People live in the Ming Dynasty, evil spirits are soaring into the sky

Chapter 197 Shock! The Kong family owns one million acres of land! ! The Kong family was finally destroyed after thousands of years! !

The next thing was very simple. They started to search the Confucius family property.

The Confucius Mansion has been standing in Qufu for thousands of years. It is truly a rare family that has been passed down for thousands of years.

Although there are many changes in this, it is not necessarily passed down by blood.

But it is enough to see how wealthy they are.

How much money does the Kong family have?
It may not be possible to calculate it with money.

But they own millions of acres of land in Zhili, Shandong, Henan, Hebei, and Jiangsu.

The tax revenue collected from these lands alone reaches tens of millions and two hundred silver every year.

On these millions of acres of land, you don’t even need to pay taxes for even one tael of silver.

The biggest annual expenditure of the Confucius Mansion is the ceremony to worship Confucius.

There are more than 150 sacrifices held in the Confucius Mansion every year.

Just like Jiang Guotai, the governor of Shandong, who was found out before, why did he pay 50,000 taels of silver to the Confucius Mansion.

And how they can participate in the sacrifice is to donate money.

Therefore, the number of officials who come to Confucius Mansion to participate in the ceremony every year may reach one or two hundred.

Whoever gives more can be assigned a higher position.

The Kong Mansion was also very good at doing business, and treated the sacrificial activities as a business.

The Kong family really attaches great importance to money. They actually have a silver warehouse, a treasury, a porcelain warehouse, a jade warehouse, a copper money warehouse, a bronze warehouse, etc. in the cellar, divided into categories, and even a calligraphy and painting warehouse.

This shows how wealthy they are.

First of all, there are so many scholars in the world, and there are many people who want to participate in Confucius worship every year.

Although the imperial court did not allocate money to them every year to perform sacrifices.

These scholars attach great importance to participating in Confucius worship activities.

The sacrificial activities of the Confucius Mansion can consume one-twentieth of the national finance.

It is said that every time Confucius is sacrificed, more than 10,000 kilograms of salt, pork, beef and mutton are needed alone.

So Chen Han waved his hand and began to raid Confucius' mansion.

You must know that the Ming Dynasty's annual treasury income at that time was only about 10 million taels.

Each ceremony costs about five thousand taels.

Although not every sacrificial activity costs five thousand taels of silver, the Kong Mansion spends no less than five thousand taels of silver on sacrificial activities every year.

I just wanted to be at the front when Confucius was offering sacrifices.

But the Confucius Mansion actually received a lot of profits from sacrificial activities.

There is also a special warehouse for gifts given by the emperor.

As for the number of students, there are five to six hundred, and these have all been donated.

The warehouse is also divided into the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties.

In order to show that their family had a long heritage, they deliberately marked which emperor had given it to them.

For example, a pair of jade pots gifted by Emperor Taizong Li Shimin of the Tang Dynasty.

A Persian dagger gifted by Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty.

Rewarded by Emperor Zhenzong of the Song Dynasty to encourage him to learn calligraphy.

A landscape painting rewarded by Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty.

The daggers made of gold and so on were rewarded by Kublai Khan.

A large number of precious calligraphy and paintings, porcelain, and jade are displayed everywhere.

Their ancestors said that a gentleman loves money and gets it wisely. However, Chen Han looked through the records of his Confucius family and found a lot of information about the gold, silver and jewelry bribed by officials and merchants.

The Confucius Mansion does not reject anyone, as you can see just by looking through the records of the past few years.

This group of officials from Shandong gave them as many as one or two million taels of various property.

They recorded every transaction clearly.

For example, in the first year of Longqing, Jiang Guotai, the governor of Shandong, sent a half-fist-sized seal carved from Shoushan field yellow material to celebrate the birthday of Duke Yansheng at that time.

There is a sentence recorded in the archives about this seal, which is called - price compared to a thousand taels of gold.

Why do they dare to be so unscrupulous? This is simply writing their own crimes clearly.

That's because they feel that their family is the Kong family, and no official dares to disturb them, and no official dares to investigate them.

Therefore, no matter what kind of money they make, as long as it is a big income, they will record it clearly.

So Chen Han could tell by looking through some files in the Kong family.

The approximate silver stock that they have accounted for over the years has reached more than 30 million taels, and this is just the silver stored in the cellar. Gold reached as much as three million taels.

