Daming Yuanfu

Chapter 2049 Zheng Guoben ([-]) Performance
The news that should be spread has already been spread, and the next step is to watch the performance.

Xiao Daheng, the Zuodu censor of the Metropolitan Procuratorate, was soon ordered to cooperate with Wang An, the admiral of the East Factory, to supervise the "medicine diet case", that is, to investigate the Yikun Palace.The reason for this name is that the reason why the emperor coughed up blood was that some ingredients in all his previous medicinal diets might conflict with the autumn dew that he drank that day. "The Case of Medicinal Diet".

At the same time, Zhao Zhigao's family began to collect money to fill the big hole of his son Zhao Fengwei's 7 taels of silver, and strive to get help from the Ministry of Households as soon as possible to get rid of the crime of "private collection of salt tax" that he was impeached for.

In fact, Zhao Zhigao was not short of money. Although 7 taels of silver was a huge amount of money, the Zhao family could fully afford it. However, there were two reasons why he needed a certain amount of time to collect the money.

The first reason is very simple. Although the Zhao family is rich, it doesn't mean that Zhao Zhigao will put so much cash in his university scholar's mansion in Beijing.Not to mention cash, he doesn't need to keep so much money at hand, even if it's Minglian Reserve banknotes or Jinghua Bank banknotes.

There is not much difference between the Zhao family and many official and wealthy families in the Jiangnan area. Although their assets are sufficient, they are mainly physical assets, such as fertile land, shops, or merchant ships and goods that have emerged in recent years. These things account for the vast majority of their assets.

Of course, they also have cash and bills, and these working funds must have reserves.However, since it is called liquidity, it must be placed in areas that need to flow.

Even though Zhao Zhigao is a senior member of the cabinet, the business circle in the northern part of the Ming Dynasty already has the super giant of the Beiyang Maritime Trade Alliance. How could the Zhao family's business squeeze in?

Of course, objectively speaking, the Zhao family does not have the ability to do business in the capital... If his family does not talk about land, it is mainly engaged in the silk supporting industry, and the regional restrictions are relatively strong.

What is "silk supporting industry"?To put it simply, among the many steps of making silk, the Zhao family is mainly responsible for one of the steps.As I said before, the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions in the Ming Dynasty had a developed economy and a relatively advanced structure. There is no need to say more about the development here, but a few words about the advanced structure.

To put it simply, a relatively complex industrial division of labor has emerged.For example, the silk industry can generally be divided into three major steps: sericulture, silk making, and dyeing and printing.These three steps can be subdivided, such as silk production can be subdivided into steps such as silk reeling, silk adjustment, and weft winding.

In the past, Ming Dynasty did not have enough competition in silk manufacturing—is there a fart competition for Invincible?However, after Gao Yushi developed the Jinghua version of the Jenny spinning machine and put it into his own industry, after more than [-] years of development, the cotton spinning industry has begun to squeeze the silk industry—mainly in terms of price. , Of course, there are also impacts brought about by the improvement of the quality of cotton textiles, etc., which will not be discussed here.

In short, people engaged in the silk industry found that if they did not improve production efficiency and reduce production costs quickly, even if overseas trade still made a lot of money, their domestic market share would be very dangerous.This kind of situation is very familiar to people of later generations, that is, it is time for "industrial upgrading is necessary".

The merchants of Ming Dynasty may not have any academic theories such as "industrial upgrading", but everyone understands the truth, so they are "forced" to upgrade their industries.

On the one hand, this upgrade is for everyone to start researching to see if the silk weaving process can be "mechanized" to a certain extent without affecting its artistry; In that way, each family does its own work, but each family is a one-stop production company, almost all from silkworm rearing to silk making to printing and dyeing.

The former aspect has led to the emergence of a production mode in which weaving and embroidery are separated in the silk industry, that is, I first use machines to weave various colors of silk and satin, and then let professionals do the embroidery by hand.

This has a certain prototype of specialized production, and it can still be regarded as a high-end handicraft art - after all, silk and satin are only the foundation, and embroidery is the soul.Without many years of study and practice, the embroidered things are difficult to be elegant, and people with a discerning eye can tell the difference at a glance.

The latter aspect is closely related to Zhao Zhigao's family's property.Since entering the "Era of Great Division of Labor in the Silk Industry", the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions have been working together for many years, and gradually formed some relatively fixed family industry transformations. The choice is to specialize in printing and dyeing.

Whether it is natural silk or the chemical fiber silk of later generations, it is usually white, and of course there are special varieties. For example, the most precious variety of mulberry silk is celestial silkworm silk, which is jade green.

