My life is like walking on thin ice

Chapter 277: Common Girl, Not Afraid

"So it seems that Marquis Pingyang did a lot of homework for his sister before she entered the palace?"

Listening to Cao Shu's reply, which was basically flawless and even somewhat official, Liu Rong only smiled and said:
Then, he once again looked up and down at this girl who was still a little thin and immature, and whose face was even filled with youthfulness.

——Seventeen years old.

It would be a few more months before Cao Shu would turn seventeen.

In later generations, girls of this age would either be spending their youth on campus or studying hard at their desks, or just entering society, full of confusion and setbacks, and tempered by the cruelty of life.

But in this era, a seventeen-year-old girl can no longer even be called a 'girl'.

In 202 BC, the fifth year of Emperor Gaozu of Han, Emperor Taizu Liu Bang ascended the throne on the east bank of Luo River, founded the Han Dynasty, and established the Han Dynasty.

After the founding of the country, the first development problem encountered by the Han Dynasty was population.

Before the Qin and Han dynasties, the Chinese nation had already experienced the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, a total of more than 500 years of war and conflict.

Even though the 500-year-long Spring and Autumn Period and Warring States Period came to an end when Emperor Qin Shi Huang unified the world, the end of the war did not end the suffering of the Chinese nation.

——The war is over, the world is stable, but the people are still in dire straits.

The Great Wall of the North!

Baiyue in the South!

Mount Li Imperial Mausoleum!

Searching for immortals in the East China Sea!

Add to that the Qin Straight Road network that spread across the Central Plains, and even the five-foot road built in the Southwest Yi;

It is no exaggeration to say that the Qin Dynasty's appalling, epoch-making infrastructure capabilities, which were seriously inconsistent with the level of productivity, were entirely built with the blood and tears of the people.

From 221 BC when the world was returned to Qin to 210 BC when the First Emperor died - in just eleven years, the world's population entered a stage of cliff-like decline after more than five hundred years of cumulative decline during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period.

After the wars at the end of the Qin Dynasty and the years of war between Chu and Han;
By 202 BC, when Liu Bang unified the country again and founded the Liu Han Dynasty, the number of people that the Han Dynasty could count was less than million...

In order to restore the population level to normal levels, Liu Bang, with the assistance of capable ministers such as Xiao He and Zhang Liang, formulated many highly targeted policies.

The first and most crucial one is to grant land and titles to the people.

——During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, which lasted for more than 500 years, plus the ten years between the Qin and Han Dynasties, the people of the world were not only devastated by wars and conflicts, and the tyranny of the Qin Dynasty, but naturally there were also "smart people" who fled into the mountains and forests to avoid the wars.

In order to get these smart people who were hiding in the secluded "Peach Blossom Spring" out of the mountains and forests, Liu Bang specially issued an edict: All the people of the Xia Dynasty, whether they were the people of the Qin, Zhao, Wei, Yan, Qi, Chu, Han in the past, or the people of the Zhou Dynasty in the earlier period;
As long as they were people from the Chinese nation who tied their hair up, wore right-side lapel clothes, spoke Chinese, and were willing to register their household registration information with the government, they would all be granted the first-level title: Gongshi, and each household would be granted 100 acres of farmland and a farmhouse as a family unit.

This edict can be said to be the stabilizing force that enabled Liu Han to quickly stabilize the country and restore the order of life and production in Chinese civilization after the founding of the country.

It was also called by later historians as the Order of Granting Land and Titles to the People.

By using the method of "using fields and houses as bait to lure out households hidden in the mountains", the Han family was able to quickly build a sound household registration system. At the same time, it allowed the people who had just walked out of the mountains or returned to their ancestral hometowns to engage in agricultural production as soon as possible.

The Han Dynasty was founded in the fifth year of its founding. In the spring of the sixth year of its founding, more than 80% of the land in the country was sown. In the autumn of that year, agricultural taxes began to flow into the Chang'an treasury.

After all these operations, the registered population of the Han people just exceeded 2 million households and 13 million people.

So much so that Zhang Liang, the Marquis of Liu, who witnessed Liu Bang enfeoffing 146 families of founding heroes and allocating nearly 200,000 households of fiefdoms in one go, could not help but exclaimed: Your Majesty has given one tenth of the world's population to these 146 meritorious families.

Two million households, 13 million people;
Each household had 100 mu of land and paid a maximum of 10 shi of agricultural tax each year. The total amount of agricultural tax collected by the Han Dynasty was no more than 20 million shi of millet each year.

However, during Emperor Taizu Liu Bang's entire career, the Han Dynasty almost never stopped fighting wars.

