My life is like walking on thin ice

Chapter 328: Dynasty Cycle Law?
Putting aside the subjective reasons why the old lady would find faults in everything and criticize herself for every reason;

As far as the issue of the mausoleum town is concerned, Liu Rong's opinion is relatively consistent with that of the old empress dowager.

——Just like the general understanding of the central government in Chang'an during this era: the system of mausoleum towns is the foundation of the Han Dynasty!
And it is a fundamental thing whose importance is beyond doubt!

People in later generations often say: The cyclical law of Chinese dynasties is one cycle of three hundred years.

The reason for this is that with the stabilization of feudal society, social wealth began to gradually flow to a small number of people, resulting in a widening gap between the rich and the poor, increasingly unfair distribution of resources, and increasingly serious land annexation.

This is a long-standing problem that has plagued Chinese civilization for thousands of years.

It was not until the new era in later generations that a great man, like a pioneer, came up with the idea of ​​public ownership of land. Coupled with the great explosion of productivity in the new era, this problem was finally solved from the root.

Before the new era more than two thousand years later, the Chinese dynasty had to face this problem every few hundred years - or even almost every hundred or so years.

Take the distance between the Han Dynasty and the Han Dynasty today;

After hundreds of years of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the Qin Dynasty swept across the world and announced the collapse of the aristocracy of the six former kingdoms.

However, during the wars at the end of the Qin Dynasty, the Chu-Han contention - especially after the failure of the last aristocrat of the Warring States Period: Overlord Xiang Yu, almost all the old aristocrats of Chinese civilization were completely buried in the flames of war.

There was a period of time, that is, after the founding of the Han Dynasty and before Emperor Taizu Liu Bang conferred titles on his meritorious officials, when there was no "aristocrats" in the true sense in Chinese civilization.

Yes, but they are just farmers who grow crops, soldiers who fight in wars, and generals who lead troops into battle.

The reason why the three-hundred-year dynasty cycle has troubled Chinese civilization for thousands of years is precisely because this difficult and complicated disease, like a cancer virus, is almost unavoidable for feudal dynasties.

——When Qin was still around, we followed you, Liu Bang, to fight against Qin;
Now that Qin has fallen, we will follow you, King of Han, to resist the tyrant Xiang Yu.

When Xiang Yu is gone, the world is unified, and you, Liu Bang, rule the world, do we old brothers have to go back to the hard days we had in Pei County?

How is it possible~
So, not surprisingly, Liu Bang began to confer titles of nobility on the founding heroes and meritorious service to comfort his old comrades, and at the same time formed the first group of aristocrats whose interests were tied to the Han emperor and even the Han regime.

Today, the Han Dynasty has been established for more than 50 years;
The descendants of these rough men who came from Fengpei have gradually grown into large families that dominate the area.

Although they have not yet reached the level of an aristocratic family, anyone who understands the historical process of Chinese civilization knows that it is only a matter of time.

——Xiahou Ying, Liu Bang’s personal groom, made a living by performing funeral music during the Fengpei period. Even more than 400 years later, he still had descendants recorded in history: Xiahou Dun and Xiahou Yuan!

——Zhang Liang, Marquis of Liu, who was able to plan and win battles thousands of miles away, also had a tenth-generation grandson named Zhang Yi, who was the Left General of Chariots and Cavalry of Shu Han in the late Eastern Han Dynasty and was given the title of Marquis of Duting!

There is no need to say more about Xiao He, Marquis of Ying - the family of Prime Minister Xiao.

Lanling Xiao family!

Until the Northern and Southern Dynasties hundreds of years later, the Lanling Xiao family, formed by the descendants of Xiao He, still played a significant role in the course of Chinese history!

During the Sui and Tang dynasties, the Lanling Xiao family produced many important officials, including ten prime ministers!
It was not until the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period at the end of the Tang Dynasty that the Lanling Xiao family quietly disappeared in the long river of history as the world was broken up.

There are countless cases like this.

For example, Li Guang, the descendant of the famous Qin general Li Xin, was born into the Li family of Longxi.

That’s right;

It's the Longxi Li family of Li Tang...

For example, the Wang family, which is spread all over the world and divided into countless branches, runs through the entire feudal history of China.

The reason for this is precisely the root cause of the three-hundred-year dynasty cycle.

