Late Ming Dynasty: So what if Emperor Chongzhen was inactive?!

Chapter 315 What Eight Great Shanxi Merchants?! Just one by the roadside, easily crushed!
In February, Zhu Youjian left Taiyuan and continued westward, his next stop being Fenzhou Prefecture. Zhu Youjian stationed his troops in the Lüliang Mountains and stole the pastures of the Prince of Jin and the Prince of Yonghe. The young Prince of Yonghe, Zhu Qiuzhu, felt that the emperor was hinting at something, and tearfully presented him with thirty breeding stallions and two hundred shi of fine grain.

Zhu Youjian saw that Zhu Qiuzhu was a handsome and extraordinary young man, looking like one of the top-ranking elders in the ancestral temple who had stepped out of a portrait. He was broad-shouldered and thick-waisted, could ride a horse and shoot left and right, and knew how to use a long spear. Zhu Youjian immediately felt as if he had found a treasure, so he brought him back to the army and ordered him to accompany him.

The main reason was that before Zhu Youjian set off, he felt that 6,000 troops were already an exaggeration, and they were all elites, enough to fight a long-distance raid. But after he actually set off, he realized that he was not fighting a war, or rather, he was fighting a super-large-scale internal war with enemies on all sides. He felt that 6,000 troops were not enough.

Zhu Youjian was too cowardly. He felt insecure without several thousand people by his side. He didn't dare to send people out. If he relied on him to carry out targeted demolitions in each prefecture and county, who knew when it would take? So he felt that he should temporarily expand his team and find some helpers.

The Prince of Yonghe and the Prince of Jin were from the same family two hundred years ago. Now, he mainly raises horses for the Prince of Jin. In the tenth year of Zhu Zhanji's reign, at the beginning of Zhu Qizhen's reign, the Empress Dowager Zhang divided the Jin fiefdom and gave the first Prince of Yonghe two counties, as well as the Guandishan military settlement and pasture.

The two counties only had a few hundred acres of barren mountain land. Let alone making money, he was lucky if he didn't lose money. From then on, the Yonghe Prince made a living by raising horses. The Yonghe Prince and the Jin Prince of this generation were both of the "Qiu" generation, but there was a big age difference between them. The Jin Prince was thirty-eight years old and already had grandchildren, while the Yonghe Prince, Zhu Qiuzhu, was twenty-four years old.

Young people are good, unlike the old Deng who is full of lifelessness, or perhaps they are like newborn calves unafraid of tigers. Having never been persecuted by civil officials, Zhu Qiuzhu has clearly responded to Zhu Youjian's call to free the princes, and has now become an excellent horse trader.

The horse ranch housed three hundred horses, dozens of donkeys, and a dozen or so hybrid animals that were neither donkeys nor horses. He recruited over two hundred deserters from the border army to raise and trade horses for him. Zhu Youjian even suspected that this young man was capable enough to overthrow his patriarch, the Jin prince; truly, he was a promising talent!
Zhu Qiuzhu hesitated, not daring to let the emperor know what he had done. The emperor said he would let the princes restore the Three Guards on their own, but emperors were often unreliable, and the origins of his troops were unclear; there was no guarantee the emperor wouldn't use this as an opportunity to cause trouble. Zhu Youjian didn't care at all; let him rebel if he dared, he might even be praised as a hero!

Guandi Mountain is the main peak of the Lüliang Mountains. Several temples dedicated to Guandi were built on the mountain. Due to misinformation, the local people mistakenly believed that Guandi Mountain was Guandi Mountain.

Emperor Wenzong of Yuan, Tugh Temur, bestowed upon Guan Yu the title of God of War, which greatly boosted the morale of the army, leading to victory in the Battle of the Two Capitals. In the tenth year of the Wanli reign, Guan Yu was further honored as "Xietian Dadi" (Great Emperor Who Assists Heaven); in the forty-second year, he was further bestowed the title "Sanjie Fumo Dadi Shenwei Yuanzhen Tianzun Guan Sheng Dijun" (Great Emperor Who Subdues Demons in the Three Realms, Divine Might Far-Reaching Heavenly Venerable Guan Sheng Dijun).

Zhu Youjian dragged Zhu Qiuzhu up the mountain to pay homage at the Guan Temple. After a couple of cups of wine, he became quite tipsy and insisted on dragging Zhu Qiuzhu to cut off a chicken's head, burn yellow paper, and swear an oath of brotherhood. Zhu Qiuzhu was terrified and turned to run away!
Zhu Xieyuan looked at the unreliable emperor with a sense of helplessness. Only he knew that the emperor did not like to drink and would never let himself get drunk!