Then, in order to obtain colorful silk fabrics, it is necessary to go through the printing and dyeing steps.China is the first country in the world to apply fabric dyeing and printing.In the primitive society, natural mineral pigments such as hematite, cinnabar, ochre, stone yellow, carbon black and black earth have been used to dye red, white, yellow, black and other colors.

After entering the civilized society, printing and dyeing has developed from a budding state to a profession.Dyeing already existed in Xia Zhi and Shang Dynasty, and the dyes developed from mineral pigments to plant dyes.

During the Qin and Han Dynasties, the variety of dyes increased and the color spectrum expanded. By the Eastern Han Dynasty, it had expanded from more than 20 kinds in the Western Han Dynasty to 39 kinds.Color matching and color matching technology have also improved, dye making technology is more skilled, and mineral pigments have increased white muscovite.

Printing and dyeing were very popular during the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, and techniques such as twisting, small pattern wax printing, engraving wax-proof printing, and blue and white printing have matured.

In the Tang Dynasty, the method of pounding was to bind the silk and put it in a stone trough anvil, and hold a wooden pestle to stand and practice.Pig trypsin is also used to hydrolyze sericin efficiently, creating a trypsin refining process, which is the earliest invention in China.

At that time, there were more than 30 types of plant dyes, and special printing and dyeing processes such as direct printing with alkaline agent, smudged dyeing, hand-painted printing, letterpress printing, rubbing and anti-dyeing and discharge dyeing were also successively developed.

In the Southern Song Dynasty, the bleaching technology of fumigation with sulfur appeared.There are four techniques for hollow-out printing: plant dyeing, paint printing, color gel printing and gold printing.

In the Ming Dynasty, the printing and dyeing process became more and more perfect.There are already 57 kinds of dyeing chromatograms, but because of the highly pragmatic and random entry, Jinghua has come up with a lot of new gadgets. After the diffusion of these technologies, there are now more than 300 kinds of chromatograms.

I would like to add here that the development of certain technologies often doubles geometrically. In history, there are 704 colors that can be made in the late Qing Dynasty, which is more than 2000 times more than that in the Han Dynasty more than 30 years ago.It is not surprising that Daming's "color number" has increased by about six times because of his high pragmatism.

With so many more colors, the variety of dyes will naturally continue to expand.On the basis of the development of dyeing and over-dyeing techniques, relevant practitioners in Daming created new colors such as light and shade, tea brown, silver, jade, lotus root, agarwood, chinchilla, marshmallow, eggplant, etc., making clothing compatible with cold and warm, more colorful.

The Zhao family specializes in printing and dyeing, and their technical strength should not be underestimated. Now there are five unique "color numbers" of his family, so they are considered wealthy.

However, their family has a certain dependence on Jinghua because the two dyes hematoxylin and gamboge needed in its unique "color number" are mainly produced in the Nanyang region.Well, this may be one of the reasons why Zhao Zhigao couldn't fight to the death with the Real School.

Since the business is in his hometown, there are still many "imported raw materials" that need to be settled at any time when the goods arrive, so of course enough cash flow must be left behind. This is the main reason why Zhao Zhigao will not put too much money in the capital.

The second reason is political.As for the officials of Ming Dynasty, everyone only took the meager salary set by Lao Zhu, and each of them was so comfortable that they almost served the emperor hungry. What about two denarii?

Impossible, absolutely impossible!I have to go here and there, and borrow all my relatives, friends, disciples and old officials, so that I can barely get this number together at the last moment. It is an insult to me, Mr. Zhao Ge, to make it up one day earlier, and it is to question my lack of peace and happiness... Cough, In short, this is what it means, whether you believe it or not, anyway, I believe it.

This practice is very common in the officialdom of the Ming Dynasty, with only a few possible exceptions, such as Gao Pragmatism.But high pragmatism is a school of pragmatism, and his "reason" for doing this is to prove that the path of pragmatism is not only feasible, but also has unique advantages, so his high pragmatism has the attribute of "debating classics".

The School of Mind can’t do this, because as I said before, the School of Mind is essentially a practical study of morality, and they must put moral attributes first, and they are not happy to “blatantly show off their wealth” like Gao Pragmatism.

In this way, of course Zhao Zhigao began to collect money to perform.He actually publicly stated that Zhao Fengwei’s money was collected based on his understanding of the “instruction spirit” of the Ministry of Households—in other words, the Ministry of Households has such a “spirit” Based on the principle of contribution, I decided that it was necessary to increase the levy, so I added it.

In this way, two points are very important: the first point is that the Ministry of Household Affairs must admit that there is such a "spirit", otherwise you, Zhao Fengwei, are "unreasonably speculating on your intentions", not only not legitimate, but also regarded as an official obsessive , ridiculed by all walks of life.