Internally, he suppressed the rebellion of foreign princes, and externally, he fought against the Huns in the north and the Baiyue in the south.

In short: either they are fighting a war or on their way to the battlefield.

Tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of troops were deployed, and the war lasted for years and almost never stopped.

Of the 20 million shi of agricultural tax revenue in the entire country, local counties retained 30% as operating funds, leaving only 14 million shi sent to Chang'an.

The army's rations were three to four million dan a year.

Official salaries - just the three dukes, nine ministers and twelve officials in the court received more than 30,000 dan!
If we take into account the officials in the imperial court and the local counties, it is no exaggeration to say that the annual salaries paid out by the Han Dynasty alone are no less than 10 million dan!

By this calculation, the military rations needed for the war alone, plus the salaries of officials, would be enough to consume the Han Dynasty's entire fiscal revenue for the year.

Therefore, the Han Dynasty was poor at the beginning of its founding.

A poor treasury can escape rats;

Emperor Liu Bang was so poor that he couldn't even get eight horses of the same color to pull his imperial chariot.

Later, Liu Bang was so poor that he could not raise the military expenses to quell the rebellion of the princes of different surnames. He had to issue three-zhu lead coins with a face value of twelve-zhu copper, despite the unanimous opposition of the court.

But there is no way;

At the beginning of the country, there were internal and external troubles, the whole country was devastated and needed to be rebuilt.

In order to improve the financial situation in the short term, Liu Bang had no choice but to solve the current problems first;

As for the future troubles, they can only be left to future rulers to solve, or to clean up the mess.

Of course, the Chang'an central government headed by Liu Bang did not forget to dig a well for the Han family that would provide water after a long time because distant water could not quench immediate thirst.

This 'well' consists of two specific provisions.

Article 1: Any Han woman who is over 15 years old and does not marry will be fined one hundred and twenty coins every year starting from the age of 15.

For women who are still unmarried at the age of 18, the government is responsible for finding a suitable man for the woman and helping them to start a family - in the popular sense, this is called forced marriage.

If they fail to do so, the local officials and the woman's family will be held accountable.

Article 2: After marriage, for each child born to a couple, a reward of 200 yuan will be given to a boy and 50 yuan to a girl.
If a couple fails to give birth within two years of marriage, they will be fined 200 yuan.

With these two highly targeted birth policies, the Han Dynasty was able to establish a social consensus for Chinese civilization in a very short period of time after the founding of the country that "women must marry before the age of fifteen" and that they must have as many children as possible.

In the following four or five decades, the population of the Han Dynasty doubled from two million households and more than 13 million people at the beginning of the founding of the country.

In the sixth year of Emperor Xiaojing, Liu Rong's reign, that is, the 51st year of the Han Dynasty, the total population of the Han Dynasty exceeded 5 million households, with more than 28 million people. With 5 million farmers, even if the agricultural tax was reduced from 15% in the early Han Dynasty to 30% almost permanently, it could still bring more than 30 million shi of millet in agricultural tax revenue to the central government in Chang'an every year.

——Although each farmer still has 100 acres of land, the harvest has long since increased from less than two dan per mu in the founding years to an average of more than three dan per mu!
This meant that even if the agricultural tax paid by the people was halved to one in thirty, it could still be maintained at more than ten stones per household.

If every household has 10 shi, there are more than 5 million households, which means more than 50 million shi!

Even if the local counties still had to withhold 30%, or more than 15 million shi, the amount left for the court in Chang'an would be as much as 35 million shi.

Among them, 15 million shi are officials' salaries, and the remaining 20 million shi can be used to do something.

For example, the excavation of the imperial tomb~
The construction of the mausoleum town
As well as horse march construction, army expansion, weapons replacement and the like.

In short: the population of more than 10 million at the beginning of the founding of the country could barely maintain the basic operation of Liu Han's regime;

The current population of more than 2,000 - nearly 30 million is enough to enable the Han Dynasty to maintain an extremely low tax rate: 30% of the tax rate, that is, less than 4% of the agricultural tax, while at the same time steadily moving forward on the path to rapid growth.

Even if there were occasional wars, they were no big deal, like the Rebellion of the Seven States of Wu and Chu in the third year of Emperor Xiaojing's reign.

——At worst, you can just take out all your spare money that year!
Considering this background, Cao Shu is now nearly seventeen years old, which is actually not considered young at all in this era.

In the common people, a woman of this age who has not yet married would have to pay a two-year fine for late marriage and late childbearing, and would be put on the local government's reserve list of women who "need to find a husband."

