Haisheng Mingdi

Chapter 212 Cannibalism
Yanzhou Fucheng.

Because Jian Guo is here, this place has become a temporary presence, and all the government offices in the city have also become temporary offices.

Zhu Yihai once publicly said that wherever he is, the Ming court will be there.

Although it sounds a bit arrogant, at that time the Ming Dynasty had already collapsed, and Lu Wang, who had once fought with Fu Wang for the emperor, was determined not to be the supervisor of the country.The emperor has become a high-risk position. If Zhu Yihai disappears, his court will naturally disappear as well.

Outside the magistrate's office, there is the Tongzhi Office of the Qing Army, which assists the prefect in charge of military affairs, and the Supervising, Grain, and Judgment Office, which is responsible for money and food. Mention Xuedao Office.

Others, such as Senggang Division, Daoji Division, Medicine, Jiande County Government, Yin-Yang Studies, Hefeng Cang, Cunliu Cang, Reserve Cang, etc. are complete.

However, the officials in Yanzhou Mansion and Jiande County have almost been wiped out by Zhu Yihai, and all of them have been dismissed. Now they are all ordered to suspend their posts to write reports, trying to find a way to make up for the shortfall.

What magistrates, Tongzhitong, judges, magistrates, county magistrates, and chief clerks, and there are also sub-guards, patrols, soldiers, guards, food supervisors, and even school officials, who are in charge of warehouses. Anyway, from top to bottom, they are not clean. If Zhu Yihai wants to catch it seriously, he should catch a model, and clean it from the inside to the outside from the beginning to the end, so that he won't be confused again.

So many people in the imperial camp are busy with this matter, some of them are outside to check warehouses and measure fields, some are in the city to check account books and compare inventories, some are in charge of interrogation, some are in charge of ransacking houses, they are not idle anyway.

This side is busy with house raids and interrogation, but there is still no time for disaster relief.

There is a long queue in front of the porridge shed, and they use work as relief. As long as they can work, they will go to build the city wall and roads, and even help build water conservancy canals, clear the fields, etc., as much as they can do, and pay the wages and take care of the food. The old and the weak, women and children, just help cook the porridge and light the fire.

Yanzhou now has a lot of food, and the Fang family took the lead to send tens of thousands of grains, so there is no shortage of food for the time being, especially Zhu Yihai has also imposed military control on the grain shops, rice shops, and granaries in the city, forcibly reconciling them at market prices. Buying and buying, and then selling it to the people at a low price, greatly alleviated the problem of high food prices and the hunger of the people who could not afford the food.

Although this is only temporary, the effect is still obvious.

At least now Yanzhou seems to be quite alive, and even people from nearby prefectures and counties have heard the news.

Of course, there are also a group of ministers from Shaoxing who came here.

When they heard that Zhu Yihai slashed Fang Guoan with his sword in Yanzhou, and then attacked the powerful local family, they were all terrified.

Song Zhipu, Liu Zong, Zhou Qibiaojia, He Tengjiao, Ke Xiaqing, Chen Hanhui, Chen Meng, and other ministers, as well as internal ministers Pang Tianshou, Li Guofu, etc., all came in full of red.

"Dear ladies, sit down."

Zhu Yihai was smiling, holding a book in his hand.

Liu Zongzhou had good eyes, and he saw the cover at a glance, "Xingge Regulations".As the censor of Zuodu and the leader of the Metropolitan Procuratorate, how could he not know that it was written by Hai Rui and Hai Gangfeng, and that the Xingge Regulations were issued by Hai Rui when he was the county magistrate of Chun'an in this Yanzhou? The records were completed in the 41st year of Jiajing, and later included in Hai Rui Collection.

This Xingge Regulations clearly records all aspects of Chun'an County, even local regulations and customs, local bribery is commonplace, officials are corrupt, and even details of corvee labor are all recorded. Have.

Liu Zongzhou has read this book, and the above data are very true. From the above, it can be seen that the local government of Ming Dynasty was very chaotic during the Jiajing period, and the burden on the people was extremely heavy.

There are so many problems exposed, but no one can solve them.

For example, Hai Rui said that the county magistrate of Chun'an has as many as 23 items of routine, and the total annual income of the routine is 720 taels, which is only gray income and not illegal.

Not counting corruption, exploitation, embezzlement, etc., it is very common for a county magistrate to embezzle tens of thousands of taels of silver a year.

When Hai Rui was in office, he made drastic reforms, such as abolishing the routine, no longer welcoming gifts to Shangguan, etc., but these things could not be supported by the court.

In fact, if you read this investigation report carefully, you can know why the officials of the Ming Dynasty liked to embezzle. The salary is really too low. , It was also forcibly stipulated that only one or two per month should not be exceeded.

With the power in hand, and in charge of a county, with such a small salary, it is difficult to support oneself, let alone an official, that is, a master, who doesn't hire a few masters to order a few maids to follow?Who doesn't bring wives and children, who doesn't take concubines, who doesn't support mothers, who doesn't have sons?
Just as Zhu Yihai reads Hai Rui's book now, what he reads is actually the real original data he recorded, not how he reformed, because his reform is a castle in the air and cannot be successful.

If you abolish all the routines, and don't even give any legal gray income, then the officials will live on these few stones of grain for a month?is it possible?
If there is no gray income, it must be directly embezzled.

