this novel is healthy

Chapter 1525 Secretary's Office

The entire Great Zhou Dynasty then went through three relatively stable years. Yuwen Chan kept his promise, which was that he did not carry out any purges except for those who were die-hard fans of the Yang family and who still rebelled even after the restoration of the Great Zhou Dynasty. Even several members of the Yang family were still living well in the palace, and the empress dowager was still Yang Lihua. This made the entire Great Zhou Dynasty completely stable again.

It seemed as if there had never been such a thing as a change of dynasty in the whole world.

Of course, there are still some places where it can be seen. For example, in the second year after the restoration, Yuwen Chan decisively abandoned the reign title of Daning suggested by Yang Jian and changed it to Zhenguan. From then on, it was the Zhenguan period of the Great Zhou Dynasty.

In addition to fulfilling his promise, Yuwen Chan also demonstrated amazing political ability.

At the beginning, many court ministers wanted to bully Yuwen Chan because he was young and did not understand the affairs of the court. They deliberately sent many complicated matters to Yuwen Chan for approval, and they used the excuse that they did not dare to abuse their power to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

In fact, this move was quite unreasonable. After all, the various government offices of the court had the right to handle these daily affairs, and the officials of these government offices could handle them on their own. Except for the matters that had to be decided by His Majesty the Emperor himself, the rest did not need to be sent to the palace in the form of memorials.

To put it bluntly, this was a demonstration by the Guanlong nobles to the emperor. The emperor directly swallowed up the entire Dugu family's cavalry. Although other Guanlong nobles were the main driving force behind this, this was for the sake of balance and did not mean that these nobles were not angry.

So they used this method to give the emperor a small warning, telling him that if he wanted to control the world, he could not rely on force alone, but also had to rely on officials and nobles like them and the major families in the court to handle court affairs. Otherwise, even if your Majesty the Emperor only slept 6 hours a day, he would not be able to handle the vast amount of affairs in the world.

After all, these memorials cannot be reviewed with just a glance; the emperor himself must review them personally.

When processing a memorial, one must first carefully read the contents of the memorial... All the memorials submitted by officials were written in classical Chinese, a style that was completely different from everyday spoken language and would greatly affect the emperor's reading efficiency.

Some officials would even write several thousand words of classical Chinese on a memorial, which meant that it might take half an hour or even an hour just to read the memorial.

During the Ming Dynasty, there was an official named Ru Taisu, who was the Minister of Revenue. He wrote memorials of at least 17 words, but occasionally he wrote memorials of 000 words, and the longest memorial was as long as words.

Zhu Yuanzhang was so industrious that he had a headache when he saw the memorial, so he had to ask his officials to read it to him. As a result, the memorial, which contained more than 15 words, was full of irrelevant nonsense. It was not until the next 000 words that a solution to the problem was formally proposed.

Although these solutions to the problem were relevant to the current situation and Zhu Yuanzhang himself adopted all of them, he was still very angry and had Ru Taisu severely beaten. He also ordered that there must not be any empty talk in the memorials, otherwise he would be beaten to death.

But even so, Zhu Yuanzhang himself still had to spend more than 16 hours a day in his later years to deal with various memorials, which was much more introverted than the current social animals.

And now, these people used the same method on Yuwen Chan.

As a result, a huge amount of memorials, several times more than normal government affairs, were sent to Yuwen Chan. Many people expected to see Yuwen Chan in chaos and at a loss, and had to invite officials back to handle government affairs and continue to hand over power to them. However, starting from the fifth day after the restoration, as long as the memorials were sent to Yuwen Chan, they would be sent back to the various government offices with relevant replies within two days at most.

Moreover, many of the replies were very long. Many memorials themselves only had a few hundred words, but the replies were thousands of words long. They also included many detailed policies and decrees, etc., which were basically at the level of being directly implemented with the reply. The officials who submitted the memorials were shocked. Is this really something that an 8-year-old child can handle?

Later, some officials secretly collected the memorials together and found that there were a total of 13 different handwritings on the memorials, and the replies to each memorial had the handwriting of at least two, and at most seven or eight people.

The handwriting of one of the people will definitely appear, and this person's words are written specifically in red cinnabar, and most of them are circles or crosses.

If a circle is drawn, it means agreement, and there is no text behind it. But if a cross is drawn, it means disagreement, and it will be followed by a sentence saying why you disagree, and then it will be sent back to the various government offices for re-examination, etc.

Of course, there would occasionally be a large amount of red text on memorials, and the reasons expressed in them were no weaker than those in other memorials.

Such a strange situation left many officials puzzled. Later they learned that His Majesty the Emperor had set up an institution called the Secretariat inside the palace, and then the commissioner recruited twelve cabinet secretaries. All memorials sent to the palace would first be handed over to the 12 cabinet secretaries.

After being reviewed and approved by 12 cabinet secretaries, it will be handed over to His Majesty the Emperor for personal decision.

Because the Cabinet Secretary had already read the memorial in advance and given corresponding solutions, His Majesty the Emperor only needed to review whether the solution proposed by the Cabinet Secretary was qualified.

If qualified, a circle will be drawn and the document will be handed back to the relevant government offices for execution.

If it is unqualified, a cross will be given, and then, depending on the actual situation, it will be sent back to the various government offices or secretarial offices for re-examination and revision.

If one or two cabinet secretaries cannot make up their minds during the review of the memorial in the Secretariat, they will ask multiple cabinet secretaries to discuss it together. Therefore, there will be a situation where there are seven or eight different handwritings on a memorial, which means that seven or eight secretaries have given different responses and handled the memorial differently.

Later, this whole process evolved into two special terms. The cabinet secretary's handling of memorials was called "tie tiao", while the emperor's final review was called "quan hong". The whole process was smooth.

It is said that the little emperor only needed to work for an hour and a half drawing circles every day. Sometimes when he encountered some big problems, he would barely work for about two and a half hours. The rest of the time was spent on riding horses, painting, writing poems, and cultivating immortals... That's right, no one knows what the little emperor was thinking at such a young age, but he felt that his life was not long enough, so he started cultivating immortals directly.

However, upon hearing the news, the Guanlong nobles also breathed a sigh of relief. It was good to cultivate immortality. As long as the emperor started to cultivate immortality, he would certainly have no intention of handling state affairs, and would have no time to restrain them from annexing land and sucking the fat of the people.

Wait...it seems like this little emperor doesn't have to deal with state affairs at all, as the cabinet secretaries do it for him!
(End of this chapter)