Emperor Zhengde

Chapter 205: Changes in the Ming Dynasty (Two in One)

As the sun rises, the shadow of the Forbidden City's walls appears very long.

Zhu Houzhao walked with his hands behind his back in the angular screen accompanied by Liu Jin. He couldn't help but look at the blue sky and at Liu Jin beside him.

The national strength of the Ming Dynasty is now flourishing, and it has officially begun to participate in the Age of Discovery, becoming a trend-setter of its time. The empire is transforming from an agricultural society to a capitalist commercial society.

However, when such a transformation is applied to specific people and things, what is manifested is simply a change in the fate of the characters.

Liu Jin was not executed by himself in the fifth year of Zhengde as in the original history.

In the original history, because Prince Anhua rebelled in the name of killing Liu Jin, and the civil officials even deliberately exaggerated the momentum of Prince Anhua's rebellion, the simple-minded Emperor Zhengde believed that the world had really lost the support of the people because of Liu Jin. So when Liu Jin was jointly falsely accused of treason by Zhang Yong and Yang Yiqing, he had to agree to kill Liu Jin to relieve the people's grievances.

In this life, although the Anhua Prince Rebellion was still deliberately exaggerated by the civil service group, Zhu Houzhao, who was familiar with the course of history, was no longer easily intimidated by these civil servants as he was in history. He even took advantage of the civil servants' desire to cause trouble and made Yang Yiqing confess his guilt voluntarily. At the same time, he did not let the civil servants achieve their goal of killing reformist officials by taking advantage of the Anhua Prince Rebellion.

The rebellion of Prince Anhua was still quickly put down, and Prince Anhua himself was executed, and all of his relatives were demoted to commoners.

The Ming Dynasty had one less prince to pay rice for, but had many more common people who could pay taxes and work as officials. In any case, this was a good thing.

However, Liu Jin did not die, and Ma Wensheng, Jiao Fang, Xu Jin and other reformist officials who were hated by the civil servants also had a good end.

But Zhu Houzhao had to admit that even though people like Liu Jin who had offended the civil servants did not die, great changes had taken place.

Take Liu Jin for example.

Because he, the emperor, did not delegate power to the Imperial Household Department and the Cabinet, Liu Jin of the Imperial Household Department, like the ministers of the Cabinet, was not as powerful as in history.

On the contrary, Zhu Houzhao had to admit that he, as an emperor, was increasingly giving people the impression of being shrewd.

Of course, it is very likely that Zhu Houzhao himself was not smart but appeared smart because he knew the direction of history.

In short, Liu Jin and many Ming officials began to feel that Zhu Houzhao was not an emperor who could be easily fooled, and that he was ruthless and insidious and could read people's hearts. As a result, Liu Jin became very cautious and not as arrogant as he was in history.

In particular, after witnessing with his own eyes that his emperor executed eunuchs who had betrayed him, such as Wang Yue and Zhang Yong, Zhu Houzhao discovered that even Liu Jin became silent in front of him. As long as he did not ask, even if he walked for another half an hour, Liu Jin would not make any sound, as if he had disappeared out of thin air. But as long as he called out to him, he would always appear in time, and seemed to have figured out his thoughts. As long as he said something, he would only give an answer that satisfied him, but Zhu Houzhao found it increasingly difficult to tell what he was really thinking when he answered him.

Not only did Liu Jin seem to have changed greatly from his original historical character, but the other Eight Tigers were also far from being as genuine as Zhu Houzhao first met them. They all wore masks and appeared to be more afraid of Zhu Houzhao than before, but Zhu Houzhao had no idea what they really thought of him as the emperor.

The same was true for other civil and military officials. Zhu Houzhao found that the more military power he held and the more autocratic his imperial authority became, the less people around him dared to get close to him.

Sure enough, people at the top of the pyramid have no friends.

Back to the topic, Liu Jin was still alive, which meant that the eunuch group had not been completely suppressed by the civil officials, and the balance of the empire was still there. It was precisely because of this balance that Zhu Houzhao was able to establish the Ming Dynasty's military-industrial system, resolve the threat from the little prince, and allow the empire to begin to re-engage in the maritime industry.

Zhu Houzhao didn't know to what extent he would lead the Ming Dynasty next, but he had to admit that even as the emperor, he could not fully control the development direction of the entire empire, and sometimes he had to decide what was the best choice.

For example, under the deliberate arrangement of the emperor himself, the new Ming Dynasty hand-cranked vertical spindle spinning machine and flying shuttle loom, which were imitated from the Jenny spinning machine, have now appeared.

Zhu Houzhao's goal was naturally to allow the Ming Dynasty to enter the era of industrial revolution ahead of schedule, and to gradually achieve semi-mechanized or even mechanized agricultural and industrial production in the Ming Dynasty.