Another example is that for those officials, the maximum amount of money for work and food can only be one tael a month, is it possible?
There are also those Yao slaves recorded in the book. Many of them are poor in strength. Although they can be converted into silver later, there are many problems.For example, if you are assigned to a warehouse errand, if you are a silver agent, the errand hires a person for a month on the surface, but the problem is that the actual employment is more than that. Purchase some things used in the warehouse, this is also borne by the contractor.

Then the acquisition problem is even bigger.

Originally, Kuzi worked for one tael of food and silver, and it was 12 taels a year, but he was responsible for the procurement, and this expense was as high as 400 taels. Isn't this cheating?
But the fact is that it is so outrageous. A large number of conscripts are very harmful to the people. Even if you don’t lose money, if you go to the conscription by yourself, the burden is still huge, and it may even be even higher.

There are all kinds of servitors in the yamen, but only some of them do not cost money, such as Menzi, but most of them consume money, and the money consumed mainly comes from the compradors. Kuzi, one tael of silver a month, you click on this job, and then you pay the silver for the job, but the purchase task is a trap, and you still have to bear it, costing dozens of times the silver to hundreds of taels.

Later, many yamen’s services have actually been integrated, that is, a unified calculation, how much money is needed for all these employees for a year, and then how much money is needed for additional purchases, etc., are all added together, and finally distributed by Junyao, so In fact, it is more advanced.

The burden is also relatively average, no matter how much your service is discounted, how much his is, and that is dozens of taels.

But corvée harmed the people in the Ming Dynasty, which was quite perverted. Its service was very complicated, such as dividing service according to household registration, and different household registrations had to undertake special services.

It is even possible that this service has been uniformly levied in a whip law, and then the additional service was resumed not long after.

Another example is the labor of grain chiefs that large households have to bear. Anyway, in the final analysis, the root cause of all this is that Zhu Yuanzhang, the chief designer in the early Ming Dynasty, had design problems and many inherent defects in the system.The bigger problem is that the Ming Dynasty had a very light tax on the surface, and then most of the taxes collected in this place were shipped and handed over.

There is not much left in the local area, and the salaries of local officials are set very low.

Not only are the officials unable to support their families with their salaries, they even have insufficient office funds, not to mention the large number of people needed to maintain a local government, and there is no money for some local engineering projects.

So no matter what you do, you must enlist common people to serve as errands. If these common people go on errands, they will inevitably be exploited and squeezed by officials, and even affect agricultural production.

So later they engaged in discounted silver service, but the government took the opportunity to make money, so the Yao service was more important than the tax, and the people suffered unspeakably.

Doesn't the court know about this?

I know, but I just don't change it.

Because the reform has to start from the ancestral system, and no one is willing to change the ancestral system. Everyone is even used to the current muddle-headed system. It is easy to fish in troubled waters.

After Junyao's service, he served in Lijia again, and outside of Lijia served in general service, and the silver gap was endless.

"My lords, I just read Haigangfeng's record that there are five housekeepers at the Fuchun Station in Yanzhou Prefecture, and each of them works and eats ten taels of silver a year, a total of 50 taels, but the actual use of silver is more than six hundred taels. The shopkeepers were only responsible for agreeing to travel, not for the various expenses of the post station, but the actual cost was spread to them, which increased by more than ten times."

If it is the turn of a private household to be the banker of the storekeeper, the burden will increase ten times at once, but you know how harmful it is to the people.

Anyway, there are too many such things, and even the Ming Dynasty has not changed a bit for hundreds of years.

"My lords, the corvee service is exhausting the people, and the burden far exceeds the tax by several times. The people are struggling to survive."

A group of ministers who wanted to come to Jian Guo for advice in an aggressive manner, did not expect that they would be asked such a deep-rooted question just after they met, tearing off the last bit of embarrassment of Daming.

"Haigangfeng wrote about these problems clearly during the Jiajing period, but up to now, no matter whether it is a whip method or any other method, it has not been able to solve these local problems. The discovery of the problem was even more shocking than what was written in this book.

"The people can't survive anymore, and the guards have long been deserted. Do you know who owns the land in Yanzhou Mansion? Do you know how much grain is worth for one stone now? Do you know how much silver a little girl sells for? "

"If we don't face up to these problems and change them immediately, if we don't need the Tartars, we will perish!"

He waved the Xingge regulations, "I read this book carefully for seven days alone, and there are not many words, but I saw two words in it, eat people!"

"The word cannibal is not written on every page, but every page remembers cannibalism."

"The common people have endured for more than 200 years, and they are already very tolerant, but they can't bear to watch alone."

"Change, must be changed, change immediately, can't hesitate for a moment, can't wait any longer, the fire is imminent."

Liu Zongzhou couldn't utter a single word of the countless words he had thought up on the road.

The same is true for Song Zhipu, Qi Biaojia and other great scholars.

"To sum up, there are several main problems in the local area. The first is the serious annexation of land; The salaries of officials are too low, and the quota of the economic system is too small,"

"The most important point is that there are too many names of Yao slaves, and the collection is too heavy. It must be simplified and reduced. The one whip method has only been a few decades, and the miscellaneous taxes on Yao slaves that were merged back then have appeared again, and even more."

"The problem has been brought up alone, now you come and tell Gu, how to solve it?"

"Speak!"

Zhu Yihai looked at the ministers.

(End of this chapter)