Datang Nongsheng

Chapter 712 Reform of the eunuch system
Wang Deyong told Li Shimin all his inner thoughts, so that Li Shimin had a more specific understanding of the group of eunuchs.

He didn't expect that none of the eunuchs serving the royal family was physically and mentally healthy.

The pain of that knife is enough to change a person's outlook and character.

"Do you think Sun Zhengming is reminding me that eunuchs should not continue to exist?" Li Shimin stared into Wang Deyong's eyes and said.

"Yes, Your Majesty, even if the servants are now serving as the inner servants, if they could do it all over again, the servants would never choose to sell themselves into the palace as eunuchs. When everyone has their wives and children by their side Cheng Huan, when you are living a happy and fulfilling life, the feeling in your servant's heart..."

When he said this, Wang Deyong was already sobbing. Li Shimin thought about it a little bit, his concubine and children were gone, and he felt afraid of what it would be like. Without a goal, it is a walking dead, no wonder they have some abnormal thoughts.

"You, step back and rest first!" After all, Wang Deyong has been with Li Shimin for more than ten years. Seeing his sad appearance, Li Shimin was not in a good mood, so he waved his hand.

"Your Majesty, this servant is an internal servant. I can report directly to you about the affairs of the palace. This servant would like to ask you to reform the eunuch system in the inner palace." Wang Deyong, who wiped away his tears, did not back down as he said, but once again bowed.

In fact, just now when he was talking about the current situation of the eunuchs, Li Shimin had already had this kind of thought, but there is a reason why this system can exist for thousands of years. Only by thinking about it can they be more loyal to the royal family wholeheartedly and prevent the occurrence of cholera in the palace, but how to change it is a big problem.

"Have you got any ideas?" Li Shimin asked without blaming him for not stepping back as he said.

"I have some ideas. However, it may involve a lot of aspects. I will tell you about the current situation of the inner palace first, and then you can see if my ideas are feasible." Seeing that Li Shimin is willing to listen to himself, Wang De Immediately packed up his emotions.

"Come on."

"Your Majesty, since the reform of the civil system in the third year of Zhenguan, the number of people who sold themselves into the palace to serve as servants in the inner palace has been greatly reduced. By the sixth year of Zhenguan, no one was willing to be sentenced to work as a servant in the inner palace.

As for the original servants of the internal servants, after the princes gradually became adults and became vassals, they needed to be dispatched abroad, and the number of them became smaller and smaller. Now, it is almost to the point where no one is available. "

Since Li Shimin ascended the throne, he has actually dismissed the palace servants three times. However, the eunuchs could do nothing else. In fact, most of them chose to stay. The number of people dropped from 3000 to [-] to more than [-] after moving into the Daming Palace, which is equivalent to a reduction of nearly [-]%.

You must know that the Daming Palace is larger than the original Taiji Palace. Even though Sun Xiangfu and Yan Lide had already formulated a relatively effective plan for the use of human resources when they designed it, the number of servants in the palace in the future is still the same. It's too busy.

In the office area of ​​the imperial city, there are only twelve office buildings, plus the cleaning of the main palace, there are hundreds of people.

In the harem, the concubines of two generations of emperors, princes and concubines, and princes live in hundreds of villas. There are also gardens, recreational facilities, and amusement parks that are as big as the Taiji Palace in the past. Pruning, cleaning, and maintenance all require a lot of manpower. In addition, all the palaces outside Chang'an also need people who stay behind and maintain them.

With such a large stall, even the most basic cleaning, washing, repairing and maintenance work requires thousands of people, not to mention the housekeepers, who are not only doing these tasks, holding umbrellas, fanning, beating legs, serving tea, Proclamation, communication, guard of honor...

All kinds of service jobs, at least over a hundred, have to be done by them. Even if the housekeeper supervises thousands of people, they can't do it, and they need to constantly replenish manpower.

But now, the people of the Tang Dynasty are all rich, with houses and fields, high income, enough food and clothing, who is so stupid as to want to cut himself off as a slave?
When there is a choice, there will not be too many people who choose to do dirty work. This is an inevitable phenomenon when society develops to a certain extent.

Just like later generations, many big cities are facing the problem of cleaning workers, which is the reason.

"Even if the people don't want it, then I can't ignore the people's opinion, I have to change it." Li Shimin nodded after listening to Wang Deyong's narration.

Wang Deyong continued, "Since moving into the new palace last year, the servants and maids have been thinking about how to reform, and finally came to a conclusion that only if the common people are willing to do these things can they last a long time. Solve this problem. Because, the palace is still the place where His Majesty and all the nobles live, and it would be very unsafe to use criminals, prisoners of war and other people to do things."

Li Shimin nodded and said, "Your words are reasonable, but how can the common people be willing to do these things!"

Wang Deyong replied, "The first thing is to abolish the palace sentence, so that the people don't have to worry about cutting off their children and grandchildren, and then..."

"However, the harem is full of concubines and palace maids. If a large number of men are allowed in, how can we control the cholera incident?" Li Shimin interrupted Wang Deyong.

There is a shortest way to seek to usurp the throne, and that is to green the emperor. Since the Yin and Shang Dynasties, the rulers of the dynasty have the product of eunuchs in order to prevent such things from happening, but at that time they were called eunuchs. .

And this system, in the Tang Dynasty, began to have a more systematic management model, and it was able to grow.

As mentioned above, the stalls of internal servant supervision are huge. Therefore, in the Tang Dynasty, this position belonged to the third-rank official, comparable to the ministers of various ministries. started.

