My life is like walking on thin ice

Chapter 511 Moisturizing things silently

The slave trade and the existence of slaves are the most unreal things that Tian Zirong feels in this era.

After all, in the impression of most later generations, slaves are the representative product of slave tribal civilization.

Chinese civilization had undoubtedly entered the feudal civilization stage during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, especially after the Qin Dynasty.

Slavery, a product of the "old times", should have disappeared in the long river of history along with slave society and slave civilization.

However, this is not the case.

In this era, whether it was the grassland nomads who were still in the slave tribal civilization, or the Central Plains Chinese nation that had evolved into a feudal agricultural civilization, there were a large number of slaves at all levels of the community fire structure.

Especially between the two, the Han people, who gave people the impression that they had "relatively fewer slaves", were even more dependent on slave labor than the nomadic people on the grasslands.

What is the most valuable asset of Han Shaofu?
What is the most solid basis for Han Shaofu's confidence?
When something unexpected happens, the Emperor of Han has a 1% chance of vs the whole world if he holds the Shaofu. Why is that?
Some people would say that it was the huge inventory of materials and money and grain reserves in the Shaofu treasury.

Some people also say that it is due to the extremely high productivity of the workshops and departments of the Shaofu.

But if this question is put to any official who has served in the Shaofu or is familiar with the structure of the Shaofu, he will inevitably get a stereotyped answer.

--people!

The confidence of the Shaofu lies in the hundreds of thousands of people under his command!
Who are these people?

Based on the experience of Zhang Han, the Shaofu of Qin Dynasty, it is not difficult to know that the Shaofu of Qin and Han Dynasty controlled tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of "official slaves".

The so-called official slaves were naturally slaves owned by the state, belonging to the country, or in other words, belonging to the emperor personally.

Most of these slaves were stripped of their titles due to crimes, and even the lowest level of dukedom was stripped away;
Then, with the saying "You can escape the death penalty, but you can't escape the living punishment", he survived as a slave.

Slaves like these who lost their titles due to crimes even had very specific "classifications" in the Han Dynasty today.

For example, Chengdan was a punishment in which male criminals were stripped of their titles and sentenced to life imprisonment in a city.
If a female criminal was punished with pounding rice for the rest of her life, she would lose her title and be sentenced to pounding rice for the rest of her life.

For example, Guixin Baican.

Among them, Guixin is a male criminal who is responsible for chopping firewood in the mountains, and Baican is a female criminal who is responsible for selecting rice and cooking.

There were also nai li chen qie and li chen qie, who were female family members implicated by criminals;
As well as Naisikou, Sikou, etc.

In the beginning - to be precise, before Emperor Taizong Xiaowen, these punishments were almost all lifelong or even hereditary.

That is the phrase that people in later generations often use when swearing or cursing others: Men will be slaves from generation to generation, and women will be prostitutes from generation to generation, for thousands of years, without end.

After Emperor Taizong Xiaowen abolished corporal punishment and reduced sentencing laws, these official slaves who had originally been sentenced to life imprisonment or even hereditary imprisonment finally had a chance to regain their freedom and start a new life.

Emperor Taizong Xiaowen decreed: those who work in the city as farmers should be required to work in the fields for six years without committing any new crimes, and then they could return to farming after six years.

Gui Xin Bai Can is a laborer for four years. If he does not commit any new crimes, he will be restored to agricultural status in four years.

As a result, the original one-size-fits-all life sentences such as Chengdan Chong, Guixin Baican, etc. were changed into more specific and detailed categories due to the reform by Emperor Taizong Xiaowen.

Official slaves who lost their titles due to crimes were divided into: shaved and shaved city slaves, intact city slaves, ghost firewood and white candid slaves, servants and concubines, and Sikou.

Shaved head, shackled and imprisoned in the city - a six-year fixed-term imprisonment, the victim must be shaved head and shackled.

"Kun" means to shave the head; "Qian" means to tie the neck with an iron ring.

After Emperor Taizong Xiaowen abolished corporal punishment, these two became the final punishments below the death penalty in the "Han Law".

Wanchengdanchong - a sentence of five years in prison.

Gui Xin Bai Can - a sentence of four years in prison.

A slave concubine - a sentence of three years in prison.