Zhu Youjian, stationed in the Lüliang Mountains, the geographical center of Fenzhou, ordered his subordinates to sweep through Fenzhou Prefecture with imperial edicts. Instead of carrying out anti-corruption work, he merely purged the local monks and Taoists, and incidentally wiped out the wealthy Fan family in Jiexiu County. What a load of rubbish, the head of the Eight Great Shanxi Merchants, crushing them was as easy as crushing a bug.

The Shanxi merchants are now just a roadside stall. Their commercial empire only grew and expanded after the Jurchens entered the pass several times and Dorgon led his troops to massacre Shanxi. They were an important part of the Manchu economic cycle, mainly responsible for selling stolen goods for the Jurchens and transporting goods, mainly through the Zhangjiakou trade market.

Even though they made some progress in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, they remained relatively unknown until the Manchus destroyed the Southern Ming and completely occupied Han Chinese territory. The Manchus had many so-called imperial merchants, but the Fan family wasn't even considered a prominent one. It wasn't until the mid-Qing period, when the Manchus were conquering the northwest, that these Shanxi merchants truly became the wealthy and influential Shanxi merchants known to later generations by supplying grain to the Qing army.

After the Fan family rose to prominence, they began to boast about the glorious deeds of their ancestors. This is like some people who claim to be descendants of Dorgon, yet they can't even tell whether Dorgon belonged to the Plain White Banner or the Plain Yellow Banner, or even distinguish between the Three Banners and the Lower Three Banners, yet they randomly claim ancestry. It's one thing for such people not to be ashamed of being traitors, but they are also utterly ignorant!

With the cancellation of the border trade in Zhangjiakou, the development of the Fan Yongdou family was limited. Zhu Youjian did not sever the border trade with the Mongols, but merely moved the trade location to outside the Great Wall, collecting commercial taxes through customs duties to save on administrative costs and reduce opportunities for corruption to some extent.

Even if the border troops embezzled the money, it was still indirectly supporting the army, which was better than enriching those shady characters. This system naturally had its hidden dangers, but it wasn't too outrageous in its early stages. What happened afterward can only be left to the wisdom of future generations.

Although the Fan Yongdou family had not yet risen to prominence, it was not unjust for Zhu Youjian to exterminate them, because Zhu Youjian's men found evidence in their home that they had smuggled grain to the Jurchens during the Wanli era. In the 46th year of Wanli's reign, Liaodong suffered a severe drought, and the Later Jin dynasty faced a grain shortage. Fan Yongdou and his associates purchased grain from Henan and Shandong, and transported it to Shenyang via Mongolia.

At that time, the price of grain in Liaodong was sixty taels of silver per shi (a unit of dry measure), a profit of a hundredfold. Even Zhu Youjian himself was tempted. With conclusive evidence of collusion with the Jurchens, there was nothing more to say. The Fan family of Jiexiu was expelled from the family, the patriarch Fan Yongdou was executed by being cut in half at the waist and his body displayed in the marketplace, and all those who had been coerced into following him were also beheaded.

Those who did not meet the death penalty criteria were sent to Liaodong for forced labor. The Ming Dynasty originally had millions of acres of military farmland in Liaodong, but now only less than 400,000 acres remain, and large tracts of wasteland urgently need to be recultivated.

After Zhu Youjian sent people to confiscate the Fan family's property, they found 40,000 taels of silver and properties such as fields, houses, and shops worth about 130,000 taels. Zhu Youjian was somewhat disappointed, as this amount of money was not even a fraction of the tens of millions of taels of silver that the legendary eight great Shanxi merchants possessed!

By torturing Fan Yongdou, Zhu Youjian obtained a list of Fan's business associates and their official network. The Fan family was indeed very weak at the moment, incomparable to those big-name merchants. The Jin faction in the court was half dead, and the current pillar of Shanxi was actually Sun Chuanting?!

The Fan family had no connections in the imperial court, and the highest-ranking figures they knew were only a few fourth-rank garrison commanders in Datong and Xuanfu. Now the question returned to Zhu Youjian's side. He could easily crush the Fan family's merchants, but should he severely punish the border generals involved in smuggling, or follow Cao Cao's example and burn all the evidence of his subordinates' treason?

(End of this chapter)