The Silent Reforms of Eldridge Chapter 18

On March 15, I was promoted to Tingzhanglong Taoist priest in Fujian Province. If you think about it carefully, it has been five years since I took office as the prefect of Shuoping Prefecture!

In April, I waited until Pingding Zhizhou Wenming, acting as the prefect of Shuoping Prefecture, took office, then handed over my seal and went to the province to ask for instructions.

It was a long journey from Shanxi to Fujian, and I still had no money to pay for the trip, so I borrowed 4,000 taels from a foreign bank. Adding in the more than 1,000 taels of Lianlian silver I had accumulated, it was probably about the same. After arriving in Taiyuan, the prefect Wang Lanjun gave me one hundred taels, which I declined politely. I also declined all the gifts from others. Only Fantai Qiaoyong was a family friend of mine, so I accepted the one hundred taels he gave me. In addition, Chen Zhongyun and I were from the same hometown, and he asked me to bring a large sum of money back to my hometown. The two hundred taels he gave me, I Unable to refuse, I accepted it. Jiang Mei invited Qiao Fantai, Ruizhitai and Xuetai Jiao Liquan to invite me to Daotai Yamen for a day. They were very attentive and said that they wanted his son to marry my family. But I don’t have a daughter. I guess he heard me wrong.

On May 18, I set off from Taiyuan with my family. Governor Yang ordered all the officials to line up in the suburbs to see me off, and also ordered three battalions of soldiers to escort me out of the province to show my dignity. When the prefect was promoted to leave the province, there was no precedent for the governor to summon civil and military officials to the suburbs and send them out of the province. Governor Yang said that I had been in Shanxi for many years and had benefited the elders of the three Jin Dynasties a lot, so he personally led the provincial officials to send him out to the countryside to encourage those who came. I can't bear Governor Yang's love for me, but looking back on the past few years, I have worked so hard and suffered all kinds of grievances. Only Mr. Yang can understand this kind of hardship.

A few years later, when I traveled around Gansu, Fujian, and Jiangxi like a puppet, and suffered many mistakes at the hands of Le Bin, Qing Duan, and Zeng Guofan, I recalled all the unpleasantness I experienced in Shanxi and felt that it was really nothing. At least, the two governors in Shanxi praised me very much and gave me a lot of support. This kind of support was never seen again in the last fifteen years of my career.