were puzzled.
Qi Qingyao thought to herself, based on what Jiang Bai had said the last time, she could probably buy an abode worth ten thousand taels with ten thousand taels of silver and it would likely be located at the edge of Qingzhou City. She was just afraid that with the house being located at the edge of the city, each ping of land would still average at ten taels. That would probably mean thirty taels to a hundred taels a ping for the best plot of land plus upscale housing. No wonder Jiang Yeqian asked her to forgo any thoughts about a mansion akin to the one Heir Pei had stayed at for his recovery.
It would easily be the price of a mansion in Shanghai in modern times.
Even if she had four spare kidneys in her family, selling them would not be enough!
If they were to calculate the price of a ping of land to be thirty taels, then the price of a thousand ping would be three thousand taels, and this was not including the mahogany or phoebe zhennan furniture inside.
Qi Qingyao suddenly realized that she once read in literature that during the Tang Dynasty, Bai Juyi had served as an official in Chang’an for 20 years, but still ended up not having enough money to purchase a house in Chang’an. In the end, he could only buy a house in Weinan County, which was a satellite city of Chang’an. After buying a house, he then settled his family in Weinan.
He might have been able to save money by buying a house in the suburbs, but then he would waste his time every day on commuting. Depressed, Bai Juyi then moved to the dormitory provided by the court and lived a pitiful life separated from his wife and children.
In the end, Bai Juyi wrote an emotional poem with reluctance; twenty springs in the imperial capital court brings naught peace in poverty…
The poet Du Fu had been even more pitiful. He did not have money to buy a house in Chang’an and had gone on to make a living in the second-tier capital of Chengdu. Things had not gone well and thus he temporarily set up quarters that faced the river. In the end, some strong winds blew his roof away and Du Fu had wrung his wrists in an angry lament—
Where be a large broad shelter, ten thousand spans wide, a roof so large that all the world’s poor can share with joy?
