Some people have an inexplicable admiration for Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang, feeling that he only abuses the gentry and the wealthy, and is too good to treat the low-level civilians. In their eyes, Zhu Yuanzhang does not seem to be a centralized emperor, but a living bodhisattva dedicated to the people. Is that really the case?
To be honest, Zhu Yuanzhang basically "treats all subjects in the world" (except for the royal family).
When Shang Ying implemented the reform of the law in the Qin State, he believed that Great Qin only needed one kind of personThe people of the ploughing war。Engaged in daily production, accumulating resources for the empire. In wartime, he went into battle to kill the enemy, conquered the unsubsistent and expanded the territory for the king. Zhu Yuanzhang is a loyal supporter of this "One People Theory".
In his eyes, the subjects are the screws of his Zhu Ming Dynasty, and they are used if they are needed. Understanding this, you can understand why Zhu Yuanzhang wants to implement the "hereditary household registration system" that blocks the path of life. Because the matter of whether the life of the subjects is meaningful or not is completely meaningless in the eyes of Taizu.
Desire makes people have ideas and motivation, and Zhu Yuanzhang, who has stepped onto the throne step by step from the bottom, naturally understands this truth. In order to let his subjects work hard and keep to themselves, Zhu Yuanzhang snuffed out the people's desires and ideas from all aspects of life.
Through the road introduction system, people are confined to their places of residence, reducing their mobility, communication and organizational skills. Houses, cars, seats, drinking utensils, beds, etc. are also carefully divided according to grades and use restrictions are stipulated, and it does not matter whether you have the money to buy them, the key is that you are not naturally qualified to use them.
In order to make people pay less attention to these "things outside the body", Zhu Yuanzhang even made regulations on what clothes civilians should wear, and even the style of clothes.
Fourteen years, order agricultural clothing, yarn, silk, cloth, businessmen stop clothes, silk, cloth...Zhu Yuanzhang, who regards the people as screws, hates the most is actually not the rich gentry, but the "Yifu". Shaw is not only a homeless homeless person, but also a person who is not engaged in "farming and commerce". For Ming Taizu, for whatever reason, if a person cannot make a real contribution to his dynasty, then his existence is worthless.In the past twenty-two years, farmers have been forbidden to wear hats and hats to enter and leave the market, and those who are not close to agriculture are not allowed....
Twenty-three years, the elderly are clothed, the sleeves are longer than the hand, and the return is less than three inches at the elbow; The length of the man's clothes is five inches to the ground, and the sleeve length is six inches longer than the hand....
History of the Ming Dynasty, Chronicles, Volume 43
Between a mile, within a hundred households, there are still Shaw, Lijia sits and watches, neighbors and relatives do not take it, and his Shaw is either in the public gate, or in the city, there is a crime, the official is captured, the Yimin is executed, and the neighbors of Lijia are relocated.Dahao".
Want to stay at home? Kill; Want to work in the tertiary industry? Kill; Want to specialize in literature and ideological research? Kill too. This is not to scare peopleDahao".There is a case record of Zhu Yuanzhang's one-time execution of 2,871 "Yimin" in Suzhou and Songjiang.
Is it possible that as long as you keep to yourself, you can live a stable life under the rule of Taizu?
After the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, because of the war that lasted for decades, many people fled and the population loss was serious. Zhu Yuanzhang once said after returning to his hometown for the first time as the emperor, ".I went to Haozhou yesterday, and when I passed through the prefectures and counties, I saw that the people were scarce and the fields were barren. Since the rise of the war, people have died, or have been exiled to other counties, and they are not allowed to return to their villages
In order to restore production and develop the economy, Ming Taizu launched a huge movement involving tens of millions of peopleSoutherners transferred to the north。It's just that this project, which has been contributed to the Zhu Ming royal family, is a history of blood and tears for the people in the early Ming Dynasty.
For people, migration means not only being uprooted from their homes, but also ruthlessly depriving their families of the assets they have accumulated for decades – their fields and houses. In addition, the compensation given by the imperial court was negligible (mainly wasteland), so the people who were relocated, whether rich or poor, were basically reduced to abject poverty in an instant after the migration.
For example, Fengyang, one of the main destinations of migration, was dominated by wealthy households in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. But in less than two years,".There are ten first-class and **, and one or two survivors; There are thousands of acres of land and nineteen barren land, and one or two cultivators”。Everyone has gone, and they have basically joined the beggar gang.
If the migrants are not bitter, Fengyang Flower Drum will not be able to sing "Big families sell fields, small families sell children" and "Since Emperor Zhu came out, there have been nine years of famine in ten years".
If it is moved to the Nine Sides, it will be even worse. Not only is the border poor, but there is also a high possibility of becoming a military household. This is really a person sitting at home, and the pot for the army comes from heaven.