The second point is that the money must be made up as soon as possible, but you can’t say that the salt tax increase is to meet the expenses of the Korean war, but now that the Korean war is over, you quietly swallowed the money yourself.

But there is a problem here, Zhao Fengwei was impeached.Although he is not a Beijing official, the Department of Transportation is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Household Affairs. After the reform of the Ministry of Household Affairs, the supervision system of the Ministry of Household Affairs has become stricter than before. There are clear regulations that officials who are impeached because of economic problems must be impeached just like Beijing officials. Close the door and thank guests at the first message - effectively self-suspension.

Therefore, Zhao Fengwei should have self-suspended in theory now, so this brings up a problem: If Zhao Fengwei has sent the money to the Beijing Normal University Household Department before the impeachment, then it’s fine, just continue to wait for the money to be delivered.But if Zhao Fengwei hadn't issued the money at that time, he could only wait for the household department to send personnel to Huai'an to check the accounts and count the bank.

This is a reasonable and legal procedure, but it takes too long.The Ministry of Household Affairs sent people to Huai'an. The round-trip journey and the audit itself were very time-consuming. It might have been half a year.

The imperial court was also well aware of the troubles of this process, so they came up with some accommodation methods, such as Zhao Zhigao's hole-filling method is one of them.Of course, in fact, this method was deliberately devised by Gao Yushi, as a way for some people to save themselves after the reform of the Ministry of Household Affairs.

This is related to the habit of high pragmatism.As a person who studied law in his previous life, he certainly knows that the law should not be lenient, but the reality cannot be ignored. Now the law can only belong to the law and politics to politics.

The Ming Dynasty was not a society ruled by law, but a society ruled by man. This is a basic fact that must be recognized before any reforms.

Idealism cannot be divorced from the real situation. If there is no high-practical accommodation after the reform of the Ministry of Household Affairs, then the supervision system of the Ministry of Household Affairs is now ten times stricter than before, and the number of people arrested may be tens of thousands. .

As I said before, there are actually not many officials in Ming Dynasty. The typical imperial power does not go down to the county, and there are only three official officials in a county.If all of these were beaten to death with a single stick, if the Ministry of Household Affairs caught economic problems and dealt with them in accordance with the law of the Ming Dynasty, the administrative system of the imperial court might be paralyzed.

Faced with such a realistic situation, Gao Yushi can only put the law aside, give priority to politics, and provide some measures to allow the perpetrators to remedy the crime themselves.In this way, although "guilty must be punished" cannot be achieved, at least it can be regarded as "culprit must be punished", and the stolen money has been recovered and losses have been reduced.

This is of course because the imperial court was not strict with financial management before, and many officials were not used to it when it suddenly became strict, so they had to give some temporary accommodation, but in the highly pragmatic plan, these accommodation measures will eventually be slowed down step by step Slowly canceled.

In short, after Zhao Zhigao announced the incident, he soon began to borrow money to perform.The master borrows a little, the west borrows a little, colleagues borrow a little, and students borrow a little.Each family does not borrow much, ranging from a thousand taels to a few hundred taels... After all, everyone is a good official with a clean sleeve. If Mr. Zhao Ge borrows too much, how can everyone get it out?

On this side, Elder Zhao Ge started to perform, and on the other side, Zongxian Xiao couldn't avoid the vulgarity, and those who should perform still had to go.

Of course, Zongxian Xiao's performance is quite different from that of Mr. Zhao Ge. He mainly performed the outrage of the court over the "medicine diet case" and his determination to investigate it thoroughly.

To show his determination, when Xiao Daheng met Wang An, the admiral of the East Factory who "jointly supervised" the case with him, he made a suggestion that stunned Wang An as soon as he opened his mouth.

"This constitution believes that when Jinyiwei immediately seals off the Yikun Palace, all the people in the palace must be searched by eunuchs selected by Dongchang, and then temporarily live in another palace with only the necessary clothes. After that, the two section chiefs Qian and Zhong will On behalf of Ke Dao, together with Dongchang Da Pang, they searched the palace together to ensure that there are no omissions."

Wang An opened his eyes wide, and asked back: "The outer court wants to enter the Yikun Palace to search, and the eunuchs in the Yikun Palace are also required to evacuate? Hehe... The general constitution has learned that if our family does not allow it, our family will only ask two questions." Question: First, will the imperial concubine also leave Yikun Palace, will the emperor agree? Second, will the two section chiefs also personally inspect the clothes that the imperial concubine left in Yikun Palace?"
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PS: At least half of the lambs are already around, but I am still overcast.Well, I may have practiced the Nine Yin Manual in my dream... By the way, my cold is basically cured, and now I am simply busy.

(End of this chapter)