Lu Ming

Chapter 349 Opening of Port (fifteen)

As early as the Hongwu period when Zhu Yuanzhang founded the country, the imperial court formally implemented the existing fish scale book system in the Song Dynasty because of the need to clear the land of the whole country.

The fish scale book is the land register.

After arranging and connecting houses, forests, ponds, and fields in order, and marking the corresponding area, soil quality, barrenness, etc., the land is fixed and becomes a general book of folk fields.Because the plots of fields look like fish scales, they got this name.

In the 26th year of Hongwu, the total number of acres of land in the world after verification was more than 850 million hectares.In this process, the appearance of the fish scale books enabled the imperial court to find out the land rights and clear up the concealment to a considerable extent.In terms of the management level at that time, the fish scale book was a huge progress in the history of land administration.

However, feudal society is like this, debut is the pinnacle, after that, one crab is not as good as one crab.

With the passage of time, in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, due to heavy taxes, people fled one after another, coupled with the land changing hands over the years, concealment and other reasons, the fish scale book has actually become chaotic and inaccurate.

So in the 15th year of Hongzhi, there were only more than 420 million hectares of land registered in the country; in just [-] years, the land used by the country for taxation was reduced by half. This is really a joke in the world, The fields actually grew feet, and they probably put on propellers and ran to Jupiter.

From here, we can clearly see how the landlord class uses hidden fields to hollow out the country: theoretically, as the population grows, more and more fields should be opened, but within a hundred years, they can shrink by half.

So by this time, the fish scale book system had completely collapsed, and instead became a tool for gentry and subordinate staff to unite to embezzle state assets.

Decades later, in the Wanli period, Zhang Juzheng, the first assistant, saw that he couldn't get along anymore, so in order to reverse the economic crisis of the court, he decided to reform taxes and labor, and finally implemented the "one whip method" throughout the country.

To clear up taxation, it is necessary to clear up the basic unit of taxation: the field mu.Therefore, after Zhang Juzheng asked Shenzong for approval, the Ming court carried out the second national land census after the year of Hongwu.

Overall, the results of this census were good.While strictly investigating hidden land and tax evasion, the imperial court recovered the tax owed by the way, completed the land measurement and registration book, and compiled a new fish scale book.

Of course, the funny side still exists: the tax-paying land across the country has recovered to 700 million hectares in this clearing. Although it has increased by nearly 300 million hectares compared with the year of Hongzhi, it still cannot catch up with the total amount of land at the time of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, let alone hundreds of years The people's newly cultivated fields.

So after a little trip, when Zhang Juzheng passed away, life continued to go on like this.

In the reign of Chongzhen when the cross-travelers appeared, as expected, the Fish Scale Book was once again reduced to a tool for the subordinates to fool the court. In fact, all kinds of land data decades ago were copied by the subordinate staff year after year on the latest version, completely losing their reference value.

The materials that record the real information of the local fields have become the private heirlooms of household book offices like Yu Bende.That is to say, the original copies of the Fish Scale Books, which are collected and submitted to the prefectures and counties every year, are actually fakes, and only the copies hidden by Yu Bende and his like are the real basis for tax collection.

All the land conditions in a county, including all kinds of tricks, donations, hidden fields, etc., and even the real information of taxpayers, are recorded on the copy.This kind of private copy is the core competitiveness of the household book office, which is responsible for money, grain and taxation, in the county government.

So Yu Bende was able to get the workshop business from Xiong Dao, not because of his good looks, nor because of his cunning, but simply because he has the land and tax information in Jiading County, and he is a person who cannot be bypassed by the land expropriation.

This kind of investment in Yu Bende has finally paid off today.Yu Bende is very clear about which piece of land in Zuojia Village is hidden land and who owes taxes all the year round.

So when he pointed to the field under his feet, the Zuo family was speechless: You said that this land has been taxed, so please show the land deed and tax payment certificate?But where did Hidden get these things?

"In the 40th year of Wanli, this place was flooded. After the flood, you cut down the forest, built ditches and ridges, and turned this place into a paddy field. Is Yu right?"

Not only did Yu Bende know that this land was a hidden field, he even knew when and who opened it up.In fact, in the densely populated Jiangnan area, the so-called hidden fields and hidden households cannot be concealed at all. This is not a big mountain valley in Guangxi, and the landlord can still hide a thing or two.

These hidden things were originally used by the landlord class to evade taxes by relying on their privileges to evade taxes, so Yintian is actually not difficult to find, it is rare to challenge the courage of interest groups.

Simply this time, someone gave courage to the treacherous old official Yu Bende-using power and interests.

It will be very difficult for the Zuo family whose window paper was pierced.No matter how much tacit understanding there was between the two parties before, today's turn of events will immediately make it difficult for the Zuo family to deal with: all legal basis is not good for them.