Even when they were relocated to more affluent areas (Henan, Shandong, etc.), the lives of these migrants were quite difficult because the imperial court did not have any long-term support policies for the migrants. In the twenty-fifth year of Hongwu, the Ministry of Household reported the situation of fleeing nationwide,".The people of the Quartet were poor and exhausted, and more than half of them fled, compared with the ten in the book
There were nearly 100 peasant uprisings in the entire Hongwu Dynasty (according to the records and statistics of the "Ming Shilu", a total of 411 uprisings occurred in the Ming Dynasty in the more than 60 years from Hongwu to Xuande), not everyone wanted to learn from Zhu Yuanzhang and become the emperor, but the people forced by Taizu to sacrifice their lives.
In the end, even if civilians were not forcibly relocated in the early Ming Dynasty, they would not necessarily be able to live in peace.
First of all, Taizu likes to ignore the laws of social production and promote "administrative production", artificially stipulating the scope of production and products. For example, he stipulates, ". .Where there are five to ten acres of private land, half an acre of mulberry and numb cotton are planted, and more than ten acres are doubled”。As for whether you can plant it or not, it doesn't matter, if you can't pay the tax, you will spend your own money to buy it,"Do not plant mulberry and produce silk, do not plant hemp and kapok, and produce linen and cotton cloth
The Ministry of Labor instructed the people of the world to plant more mulberry dates. Plant two acres of seedlings in each mile, in every hundred households, a total of manpower to pick up firewood and grass, burn the land, plough and burn again, plough and burn three times under the planting, wait for the seedlings to be three feet high, and then plant, every five feet wide and five, each household, 200 plants in the first year, 400 plants in the next year, and 600 plants in three years. The number of plants has been planted to make a book of reciprocation, and the violators have sent Yunnan golden teeth to fill the army.In the twenty-seventh year of Hongwu, Taizu issued the most detailed agricultural decree in more than 2,000 years. It not only stipulates how to plant, but also lays out a three-year plan for farmers. Whether the emperor does not forget the agricultural mulberry or the day, for the common people, this is another few years of tossing and worrying.
Second, the tax and forced labor in the early Ming Dynasty was not light.
In order to restore production and economy as soon as possible, the great unified dynasties in history generally pursued a policy of low taxes and light taxation at the beginning of the dynasty. But Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang's views on this issue are different from those of many emperors.
After the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, Taizu first implemented a heavy tax policy in the six prefectures of Su, Song, Chang, Zhen, Jia, and Hu, and levied 22% of the land with 4% of the country's land (data ** in "Statistics of Chinese Household Registration, Fields, and Field Taxes in the Past Dynasties"). After the scope of heavy taxation, it was extended to the whole territory of Jiangsu and Zhejiang.
The reasons for this are, first, that the land in Jiangsu and Zhejiang is fertile and relatively wealthy, and there is potential to increase expropriation. Second, Jiangsu and Zhejiang are in the vicinity of Beijing (Nanjing), considering the cost of transportation, increasing the collection will make the tax collection more efficient. Third, Jiangsu and Zhejiang were originally Zhang Shicheng's old land, and increasing the expropriation can not only punish these "anti-people", but also prevent them from accumulating money and grain to rebel.
Suffice it to say, everything was taken into account except the endurance of the civilian population.
For example, in the "Guo Huan case" in the 18th year of Hongwu, there is no discussion of whether the case is true or not, and whether the tens of thousands of people who were killed were unjust. After the case was concluded, Taizu actually asked the taxpayers to pay the so-called "corrupt" land tax, which was done."Most of the people's middle-class homes are broken”。Is this for the people or for their own pockets?
The heavy taxation policy of the Ming Dynasty in Jiangnan was not partially lifted until the Xuande Dynasty. Some people always say that Jiangnan people are not loyal to the Ming Dynasty and the old Zhu family, so we have to see who doesn't take anyone seriously.
Moreover, the heavy tax policy is not limited to Jiangnan. It is implemented in Jiangxi, Shaanxi, and Shanxi, which are grain-producing areas, but in a more subtle way. In these places, the tax base of the imperial court was not raised, but the taxpayers were required to bear the transportation and transportation costs corresponding to the tax in kind. In that era when manpower was the main body of transportation, this consumption was often several times that of the grain itself.
The above does not involve another major component of the civilian population of the Ming Dynasty, the "military household", which is a history of blood and tears. Not to mention anything else, in the more than 30 years of the Ming Taizu Dynasty, more than 200 sentences were added just for military punishment. The so-called backbone of the dynasty is proper in his eyes."Untouchable
Finally, let's look back at the so-called Taizu "abusing officials and gentry and rich households". This is indeed true, but Taizu's purpose in doing this is precisely to facilitate his abuse of civilians.
From ancient times to the present, there have been countless rebellions and uprisings. But why are these rebellions against the masses so rarely successful? The main reason is that they lack effective organization and find it difficult to steadily convert all kinds of social resources into combat effectiveness. And it was only the "gentry" who were able to provide this organization for thousands of years.
Zhu Yuanzhang was able to finally become the emperor, not because he distanced himself from the Red Turban Army, nor did he literally "build a high wall, accumulate grain, and slowly become the king", but he established extensive cooperation with the gentry at the end of the Yuan Dynasty.
Therefore, after Ming Taizu ascended the throne, he destroyed the officials and gentry and wealthy households, just to destroy the ability of his subjects to unite, organize, and resist, so that he and the Zhu family could abuse the subjects of the world.