Ming Dynasty: Traveling through the harem, Zhu Yuanzhang was dumbfounded

Chapter 170: Businessmen unite
Time flies, and in the blink of an eye it’s already twenty days.

August 13th, there are only two days left until the Mid-Autumn Festival.

According to the dates on the calendar, this recent period can be said to be a good time for everything and suitable for doing anything.

It was on this day that Zhu Yuanzhang received a letter from Zhenjiang Prefecture, stating that the "Three Strategies of the Crown Prince" were being implemented very well in Zhenjiang Prefecture. The people would rather hand over grain and silver, and corvée labor no longer required constant conscription, which could also maintain the public construction needs of the Ming Dynasty. Land was forcibly reclaimed, and ownership was explained by the court, and the people had no complaints.

So Zhu Yuanzhang started a new reform in Jiangnan.

He gathered people and ordered Lan Yu to be the commander-in-chief of the army heading south, and led Zhang He, Marquis of Hanghai, and Zhang Long, Marquis of Fengxiang, as left and right deputy generals, and Fei Ju, Marquis of Pingyang, and Xie Cheng, Marquis of Yongping, as the vanguard. He called on the five guards under his command, and urgently mobilized 10,000 militiamen and 20,000 auxiliary soldiers to transport food, fodder, horses and other supplies, totaling 60,000 troops to march south together.

Starting from the capital's river and sailing south, the army's massive march caused many people in the palace to tremble.

You know, mobilizing troops in the capital meant that something big was going to happen. Zhu Yuanzhang's unreasonable actions made many people feel that there would be a scene of heavy bloodshed in Jiangnan.

Six days later, shortly after the Mid-Autumn Festival, the army began to gain victory news in Suzhou, Songjiang, Jiaxing, Yangzhou and other places.

Since then, the Ming army has gone to liberate the poor areas in the north, but has never used its own troops to liberate itself, and it has always been in the heavily taxed areas in the south of the Yangtze River.

This place is the most coveted holy land for all the literati in the Ming Dynasty, because so many talents gather here.

It is precisely because of this situation that there are very few people in Jiangnan who pay taxes. The reason for this is that the problem lies with Old Zhu.

In order to encourage scholars to take imperial examinations, Zhu Yuanzhang promulgated a number of friendly policies for scholars, including exemption from taxes if someone in the family passed the imperial examination.

Under the influence of this trend, the whole of Jiangnan began to be swept by the evil trend of allowing successful candidates to marry into one's family.

As a result, the Ming Dynasty collected less taxes from these wealthy people.

Zhu Yuanzhang was determined to clean up the Jiangnan region because he secretly asked someone to calculate, based on the level of corruption in Zhenjiang Prefecture, how much less taxes the Jiangnan region paid him every year.

The result was not bad, but this calculation almost broke Lao Zhu's defense.

According to records from previous years, Jiangnan was a major tax-paying area, paying more than 10 million taels of silver in taxes each year. However, this amount was only one-fifth of Shanxi merchants' annual income.

In other words, as a dynasty of a country, the imperial court that controlled the operation of this dynasty, the tax revenue of the Ming Dynasty was actually not as good as that of the Shanxi Chamber of Commerce, which was a group of merchants united together.

This immediately made Zhu Yuanzhang furious, and he made up his mind that from now on, all the land in the Ming Dynasty would be under the control of the court, and he would keep a close eye on everyone, especially the rich. If anyone dared to embezzle his money and give it to others, he would not mind letting them know who had the final say in this Central Plains.

Therefore, under the command of this core idea, Lan Yu killed so many people in most areas of Jiangnan in less than ten days that it is no exaggeration to say that there were mountains of corpses and seas of blood.

Unexpectedly, even though so many people died, the imperial court was not affected at all. Not only that, the people in the south, who were originally in chaos, gradually calmed down.

what is the reason?
The problem lies in land reform.

The people who were rebelling in Fujian, Guangxi, Guizhou, Hunan, Guangdong and Jiangxi suddenly learned that as long as you are an exiled people and are willing to settle down.

Then you can get one and a half mu of land from the rich peasants liberated by the court, calculated based on the number of people.

To put it bluntly, it is using land to buy your peace of mind. Faced with such temptation, a civilian who was a member of the rebel army one day may become the most loyal citizen of the Ming Dynasty the next day.

It is just as the saying goes, since ancient times in the Central Plains, only peasants could turn the world upside down, and it has never been heard that scholars and officials could accomplish anything great.

When the majority can crush the minority who are like fluorescent lights, then no matter how loudly these minority shout, it is just like the sound of a mosquito flapping its wings.

A casual slap can destroy it.

This massive campaign to clean up the land and reform the new land policy in the south lasted for almost a month.