So Zuo Hongwu couldn't come up with any clever schemes in such a hurry when he got all the stolen goods, so he could only bite the bullet and use a set of untenable arguments to fool him: "Master Yu, you have misremembered." .This piece of land was handed down from the ancestors in the early years, and there has always been food, but the land deed was lost the day before yesterday, and it has not been reissued."

"Well, it's good to have food." Yu Bende nodded, and then stretched out his hand: "Take a look at the grain skewers."

The grain string is the tax payment certificate. Where does the Zuo family have it?
Seeing that Zuo Hongwu kept silent, Yu Bende smiled sinisterly: "Maybe the grain skewers are also lost?"

"Master Yu, don't bully people too much!" Seeing that he couldn't be fooled, Zuo Hongwu also turned his face.

"It's a joke, Mr. Yu is collecting lessons for the imperial court, why are you lying?" Old official Yu exuded a halo of holiness at this moment, as if he was really serving the people.

"Forget it, let's go." Stretched out his arm to stop Zuo Hongwu who still wanted to distinguish, Zuo Hongtang, the suzerain, looked at Yu Bende with murderous eyes and said: "Give him the land, and give him the people. We Go back and talk."

As the patriarch, Zuo Hongtang naturally looked at things from a more macro perspective.Today's incident is obviously a premeditated trap: the opponent has everything prepared, just waiting for them to jump in.

So he stopped the loss in time and went back to the mobilization meeting - Zuo Hongtang had clearly realized his opponent's determination to go to Zuo's family to die, and now it was time to throw away his illusions, mobilize the whole clan, give full play to the traditional advantages, and fight the enemy to the death.

And what are the traditional advantages of the rural clans?Being at a disadvantage at the legal level, they can only take up the last and most powerful means to fight against the vicious government: mobilizing crowds by force to make trouble.

This kind of craftsmanship, which has been passed down for thousands of years, has not been discarded until later generations: gathering crowds to rob passing trucks, gathering crowds to block roads and set up card tolls, gathering crowds to block road visits and so on.

For the villagers in the 17th century, once a crowd gathered to make trouble, the prefectural and county yamen would definitely have a big head.You must know that the entire strength of a county government is only two or three hundred people, and there are still a large number of bastards in it. The combat effectiveness is worrying, and there is no force to go to the countryside to subdue the troublemakers.

As for mobilizing troops, disturbing the governor over such a matter, the magistrate's black hair will definitely be lost, and "causing civil unrest" is a serious crime in itself.

Therefore, as long as these country people don't rebel and control the water temperature, even if they kill a few tax collectors and other villains, the government will definitely "listen to the wishes of the people" and make things worse in the end.It is not only the officials of later generations who will maintain stability, the same is true in the seventeenth century.

Of course, this kind of double-edged sword will definitely lead to long-term hidden revenge from the local government afterwards. However, the Zuo family is about to end now, who cares about the future?
So later in the day, the landlords of the Zuo family who recognized the situation quickly unified their thinking and began intense mobilization work: for example, telling the tenants that the government would take away all the hidden land, and the taxes owed by the Zuo family over the years would also be taken away this time. They were confiscated together, and no one could escape when they were spread out.

To a certain extent, these rumors fabricated for the purpose of mobilization are actually quite accurate: land requisition and tax arrears are both backup means in the plan of the Land Acquisition Office.

But now these methods are no longer available.Things have developed to the present, and the plan of the Land Acquisition Office has progressed smoothly to the final step: to deal with the big landlords.

Prior to this, the Land Acquisition Office had sent away the more troublesome rich peasants and self-cultivating peasants by throwing money at them.This group of people belonged to the backbone of the traditional struggle. They could do anything for their family business. They had a strong will to fight and were easily incited by the big landlords to fight.

It is much easier to deal with the remaining big landlords and tenant farmers in Zuojia Village.

Needless to say, the number of big landlords and accomplices is rare, and the largest number of tenant farmers also has a philosophical problem: who are they fighting for?It's not that the local tyrants are being divided to divide the land. Could it be that the family is desperately defending the master's property?Therefore, this group of proletarians does not have a strong will to fight and is easy to deal with.

So in the next two days, the atmosphere in Zuojia Village became tense in vain.The clan first gathered the elite people who could fight, and the thousands of tenant farmers in the periphery also put on the posture of fighting with weapons, which was worthy of their surname.

As for the Land Acquisition Office, a total of one hundred or so people were first shrunk into a few courtyards.It was night, and ten reinforcements quietly came to the Land Acquisition Office from the darkness where you could not see your fingers.

Don't underestimate these ten people.This is a new type of explosion suppression personnel specially transferred from the senior staff.They carry sophisticated secret weapons and are the latest professionals trained by the army.

When everything was ready, the Land Acquisition Office began to strike preemptively: they dispatched all the next day, and turned over a hidden field at the entrance of the village, and arrested several tenants by the way.

Then the Zuo family, who had already been prepared, immediately assembled, and the team of thousands of people soon confronted more than 100 people.

(End of this chapter)