People in the Ming Dynasty are lawless

Chapter 700 Most People Misunderstood Zhu Yuanzhang

But most people cannot understand this point. They always think that if an emperor kills people indiscriminately, he must be a tyrant.

As for why they killed people, they didn't think about it, and they didn't think about why killing these people would make the Ming Dynasty go better and faster. They only recognized one fact, that is, you, the founding emperor, were mean and ungrateful.

As an emperor, you even killed those brothers who followed you to build the empire. This shows that you are totally unqualified to be an emperor.

This is why so many civil and military generals are so disloyal to your Zhu family's kingdom, because they see no hope at all, so of course they want to leave. Therefore, people like you should not be qualified to be an emperor. It is very wrong for people like you to be praised by so many people.

Many people even criticized Zhu Yuanzhang on some self-media, saying that the Ming Dynasty founded by Zhu Yuanzhang was the darkest in the entire feudal era.

Every feudal dynasty is actually dark to a certain extent, but they don’t even think about these things. The reason is that these people need to criticize the Ming Dynasty in exchange for traffic.

As for the good aspects of the Ming Dynasty, they may really be unable to see them. They have always felt that there was nothing good about the Ming Dynasty. It was just a feudal and very dark dynasty, and any good aspects of it are fictional.

As for the so-called "every emperor has a strong character", some people criticize that this is not the choice of ordinary people? As an emperor, he has gained so many benefits, shouldn't he be wronged a little? This is what he should do.

Anyway, in the eyes of many people, no matter what the Ming Dynasty did, they would directly pull out the evil things that the Ming Dynasty did and repeatedly criticize it. As for whether it did a good job? That's what it should be, and it shouldn't be praised.

In fact, after Chen Han came to the Ming Dynasty, he found that although the lives of the common people were not very good, and there were definitely many people who lived very poorly, but overall it was already pretty good.

Why did so many ordinary people dare to speak the truth? Why did so many uprisings occur? Ultimately, it was because Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang sometimes gave the people too many rights.

As it is clearly stated in the Great Edict, if you have suffered any injustice and you think that the officials have done something illegal, you can go to the capital to file a complaint and I, as the emperor, will uphold justice for you.

Don’t worry about whether the things in this book are true or not, and don’t worry about whether they can be done. After this spirit is passed on, the people will become more active, and once they are oppressed, they will really dare to rise up in rebellion.

Perhaps it was precisely because of this spirit that many uprisings occurred during the Ming Dynasty. But how many of them were truly destructive? Not many.

However, many people seized on this point and fiercely criticized the Ming Dynasty for allowing so many uprisings to occur under its auspices, which must have meant that the people must have had trouble living.

If you deny the value of a dynasty in this way, it would be too pedantic and shallow. You should know that the Ming Dynasty existed for more than 270 years. There were so many days like this in these 270 years. It can be concluded whether the Ming Dynasty was a qualified dynasty or a bad dynasty.

Many people say that the Song Dynasty existed for more than three hundred years, but no one thinks about the fact that it was divided into two eras and its territory was so small.

It can be said that the Song Dynasty cannot be a unified dynasty, because it coexisted with the Liao Dynasty, the Jin Dynasty, the Western Xia Dynasty, and even the Dali in the south.

The main reason why it could exist was because its taxes were very high, making life very miserable for the common people, but the lives of those dignitaries and scholars were very free and happy. Therefore, the reason why many scholars envied such a dynasty was not because they felt that such a dynasty was very qualified.

It is because the Song Dynasty was indeed quite generous to those scholars. Why was there such a generous environment? Many people talk about how high the GDP of the Song Dynasty was, but they don’t think about whether these GDPs can really be put into practice by ordinary people? Can ordinary people really enjoy the benefits? In fact, it is impossible.

Because the Song Dynasty had many officials, several times more than the Ming Dynasty, each official's salary was very high, and there were even many extra subsidies in addition to their parents. Those officials lived a carefree and happy life, and of course they were willing to sing praises.

But where do these salaries and GDP come from? In fact, they all come from the poor people. Those poor people have not received much benefit, and at the same time they are overwhelmed by the high service tax.

After these high service taxes were paid, the government did not let them live well. Instead, it kept those redundant troops like pigs and continued to support those corrupt officials. It has never truly and thoroughly fought corruption.

On the other hand, it was different in the Ming Dynasty. The salaries of officials were very low, so those officials were in dire straits. After they gained control of public opinion, they even began to criticize fiercely.

So much so that even now, many ordinary people who think they are well-versed in history still think that the salaries in the Ming Dynasty were so low and the officials were corrupt. Isn't that normal?
Some even said that the salaries of officials in the Ming Dynasty were so low, why were the salaries of the princes and grandchildren of the Ming Dynasty so high? Under such an imbalance, officials must obey them. And you, Zhu Yuanzhang, actually slaughtered those officials in such a situation. Isn't that a tyrant?

So they concluded that Zhu Yuanzhang was not a good emperor, but an emperor who killed innocent people indiscriminately and an evil monarch who did not even spare those brothers who had followed him to fight for the throne.

Because they put themselves in the shoes of those dignitaries, and they felt that even if they traveled back to the Ming Dynasty, they would become those scholars, because they felt that the education they could receive in modern times was better than that in ancient times, and they would definitely become a scholar when they got there.