In mid-October, cold air began to invade the Central Plains. According to the original plan, ordinary people could only survive in misery. Most of the grain they grew had to be handed over to their clan tenants, and the few remaining grains could only be used for one day's food and clothing.

In other words, they are almost in a state of just eating one day and being hungry the next to survive.

However, after the rectification in the south, 90% of the landlords were frightened by Zhu Yuanzhang's swift and decisive measures. They did not expect it.

The Ming Dynasty has been established for more than ten years, but the imperial court is still willing to focus its attention on them. Doesn't the imperial court worry that the Northern Yuan Dynasty will suddenly counterattack the Ming Dynasty?
Unfortunately, they will never know that the Ming Dynasty’s border is now kept impregnable by the bombs developed by Yang Chen and a group of gunpowder masters.

The Ming Dynasty’s city defense cannons could fire up to two kilometers away.

In other words, the Ming border defense troops only needed to stand on the city wall and use telescopes to see the enemy two kilometers away.

They can change the direction of the cannon fire, and when the enemy comes within a kilometer, hundreds of new cannons can be fired at the same time in an instant to annihilate any invading enemy.

When the Northern Yuan barbarians saw that they could not get close to the Ming Dynasty border city without horses, they chose to withdraw without hesitation.

It was precisely because of the cannons that Zhu Yuanzhang was given enough confidence to order Lan Yu to go south to clear up the rebellion.

A hidden chamber of commerce in Suzhou Prefecture.

Several old accountants dressed in brocade clothes and covered in sable fur gathered in a room.

The coal in the stove was burning red, and the hot warm air filled the entire house, forming a sharp contrast with the cold environment outside.

"Damn it, what's wrong with this Emperor Zhu? Even if he was not kind to us merchants before, he wouldn't kill us all, right?

Now all the ancestral land has been taken back to the court, and there are only a few dozen acres left. What can we do? All the servants in my family have been sent back to their hometown. You know, my Qian family is a famous wealthy family in Suzhou and Hangzhou. It has been hard to accumulate family property since Li Tang. Who would have thought that it would be confiscated by the court today. All the efforts have gone to waste. It’s gone, everything is gone! "

One of them, a thin old man wearing gold and silver jewelry, faced the crackling sound of the stove and couldn't help but talk about how difficult his family had been living these days.

He is a branch of the Qian family, with his ancestral home in Jiangsu. The Qian family has been a prominent family in the south throughout the dynasties. Unlike ordinary families, the Qian family advocates that the family members spread out and have no other messy rules. They only hope that the Qian family's children can help each other when they are outside.

Relying on the prestige of the Qian family, this old man surnamed Qian joined the Shanxi Merchants Chamber of Commerce and became one of the few Qian bosses in the Jiangnan region.

Ever since Zhu Yuanzhang began to purge Jiangnan, every blow he received was enough to make his heart bleed.

He had to grit his teeth and swallow his anger. He asked an elder in his family who was a prefect in the court. He vaguely heard from the other party that the reform was entirely because the emperor wanted the crown prince to inherit the throne. To put it bluntly, he wanted his son to make some political achievements.

And this group of people are the victims of these political achievements.

"Ah! Lord Zhu's move is really cruel and ruthless. You don't know that there is a rumor that there is a big family in Shandong called the Ji family. They relied on the fact that they were descendants of the Yanhuang Emperor and refused to give up the 5,000 acres of land they controlled. Later, they were slaughtered by the Marquis Lan Yu of the court. Except for a few people who surrendered in the end, all the others in the family died!"

"Yes! I've heard about this. Not only in Shandong, but also in Jiangxi there is a large family with the surname Ye. It seems that this is where the elders of Ye Jiuye's clan are. They are also unwilling to give up their own land. They say that all the thousands of clan members are willing to not give in for the clan land and to live and die with the clan land. Guess what happened?

Those marquis generals didn't say a word and just picked up their swords and chopped them all off! They killed so many innocent people, young and old, that the blood flowed like a river and the corpses floated for thousands of miles."

"What's even worse is that they don't allow us to use real gold and silver in private transactions, saying that for the sake of the court's financial economy, only Ming treasure notes can be used. Using this as an excuse, they confiscated nearly 60 million taels of silver from our family."

"Tsk! What's your 60 million taels of silver? Don't forget what happened to Mr. Shen Sanye, the richest man in Jiangnan."

When someone mentioned Shen Wansan, the room instantly fell into a silent atmosphere.

Compared to Shen Wansan, it's probably good enough that they are still alive.

In the early days of the Ming Dynasty, the country was extremely poor. How could it suddenly become stable?