Chen Han came to the cellar with the accounts and saw mountains of gold and silver. This was just floating wealth, similar to what modern people call liquid cash.

Liquidity and worth are two different things.

It is common for a billionaire to be unable to even get out five million in cash.

The most valuable thing about the Kong family is the more than one million acres of land, which is of immeasurable value.

Of course, there are also the rewards from the emperors of the past dynasties, as well as the food stored in the Confucius Mansion that can feed and drink 10,000 or 20,000 people for more than ten years. Even this Confucius Mansion is a huge wealth.

Looking through the last accounts of the Kong family, Chen Han was a little numb and didn't know how much their wealth should be more appropriately calculated.

Anyway, if you add up all the money, land, shops, etc. in the Confucius Mansion, if you don't have 5 billion taels of silver, you have to have 4 billion taels of silver.

Because they have too much land, and most of it is fertile farmland.

After Chen Han confiscated all the property in Confucius' house, he did not transport the money away on the spot.

There is no point in transporting it away, but the Shandong Branch of the Ming Dynasty Tax Inspection Department was directly established here.

According to Chen Han's next institutional reform, he wants to set up a branch of the Tax Inspection Department in each province of the Ming Dynasty.

The Tax Audit Department is actually similar to state-owned banks and state-owned granaries.

Because tax audits can review various wealth-related work in the province, they can also exchange gold and silver and silver notes, and even hoard food.

In the name of state-owned granaries, grain is purchased and hoarded in years of good harvest.

During the lean years, the grain in the granaries was sold to the people at a low price, and even cheap loans were given to the people to help them survive the years of disaster and famine.

People do not need to borrow money and grain from private grain banks.

How did the big landowners in ancient feudal society annex the land of the common people?
It was with this hand that he lent money and grain to the people at high interest rates during times of famine.

When the people can't afford it, they will have no choice but to sell the mortgaged fields to those big landowners at low prices.

Two of Wang Anshi's reforms - the Green Crops Law and the Equal Loss Law - were designed to prevent land annexation.

Why were so many people opposed at that time?

Just because those scholar-bureaucrats are all representatives of big landowners.

Of course they don't want to see that the common people can pass reforms and no longer need to rely on them.

If the people do not rely on them, they lose control of the people.

This is the biggest reason why they oppose Wang Anshi's Qingmiao method and Junshu method.

Because everything is profit.

And Chen Han's reforms will be more thorough this time.

Just like the establishment of the Tax Inspection Department, it is not just as simple as supervising taxation, but also takes on the important responsibilities of local state-owned banks and state-owned granaries.

This time Chen Han could directly deposit more than 30 million taels of auxiliary materials seized from the Kong Mansion into the warehouse of the Tax Inspection Department.

At the same time, the grain that the Confucius Mansion had stored for more than ten years was also used as reserve materials.

This year the weather has been smooth in Shandong and the grain harvest has been pretty good.

In Shandong, Chen Han promoted the idea of ​​working from one person to another. In order to prevent the people from being exploited by profiteers, he planned to use money to buy grain from the people, benefiting the people at a higher price and giving them money to pay taxes.

This is the role of the Tax Audit Division.

In the later stage of tax audit, it will also be responsible for the function of issuing banknotes.

Because in every tax inspection department, Chen Han would arrange reserves ranging from several million taels to tens of millions of taels of silver, which would have sufficient exchange capabilities.

They will not harvest leeks directly from the hands of the people with nothing like the Ming Dynasty Baochao.

The reason why precious banknotes depreciate so quickly is that they become a piece of waste paper in just a few decades.

It's because Zhu Yuanzhang never thought about requiring reserves when he issued it.

While he did not allow the people to use gold and silver, he also did not allow the people to exchange gold and silver with treasure banknotes in government agencies.

But Chen Han has this condition, with more than 2 billion taels of silver reserves, plus more than 30 million taels of silver seized in the Confucius Mansion.

And with more than one million acres of land as capital, we can open a branch in Shandong.

Chen Han destroyed the Kong family, and this incident also spread in Shandong, and then spread in surrounding provinces.

Scholars all over the world respect the Confucius family, but now Chen Han has destroyed the Confucius family.

They themselves hated Chen Han deeply, because the reform of sharing grain between farmers and gentry was aimed at the rights of scholars like them.

So a huge storm is brewing against Chen Han...

PS: Second update!

(End of this chapter)