Of course, during the period of Taizong, there were still strict regulations on the number of eunuchs, but in the period of Tang Zhongzong, it was out of control. There were as many as a thousand eunuchs above the seventh rank, and the number of eunuchs in the entire group reached tens of thousands. as much.

There is no way, they have the Daming Palace as big as [-] football fields to manage, and there are also palaces in Luoyang, the eastern capital, and palaces all over the country to manage.

However, during Suzong's period, the power of eunuchs expanded again, and they began to directly control the military power. The imperial guards and several major military branches were all managed by eunuchs. Although there were few cases of interference in the affairs of the outer court, this group expanded to such a huge size. The scale of the country, mastering such a huge power, has an impact on a country in all aspects.

Sun Xiangfu didn't know the development history of eunuchs, he just simply felt that castrating people was inhumane, and he hated dealing with these unhealthy people.

And Ma Daquan happened to be an eunuch who was hostile to him, so he was used to promote the reform of the eunuch system. It was worth sacrificing him for the sake of countless men in future generations.

"The slaves think that the harem should use female officials to manage daily affairs, and use female guards to be responsible for security. For basic miscellaneous tasks, female workers can also be recruited to do it, just like the female workers recruited by various factories in Weinan, just to provide labor for the harem. services, and no longer restrict their personal freedom.

As for the office area in the imperial city, since there are no harem concubines to come and go, there is no need to use eunuchs at all, and normal labor can be used. I believe that as long as the salary of the internal servant supervisor is high, there are still some people who are willing to work in the palace. "Wang De used some methods that he thought of, and said in one go.

"Female officer, female guard."

Speaking of this, Li Shimin thought of his own secret guards. For the convenience of doing things, there are not both men and women. Moreover, the proportion of women in Datang is much higher than that of men, so a large number of women's labor should be used.

"Yes, these days, the slaves have seen the energy of the female officials in the art troupe, all of them are comparable to soldiers. If the internal guard trains a group of people with such a mental outlook to manage the order of the harem, the effect will be very good.

As for the physical work eunuchs usually do, strong women can also do it. The slaves don't think that the eunuchs who serve as internal supervisors are stronger than those village women and female workers who work in the fields and factories.

In addition, you may not have noticed that many of the designs in the Daming Palace are designed to save labor for the workers, such as water. In the past, we needed to lift buckets from the well and then go to Pick from the tank.

Now, a waterwheel is built directly on the high place, and the water from the Taiye pool is fed into the filter pool. The filter pool is located at a high place, and the filtered clean water can directly enter all villas and buildings through pipelines.

Even for watering flowers, you only need to push the built water truck to the water truck, wait for it to fill up with water naturally, push it to the flower bed, unscrew the water valve at the bottom of the car, and use a leather tube to spray it into the flower bed Water is all you need, no effort is needed at all, anyone can do it.

There are also such designs in other aspects, and the servants will not list them one by one. In short, according to the observations of the servants, they have not found any work in the harem that the maids cannot do. "

After listening to Wang Deyong's narration, Li Shimin felt that it was indeed feasible, so he said, "If that's the case, write these suggestions into a memorial and submit them to the queen. I will discuss with the queen and the ministers before making a decision."

"promise."

Seeing Li Shimin's intention to reform, Wang Deyong felt relieved.

Earlier, when Sun Xiangfu was chatting with him, he said that if the eunuch system ended in his hands, then he would be able to leave his name in history and be praised by the people of later generations. A bad reputation is a good thing, and now, if he can have a chance to make a good reputation, he will naturally strive for it with all his strength.

After talking about these things, Li Shimin's mood was not so unpleasant. He changed into civilian clothes, and was about to go out to relax, but outside the small courtyard of the study, he saw a few princes and princesses coming home from school. Holding a black mud lump and gnawing on it, Li Shimin knew that it was a roasted sweet potato.

"Why, does the county school even take care of dinner today?" Li Shimin greeted him with a smile, and a group of children saluted him one after another.

"No, father, these sweet potatoes were all grown by themselves, and now they are harvested. The teacher distributed some to the classmates, and Lizhi also followed them to get some glory!"

Li Lizhi, who was already thirteen or fourteen years old, was already a little girl. As she spoke, she also gave Li Shimin a baked sweet potato from the basket in her hand.

Because she had been educated by the imperial court before and had a strong comprehension ability, after studying in Jiuyuan County, she quickly raised her learning progress to the fifth grade courses, which made her miss a lot of fun in the first and second grade courses.

This kind of sweet potato is a new extracurricular activity topic for the first and second grades of Jiuyuan County School. When the sweet potato seeds arrived in Shannan Road, their young princes and daughters happened to go to Jiuyuan County School. At that time, sweet potatoes were planted , was designated by Sun Xiangfu to be included in the teaching content. Therefore, the princes and princesses who had just started school were taken out by the teacher during the extracurricular activity class to teach them how to grow sweet potatoes.

After all, sweet potato is one of the crops that is relatively easy to grow. In later generations, schools in Japan began to teach children how to grow it when they were in kindergarten, let alone these seven or eight-year-old elementary school students.

As for Li Lizhi's fifth grade, it is a little more difficult to learn the cultivation of amaranth, mustard, cantaloupe and other crops. Li Lizhi also brought some back today.

After receiving the roasted sweet potatoes that Li Lizhi handed over, Li Shimin was not in a hurry to eat them, but he was thinking about the significance of Sun Xiangfu asking the county school to teach these children how to grow sweet potatoes. After all, this thing has just been introduced to the Tang Dynasty. After what happened to the eunuch before, he felt that anything Sun Xiangfu did might have a purpose.

(End of this chapter)