In fact, if there was anything to say about the queen Liu Rong finally chose, it was that Cao Shu was a little too old.

But Liu Rong didn't care about these remarks.

In fact, Liu Rong still felt that even at the age of seventeen, Cao Shu was a little too young.

After all, in later generations, marrying a woman of this age is a very punishable act, even punishable by handcuffs.

Furthermore, Liu Rong was the eldest son of Emperor Xiaojing—especially Emperor Xiaojing himself, who was actually the eldest son of Emperor Taizong.

The Han Dynasty has experienced two consecutive generations of "succession by the eldest son of a concubine" to inherit the throne.

From his heart, Liu Rong was actually more inclined to bring the situation back to the right track, that is: the next generation of Han emperor after Liu Rong must be Liu Rong's eldest son.

Otherwise, if the three consecutive emperors of the Han Dynasty were not the eldest son of the legitimate wife, it would inevitably cause a long-term blow and negative impact on the long-standing and still necessary system of primogeniture inheritance.

This is also the reason why Liu Rong was willing to give up some political interests in exchange for "not marrying A Jiao" from the Empress Dowager Dou of the Eastern Palace.

——If he really married Gillian, Liu Rong would never let Gillian bear children for him no matter what.

In this case, Aunt Liu Piao would definitely be dissatisfied with Liu Rong, and not only would she become an unstable factor, but she would also cause trouble in Liu Rong's harem and make everyone in the family restless.

Again, the same thing;
Liu Rong is very busy.

Liu Rong may have a lot of time left, but compared with what Liu Rong has to do, this life - which will probably not exceed thirty years - is definitely not a lot.

In order to do more for the Han family and the Chinese nation in his lifetime, to do more things that only a time traveler can do and which will surely be of great benefit to the Chinese nation, Liu Rong must concentrate his limited energy on more meaningful things.

Obviously, the "meaningful things" here do not include dealing with the trivial matters and love affairs in the harem.

"I need a queen who can keep the harem in order, and who will not require me to worry about it for my entire life - who does not need me to spend even the slightest bit of energy."

"Cao Shu..."

"At least I have the courage."

Obviously, among Cao Shu's extremely official reply, which could almost be called a 'standard answer', what made Liu Rong's eyes light up the most was the last sentence: I dare not take it lightly, I dare not be careless, and I am not afraid of it.

Cao Shu was not afraid.

She has a clear understanding of her future life and foresees the obstacles she may encounter in the future, but she is still not afraid, which proves that Cao Shu has the confidence to handle all of this.

At least in Cao Shu's own opinion, the life of the Queen of Han was not so difficult that it made Cao Shu feel afraid.

With this answer, Liu Rong has actually given his future queen a score of "above the passing line".

But there was one thing that worried Liu Rong.

If this matter is not handled well, it will not be a question of whether Cao Shu, the future queen, is a qualified candidate for the queen mother;
It was a question of whether Emperor Liu Rong could die on the throne...

"The late emperor once asked me why I didn't want to marry A Jiao as the Crown Princess."

"Why do you think I don't want to?"

"——Why do I not want to marry Ah Jiao when I have the support of Dong Gong Dou, Tangyi Hou Chen, and Aunt Guantao?"

“Have you ever thought about these?”

···
"Have you ever thought that in the future, Aunt Guantao will definitely find fault with my Han queen, and even make things difficult for her and criticize her?"

"Have you ever thought that the position of the queen - the Pepper Room with walls covered with pepper mud - is not a place where you can rest easy just by living in it?"

"Have you ever thought that the Empress Dowager of the Eastern Palace, my grandmother, would also treat you, her daughter-in-law, with no regard for her eyes and nose, and whenever something happens, she would always say 'the queen has no morals'?"

He asked several questions in succession, like a machine gun firing out of his mouth;

But this time, Liu Rong changed his previous leisurely attitude - he slowly sat up and looked towards the Imperial Street with a serious face.

If the previous few questions were like Liu Rong, the "elder", chatting with his juniors, then these questions were like the teacher testing his students on an extremely critical issue.

If you answer correctly, you may feel very happy.

But if you answer wrong...

"I have thought about this before, too."

Just like Liu Rong changed his previous attitude;
This time, Cao Shu changed her previous nervousness and looked calm, and nodded slowly and solemnly.

Then, Cao Shu raised her head for the first time since she stepped into the Xuanshi Hall, and met the bright and deep eyes of Liu Rong, her fiancé, the supreme ruler of the world, without fear.

"I, a common woman, am not afraid of it either."

(End of this chapter)