So they immediately used their status as scholars to criticize Zhu Yuanzhang for setting such low salaries. If they were officials, they would definitely rebel.

But those people simply don't understand one thing, that is, even if you go back to ancient times, you may not be able to become a scholar, because the scholar itself is a very noble status, which is already higher than that of ordinary people, and it is a class leap.

The examination for scholars is by no means as simple as the examinations in modern education. It is not just a matter of giving you an essay and asking you to write it.

After Chen Han came to the Ming Dynasty, he finally understood that the eight-part essay was actually very beneficial to some scholars. Because to be honest, most people are not particularly good at writing articles, even those who read poetry and etiquette every day. It is impossible for a scholar to be very good at writing articles.

But there is a very good point that the format of the eight-part essay directly puts you and other geniuses on a relatively balanced starting line.

Because whether you are a genius or an ordinary scholar, the format you face is the same, it just depends on whether you can write it in a different way.

Just like in the Tang Dynasty, many people may like to write poetry, but can you write as good poetry as Li Bai? Can you say that the style of those poems is wrong?

The reason why so many people wrote poetry in the Tang Dynasty was because there were many plus points. If you wrote good poems and they were famous all over the world, dignitaries would promote you, because at that time the imperial examination was just a supplementary form of the recommendation system.

It is impossible for you to become an official by passing the imperial examination fairly and impartially.

It was precisely the Ming Dynasty, which many people disliked very much, that brought the imperial examination system to a truly perfect level.

This gives so many educated people the opportunity to make a class leap.

Because even if many people have some knowledge of history, they don’t know the details at all. They don’t know how the imperial examination system was actually implemented, and they don’t know how officials were recruited under the imperial examination system.

Many historical TV dramas say that after passing the imperial examination, as long as you are in the top three, such as the top scholar, the third scholar, or the second scholar, you can immediately become an official. Especially the top scholar can immediately make you a sixth-rank official, and then you can be made a county magistrate, or even a higher official than a branch scholar to investigate cases.

But they don't know at all that even if you pass the imperial examination, it is impossible for you to become an official so quickly. You still have to observe politics for several years. The so-called observation means letting you work as a clerk in a specific government office to witness how normal officials handle official business.

However, in order to speed up the progress, some TV dramas and movies simply do not include the years of observing government. It always seems that if you pass the imperial examination, you will definitely be able to become an official. It is not that simple. If your observation results are not good, then you will be postponed until you have reached a probation period after observing government, and you are qualified to be independent. Only then can you become an official.

This is also something that has never been shown in film and television dramas, which leads to many people thinking that as long as they can pass the imperial examination, they can become an official, but they don’t even consider these issues at all. They are completely half-baked, and their understanding of being an official is so superficial.

Just like their understanding of history, it is very superficial, and they have no idea how strict the examination was to become an official in ancient times. So many people now think that the civil service examination is the same as the ancient science examination.

In fact, they are very different.

Because with the current civil service examination, even if you enter the system, you actually have no chance of coming into contact with how a real county magistrate handles things. You are just an assistant, and after a number of years, you may be put in charge of a department alone.

However, even in modern times, it is impossible to compare the diversity of the content of a department with that in ancient times, because there were no such obvious communication tools in ancient times, and for many things you had to travel physically to have the opportunity to access them.

Even the content of a department is just a single one, but being a county magistrate requires a very complex system with many aspects.

Therefore, in ancient times, someone who could become a county magistrate was a very powerful person. Of course, in modern times, someone who could become a county head is also a very remarkable person. After all, this is the real grassroots level.

The grassroots level is the most difficult. The higher you go, the more you have to control the direction, but at the grassroots level you have to do everything yourself.

It is precisely because most people do not understand how power institutions operate in history that they have so many misunderstandings. Their understanding of ancient times is always based on the one-sided views in history books about how many people he killed, what kind of emperor he was, and even judging whether an emperor is good or bad based on his personality.

So sometimes Chen Han also helplessly believes that some people are actually illiterate in history. They don't understand, but they are curious. In particular, many self-media make up some stories with ancient backgrounds, which makes many people more confused about history.

Based on this understanding, there are so many ordinary people. I don't understand why Zhu Yuanzhang had to kill those people at that time, and why he had to purge those engineering descents. He always said one-sidedly that it was because these people blocked the way of his grandson Zhu Yunwen, so they had to die.

However, they had no idea that the reason why Zhu Yuanzhang launched the four major cases was not just to eliminate these civil servants or for the purpose of completeness. To a large extent, it was because many of the problems left over from the Yuan Dynasty's systems were very serious.

If it had not been purged with such bloody and cruel means, then the Ming Dynasty would have been no different from the Yuan Dynasty. So why did they have to overthrow the Yuan Dynasty? Why couldn't they just follow the old path of the Yuan Dynasty?

There is a big reason for this, which is that as the emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang could actually see at a glance that if the current Ming Dynasty continued on this path, it would become the next Yuan Dynasty.

So this is actually the more fundamental reason, because this is the conclusion Chen Han came to after he came to the Ming Dynasty and gained some understanding of the Ming Dynasty.

It is precisely because of this that Chen Han is very disgusted with those who have always regarded Zhu Yuanzhang as a tyrant. They will never know why Zhu Yuanzhang had to do so at that time, but they just feel that as a modern person, they understand the Ming Dynasty better than Zhu Yuanzhang.

……

(End of this chapter)