——In the feudal era, the aristocracy, whether it wanted to or not, would inevitably take the path of exploiting the lower classes.

for example;

Your ancestor was originally a farmer. He luckily survived the war at the end of the Qin Dynasty, and followed Pei Gong all the way from Chu to Chang'an, and lived to see the day when Liu Han was founded.

Your ancestor had some merits and was granted a title of marquis, which was neither too small nor too small, with a fief of about 1,800 households.

Since then, your family began to expand unscrupulously. In just a hundred years, it has grown from a family of five consisting of a couple and three children to a huge family with more than a hundred male descendants in the direct lineage alone!
With the guarantee of a marquisate, your family will not lack for wealth;

With the protection of your ancestors, you will not lack connections and social status.

The only thing you need to pay attention to is not to break the law - or even just not to break the law too recklessly, so that you can just lie on the merits of your ancestors and wait for death, waiting to die with the country.

Then one day, a family of poor farmers comes to you.

It turned out that their family needed funeral expenses. In order to raise the money, they had no choice but to sell their family property.

But land in Chang'an is very expensive, and in areas close to Chang'an, the cost of farming is tens of thousands of coins per acre!
The hundred acres of fertile land that this farmer wants to sell is worth millions of dollars!
As the leader of the family, you hesitated.

It’s not like your family can’t come up with several million dollars.

It doesn't even take much effort to take it out easily.

But after much hesitation, you still asked: Why did you come to visit me specially and sell these days to my family?
The farmer said: Millions of dollars, who can afford it except a noble like Junhou?

At this point, you will feel at peace.

——Millions of dollars in cash may not be a big deal to you, but for most people of this era, it is an extremely huge fortune!

Not to mention taking out millions of dollars at one time, even if his family assets were worth millions in total, he would have to be a wealthy businessman!

Therefore, the only ones who can afford to buy this hundred acres of land worth millions of dollars are the wealthy merchants like you who are "born noble", who are among the dozen or so in Guanzhong and who often monopolize a large amount of goods in Guanzhong.

Furthermore, although these hundred acres of land are valuable, they are definitely not a big business. Those great marquises with fiefs of thousands or even tens of thousands of households may not necessarily be interested in it.

This is a good deal for your family.

So you started bargaining and bought the hundred acres of fertile land at a fairly fair price.

Although spending two or three million yuan was only a small part of the family's liquid funds, it was in exchange for real real estate, and the family members had no objections.

The next year, you sent slaves to take care of the 100 acres for two years. After the autumn harvest, you got about 300 dan of millet after deducting taxes. Although it was sold for more than 10,000 yuan but less than 20,000 yuan, you discovered the key.

——Spending two million yuan to purchase a hundred acres of land, although the annual output is only more than ten thousand yuan, this more than ten thousand yuan will never end!
As long as the fields are still there, your family can send slaves to work the land and get a very stable annual output of more than ten thousand yuan from these one hundred acres of fertile land.

This is much better than the vague and illusory "rest with excessiveness"!

Then, you start to think.

Your family has about 800 households in the fiefdom, and the annual rent and tax of the fiefdom is only 8,000 shi of millet.
The output of three to five years of enfeoffment will be enough for you to buy a hundred acres of good farmland;
And the rent and tax of your family's fiefdom of '8,000 shi of millet per year' can be grown with less than 3,000 acres of land!
So, you began to work hard and spent your entire life to buy 500 acres of land for your family.

After your death, your family's annual income reached 8,000 shi of millet in rent and taxes from the fiefdom, plus 1,500 shi of millet from the farmland.

Before you died, you told your son your ideas about strengthening the family without reservation.

Then, your son began to use the annual family income of 9,500 shi of millet to continue the "virtuous cycle" of accumulating wealth and purchasing land like you, accumulating wealth faster and purchasing land even faster.

Another hundred years passed, and by the time of your great-grandson, your family still had the same 800 households and 8,000 shi of millet as a fiefdom,

But after several generations of accumulation, your family owns 3,000 acres of fertile land!

Your family’s private land alone can produce 9,000 shi of millet a year, which is much more than the rent and taxes of the feudal state!
Is this the end?
not at all!
If in your generation, you relied on the annual rent and tax income of 8,000 shi of millet to buy 500 mu of land for your family,
By the time it comes to your great-grandson's generation, the 8,000 shi of rent and taxes for the fiefdom, plus the 9,000 shi of farmland output, will allow your great-grandson to spend his entire life purchasing thousands of acres of fertile land for your family!
Just like this, generation after generation, generation after generation;
By the time the dynasty had been passed down for more than two hundred years, nearly three hundred years, your family had already owned tens of thousands of acres of fertile land.