Wasn’t it just because Zhu Yuanzhang found a random excuse to confiscate Shen Wansan’s property?
As the richest man in Jiangnan, Shen Wansan's business can be said to have touched upon everything legal. Whether it was grain, silk, tea, porcelain, or Ming Dynasty industrial products, he bought them at low prices and sold them overseas in Southeast Asia at high prices.

As a result, he accumulated a fortune of two hundred billion taels of silver.

When Zhu Yuanzhang confiscated his entire family, it took the accountant half a year to complete the settlement, which shows how rich Shen Wansan's family was.

It was also this sum of money that gave the precarious Ming Dynasty a sudden breath of blood, and the court gradually stabilized. Otherwise, the Ming Dynasty would have been extinct in this world prematurely due to financial reasons.

"Ah! I thought the court confiscated all the land in order to take it for themselves, but I didn't expect the court to come up with a tax burden. I really don't know what the prince was thinking, to come up with such a plan to wipe out the whole family.

Originally, those impoverished people had to bear the heavy burden of corvée labor. Now, they only need to pay taxes per head, and they don’t even need to participate in corvée labor. The people can’t follow us even if they want to. This really cuts off our escape route!"

This move not only destroyed the lives of these wealthy businessmen, but also eliminated the last condition for them to rely on land annexation to make a fortune.

For those rich peasants who relied on their land to abuse their power in the countryside, this was the end of their lives.

In the past, in order to avoid unpaid corvée labor, common people left their hometowns and lived in two places with their wives and children. They actively followed the rich peasants’ outsourcing procedures and handed over their land to others.

He only needs to work to earn food, and does not need to go out during the busy farming season. Firstly, there will be no one to take care of the fields, and secondly, he cannot live with his wife.

The corvée problem is the biggest problem weighing on the people. Now that this problem has been solved, the people naturally have no reason to play any outsourcing policy with these wealthy businessmen.

Not only that, they can also get more land and more people-friendly policies. Since they are all working, why not work at home instead of helping you, the rich farmer?

The people are stupid, not fools. They can clearly feel who is good to them.

At present, the imperial court is promoting the distribution of labor service according to the amount of land in Jiangnan on a large scale. Judging from the extent of this, it seems that they want to make all the people aware of it.

It's not that they didn't think about resisting, but Lan Yu and his men were ruthless and as businessmen, there was little they could do except to have some money.

Incite the people to revolt?

It is totally impossible. At this point, according to the current policy, if anyone obstructs the implementation of the land tax system, not only will the imperial court want their lives, but even the common people who work in the fields will not let them go.

This group of Shanxi merchants are now banding together for warmth, hoping that when the next emperor ascends the throne, they can use the power in their hands to bribe high-ranking officials, or find other ways.

Directly train a puppet to become a high-ranking official.

The city of Nanjing, thousands of miles away in the south of the Yangtze River.

The express report was passed down through layers of channels and finally landed in Zhu Yuanzhang's hands.

Zhu Yuanzhang, who was exhausted, had just finished dealing with the government affairs this morning. He was thinking about going to accompany his sister, but found that she had just gone to coax her grandson to sleep.

So he sat on the stool, opened the envelope casually, and took a look at the contents inside.

When they saw Lan Yu clearing up the south of the Yangtze River at the fastest speed, the people not only had no intention of resisting, but applauded instead.

Now some areas in Jiangnan have begun to build temples for Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhu Biao, and they kneel down and burn incense every day, praying that the Emperor of Ming Dynasty can learn from them.

Seeing these good news one after another, Zhu Yuanzhang was so happy that he couldn't help clapping his hands in approval.

"Good! Great! I didn't expect that the people actually wanted me to continue to be the emperor. It seems that they recognize Biao'er as much as I do. Hahaha! When Biao'er inherits the throne in the future, we will see who in this world can oppose us!"

Happy Old Zhu shouted loudly in a rough voice without any image.

He had just shouted twice when Empress Ma, who had just walked over, gave him a soft warning.

"Chongba! Don't get excited yet. Xiongying and the others just fell asleep. I took great pains to get these two little guys to lie down quietly. If you wake them up, you can go and comfort them yourself later."

Zhu Yuanzhang did not take Empress Ma's teachings to heart. Instead, he enjoyed this kind of relationship with her.

When Empress Ma sat next to him, Zhu Yuanzhang immediately shared the good news with her.

"Sister, sister! You see, the common people's recognition of us is getting higher and higher. The method of allocating land tax is really a good idea. Without unpaid corvée, the people are more and more accepting of the Ming Dynasty established by our Zhu family.

Oh, and here’s the new land reform law. We thought the people would feel uncomfortable with the fact that the ownership of the land was in the hands of the government, but guess what?

The people actually did not understand at all, but instead agreed with it. They wanted to build a temple for us and burn incense for us on festivals and special occasions!"

(End of this chapter)