From a macro-historical perspective, this is undoubtedly a new thing that is beneficial to the progress of the Ming Dynasty.

However, this highly efficient semi-mechanized production also led to the bankruptcy of family-based spinning and weaving craftsmen, causing a sharp drop in people's income.

Moreover, the strict performance evaluation system implemented in the empire now made tax collection very strict, so that tax resistance often occurred, especially in the Jiangnan region where the handicraft industry was developed.

Coupled with the instigation of some officials and gentry with ulterior motives, the tax resistance phenomenon became more and more serious, causing various conflicts between officials and the public that had only appeared in the late Ming Dynasty to begin to appear in large numbers at this time.

Zhu Houzhao could be ruthless to civil officials, but he could not be ruthless to the common people, because the common people were the largest group in the empire. Once he could not get the support of the people, even if he was the emperor, he could easily be pulled off the throne.

Therefore, Zhu Houzhao now realized that even though he knew that the steam engine and oil could change the Ming Dynasty, he did not dare to directly start the steam industrial revolution.

How to make ordinary people truly benefit from the industrialization and capitalization process of the Ming Dynasty is a question that Zhu Houzhao has been thinking about. The only way he can think of now is external plunder and trade, turning a large number of people into workers, expanding the scale of production, increasing workers' income, and then selling the large number of products produced to make a profit.

Because the emergence of new spinning machines and looms led to the bankruptcy of a large number of handicraftsmen, Zhu Houzhao directly issued an order to exempt bankrupt handicraftsmen from taxes, and local governments were not allowed to levy taxes on bankrupt handicraftsmen to avoid intensifying conflicts and depriving officials and gentry with ulterior motives of the opportunity to provoke civil unrest. At the same time, Zhu Houzhao asked the government-run weaving bureau to expand its production scale, recruit more handicraftsmen to join the weaving bureau workshops, and even directly sell new spinning machines and looms to the public, so that private weaving merchants would not go bankrupt due to backward production technology.

As the production level of the entire weaving industry increased, a large number of migrant workers went bankrupt, which caused employment problems. Zhu Houzhao spent a lot of money on infrastructure. As the new technology had the greatest impact on the handicraft industry in Jiangnan, causing more and more unemployed people in Jiangnan, Zhu Houzhao allocated more than two million taels of silver to Yan Song, the governor of Nanzhili, and ordered him to organize migrant workers to repair seawalls, dredge rivers after the seawalls were repaired, and build bridges and dry roads after the rivers were dredged.

Almost all the huge profits earned by the official weaving bureau in the early stage due to technological improvements were reinvested in this way. Although the technological improvements did not lead to a large number of common people losing their jobs or reducing their income, the empire had a lot more cloth due to the improvement in productivity, causing a sharp drop in cloth prices and oversupply.

As a result, the profit margins of government-run weaving bureaus and even private weaving merchants were greatly reduced. Under such circumstances, the Ming Dynasty also needed to trade. It needed to sell cheap cloth in large quantities at high prices to avoid damage to the domestic weaving industry and thereby make more profits.

So, unknowingly, the Ming Dynasty had become a capitalist empire, and it was in urgent need of opening up the international market.

Because of this, when Zhu Houzhao opened border trade and allowed Guangdong and Guangxi to open to the sea, there was not so much resistance in the country.

Large quantities of cheap cloth were sold to the Mongolian tribes in exchange for scarce horses, cattle and sheep in the Central Plains, allowing the empire to form more elite and larger cavalry. At the same time, the large influx of cattle and sheep into the Central Plains increased the supply of meat for the people inside the pass, so that by the ninth year of Zhengde, the physical health of the people of the Ming Dynasty had generally improved.

The Dongchang Statistics Bureau, which now specializes in investigating various statistical data on a part-time basis, has conducted a survey. Compared with the fourth year of Zhengde, the height of the people in the Ming Dynasty sample survey in the ninth year of Zhengde was slightly higher than that in the fourth year of Zhengde.

After Guangdong and Guangxi opened their seas, the sale of large quantities of cheap cloth made the weaving merchants in Guangdong and Guangxi wealthy, so much so that the Guangdong and Guangxi Bank came into being. The tariff revenue brought by the Guangdong and Guangxi Maritime Customs Offices also enabled the Ministry of Revenue to earn an additional 2 million taels of silver each year, far exceeding the salt tax revenue of the past.

The Emperor of the Ming Dynasty began to build large-scale public facilities, which resulted in a large amount of treasury revenue returning to the hands of the people at a high speed. In particular, the income of urban residents increased significantly. In addition, the prices of cloth and meat fell, which enabled the people of the Ming Dynasty to have enough money to buy better cloth to make clothes and better meat to nourish their bodies, which increased domestic demand as well.