——You can get hundreds of thousands of shi of grain a year. Just relying on the grain produced from your private fields, your family can support an army of up to 10,000 people!

And there are a hundred or eighty families like yours;

Even compared to those big families that easily occupy the farmland of an entire county or even a prefecture, your family's tens of thousands of acres of land are not even worth mentioning.

All big families, including yours, are thinking: What other ways are there to make the family stronger and leave more abundant and solid wealth for future generations?

But no one noticed that your tens of thousands of acres of land were the means of production that could have provided for the survival of hundreds of families;

Just because of you, a hundred or so noble families, you have caused thousands of farmers to lose their land and means of production, and have to live in misery.

They endured and endured, endured and endured.

Finally one day, they couldn't bear it any longer and decided to launch a death counterattack.

The slogans they shouted were the same over and over again: Are kings, princes, generals, and ministers of different species? If the emperor doesn't let us live, we will kill him.

But you nobles will never know that what the peasants really want as a way of living is precisely the land that you nobles hold tightly in your hands.

——You will never understand!

You will say: I didn’t steal or rob, I bought it with real money, so this is not okay?

Well, no.

Land transactions between farmers themselves have great limitations.

Do you remember why the farmer came to you when you bought your first 100 acres of fertile land?
Only if you can afford it.

Except for you and nobles like you, ordinary farmers simply cannot afford to buy the land from other farmers.

So, they can trade freely.

Because even if they buy it, even if they spend their entire lives, they can only buy three or five acres of thin land;

But you are different.

Your generation alone, with the rent and tax output of the marquisate, bought all the land of five families!
And your family will not stop annexing land because of your death.

Not only will it not stop, but it will accelerate the annexation of land!
What helps them accumulate funds faster and buy more land is precisely the 500 acres of land that you bought at the beginning.

The more fields you buy, the more income your family will have;

The more income one has, the faster one accumulates wealth, that is, the faster one can buy land.

As the cycle repeats itself, sooner or later, the land owned by your family will allow your family to have enough output from the autumn harvest every year to buy some more land.

Even if the peasants do not resist, and this cycle continues endlessly, what will be the final outcome?
The land has all been bought up by you nobles.

All the money was earned by you, a few hundred noble families.

So, you have become another group of old nobles who have been "destroyed by destiny"...

This is the reason why the mausoleum town system became the foundation of the Han Dynasty.

——Through feudal civilization and the supreme authority of the emperor, with "ritual system" as the foundation and in the name of "guarding the emperor's spirit", the local tyrants were forcibly relocated to live at the feet of the emperor!

Let the nobles live together, no longer competing with the peasants for food, but instead crushing and competing with each other;
All their actions were restricted to the foot of the Imperial City and within the field of vision of the Chang'an court, so that everything was under control within an appropriate range.

With the imperial power and the central government, the local tyrants were suppressed to prevent the local county people's livelihood from being corrupted. At the same time, the wealth of Guandong was harvested again and again to Guanzhong, artificially creating economic and market hotspots.
Furthermore, it is to always ensure that the smartest, most intelligent, and at the same time, most restless group of people in the world are always at the foot of the Guanzhong Imperial City, rather than in Guandong thousands of miles away.

To be more precise, these people "either have already moved to Guanzhong or are on their way to Guanzhong."

In the original history, the mausoleum town system used by Liu Han to suppress the powerful was eventually abolished by the Confucian emperor who "disrupted my family": Emperor Yuan of Han, Liu Shi.

The abolition of the mausoleum town system also meant that the Han Dynasty's strict defense against the landlords, the aristocratic families, and their official academic spokespersons: Confucianism, had completely failed;
The landlords, powerful families and aristocratic families have completely found a breeding ground for survival and have lost the only shackles that could control them in the feudal era.

Liu Rong is not Liu Shi.

Not only that, Liu Rong even had to focus a considerable part of his life's energy on two major issues concerning the Liu Han country and even the progress of Chinese civilization: "How to prevent a Liu Shi from appearing among future generations" and "If a Liu Shi really appeared among future generations, how to prevent him from abolishing the mausoleum system."

Of course, before that, Liu Rong must first set an example, pick up his own mausoleum city, and fulfill his duty to enrich the mausoleum city system to enrich his generation of emperors.

Only after completing your job will you be qualified and confident to talk about other things.

(End of this chapter)