However, the increase in domestic demand only brought cheap products produced by the Ming Dynasty's own people back to the people. If the entire empire wanted to truly increase and accumulate wealth, it still had to rely on foreign trade and expansion.

It was for this reason that Zhu Houzhao first established the Daming Maritime Trade Company and let Zhang Yanling, as the emperor's brother-in-law, be responsible for the shipping of the Daming Maritime Trade Company. This not only trained Zhang Yanling's navigation skills, but also showed the world the royal background of the Daming Maritime Trade Company.

This time, the Ming Maritime Trade Company followed Pires to Portugal, bringing with them twenty armed merchant ships filled with cheap and exquisite Ming cloth. Its purpose was to sell the cloth along the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. At the same time, it would establish a base to regain control of the routes to the Atlantic Ocean and put it under the control of Ming itself.

The first key control point of this route was Malacca, which was directly captured by the Guangdong and Guangxi Navy of the Ming Dynasty.

In order to meet the purpose of foreign trade and expansion, Zhu Houzhao also forced Malacca to agree to borrow 20 million taels of silver from the Ming Dynasty to pay for the Ming Dynasty's military expenses to invade Malacca. Half of this military expense plus interest could be compensated by Malacca's tariff revenue for 50 years, while the other half plus interest would require the future king of Malacca to find a way to collect from his own people.

Moreover, Zhu Houzhao also stated that if Malacca was unwilling to pay the military expenses, the Ming Empire would not send troops to it. Even if it did, it would only regard Malacca as a captured state and would bring it under the Ming's own rule. If the ruler of Malacca still wanted to have the power to rule Malacca, he must agree to pay the military expenses of the Ming.

The rulers of Malacca finally did not refuse. There was no other way. Rulers are selfish. In order to continue to have the power to enslave their own people, they can sell anything, let alone pay tens of millions of taels of military expenses. After all, only the people of Malacca will have to repay this military expense.

Zhu Houzhao also knew that this method of plundering was the best way, because it could not only gain a lot of benefits from Malacca, but also avoid causing resentment and large-scale resistance from the local people of Malacca due to direct plundering. The people of Malacca would only blame the rulers of Malacca for their hatred of being exploited.

The Ming Dynasty could even express its sympathy for the people of Malacca and criticize the greed of the rulers of Malacca like a white lotus, so as to gain the favor of the ordinary people of Malacca towards the Ming Dynasty.

And if Malacca goes to war because the Malacca rulers increase the burden on the Malacca people in order to pay for the Ming Dynasty's military expenses, the Ming Dynasty can take this opportunity to split Malacca, causing wars in Malacca to continue and allowing Ming Dynasty's weapons to gain a wider sales market.

Not only were they targeting Malacca, the people from the Ming Maritime Trade Company who followed Pires westward were also looking for national heroes who were fighting against the Portuguese colonists in various places, and looking for opportunities to sell some weapons to these fighters who were resisting the Portuguese colonial aggression, so as to destroy the Portuguese colonial bases and return the control of the routes to the hands of the Ming Dynasty.

"Your Majesty! We have arrived at the Cining Palace!"

Zhu Houzhao was just wondering whether it was time to abolish the road permit system that was in name only to allow more rural people to enter the cities, and whether it was time to fully open the sea to take the Ming Dynasty's maritime strategy a step further, when Liu Jin suddenly reminded him that it brought Zhu Houzhao back to reality.

"I understand. You can go back to the Imperial Household Department," Zhu Houzhao said as he entered the Cining Palace.

At this time, Liu Jin also hurriedly took his leave and retreated respectfully.

Because the Ming Dynasty was a prosperous country, Zhu Houzhao had no need to lower the quality of life of his royal family, so he ordered the selection of a group of palace maids to enter the palace and serve as royal service personnel on a hired basis.

Therefore, there are many palace maids who are superior in both temperament and appearance near the Cining Palace. When Zhu Houzhao appeared here, countless ladies in colorful embroidered clothes saluted him. Zhu Houzhao had to exempt them one by one. Then he met the Empress Dowager Zhang, the Queen Xia who was in her twenties and graceful, the Imperial Concubines Liu and Su, and of course the four little princes.

Zhu Houzhao still let his royal family eat at the same table with him, so as to maintain a close relationship. He was always serious when he was outside, and when he came to the Cining Palace, he felt like he had returned home in his previous life. He just smiled and touched the little face of the little prince Zhu Zailei, sat in the middle, and said with a smile: "What delicious food has the imperial kitchen made today?"

Thanks to my book friend "Rather betray the world than betray you" for the 300 book coins reward. Thank you to my book friend Hua...丿辰 for the 100 starting coins reward. Thank you to my book friend Chaoxuexuechi for the 100 starting coins reward. Thank you to my book friend Zhoutian Meridian for the 1000 starting coins reward.

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(End of this chapter)