Sikou - a sentence of two years in prison.

It is not difficult to find from this that after Emperor Taizong Xiaowen carried out the reform of the legal system, there is no life imprisonment, or lifelong or even hereditary punishment in the Han Dynasty.

Even official slaves under the jurisdiction of the Shaofu could regain their freedom and return to the peasant register after serving their sentences.

However, in fact, this system has an extremely obvious loophole, or bug.

When a person loses his title and is demoted to an official slave due to a crime, in addition to being deprived of his rights as a "person" and a "citizen", his wealth will also be confiscated and returned to the public.

When he is released from prison and regains his agricultural status, he will become penniless - without a house or land, and will be a pauper despised by the whole society.

Although they have "restored their agricultural registration", their identity as farmers is obviously not based on "whether they have agricultural registration" but on whether they own land.

He was restored to farming status, but he had no land or even any wealth, and was despised by the whole society.

Such people are likely to sink completely - after getting rid of the identity of "official slaves", they will become private slaves by relying on what they have learned in their careers, such as construction, collecting firewood and other skills.

Private slavery means selling one's body, and this is a lifelong sale that can be passed down to future generations.

Thus, a good person became a lowly person who was enslaved by his descendants, and was no longer regarded as a "human being" by the mainstream society.

When the host got used to it, they would give the child a decent outfit and even give him the family name, calling it "uniting the clan."

What's worse, granting a chance to reproduce with female slaves seems to be a reward for the right to mate and reproduce, but in fact, it is nothing more than giving birth to another little slave.

From all of the above - the Han Dynasty's sound slave system from top to bottom, from official to private, with no blind spots in all aspects, it is not difficult to draw the conclusion: there are many slaves in the Han Dynasty today.

There were so many slaves owned by the government that they had to be classified into different categories, such as Chengdan Chong, Guixin Baican, etc., to be responsible for specific tasks.

There is no need to mention privately owned slaves.

——In today’s Chang’an City, there are usually only three dimensions to describe a person as rich.

First: how much land do you own?
Second: how many houses and shops there are;
The third is the number of child servants.

Whether a rich man looks impressive when he goes out and how impressive he looks depends on how many servants, or slaves, follow him.

If there are three or five of them, then they are the stupid sons of a landlord.

Thirty to fifty of them are mostly local tyrants in a county. A hundred or even several hundred people are the tyrants who run rampant in the county and state, and the prefects cannot control them, so they need to be forcibly relocated to Guanzhong to consolidate the foundation of the country.

As for a few thousand or even thousands of people?
Congratulations, you have become the former underground emperor of Qi: after Daojian, another huge destabilizing factor that has been the focus of attention of the Chang'an court.

If you don't make any more mistakes, your best outcome will be forced migration to Guanzhong, and then being divided up and devoured by local powerful people.

Once you make any move, it will be the army, not the government officials, who will suppress you.

Having said that, it is actually not difficult to understand how important slaves are in the current Han Dynasty, and how important a position and proportion slaves occupy in the current Han Dynasty's social system.

——In order to minimize the over-exploitation of the people’s labor force, the official government had tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of official slaves who were responsible for providing free labor for the government.

The daily lives of the powerful and wealthy, as well as almost all production work, were basically done by slaves.

The middle class used the number of slaves as the core criterion for judging whether they were noble or wealthy.

Even the lower-class farmers and common people dreamed of buying slaves to farm for them, but they were often forced by life to sell their children and become slaves.

It is no exaggeration to say that slaves, or the remnants of the slave society, are the most indispensable lubricant for the Han Dynasty and the world society under its rule.

The existence of slaves resolved many conflicts between officials and the people, nobles and the common people, and the rich and peasants.

Because of the existence of slaves, the government did not need to conscript labor on a large scale;

Because of the existence of slaves, the nobles had no urgent objective need to bully men and women or oppress the good.

It is also because of the existence of slaves that the rich target their oppression and make them their own private property: slaves, rather than poor people.

At the same time, after going bankrupt, the lower-class people have an additional way to survive without any dignity, but they can still barely survive.

Liu Rong dared to conclude: If that day, the Han Dynasty lost all its slaves overnight and abolished the slavery system in an instant, the Han Dynasty’s ancestral temples and the country would also collapse.

The Han Dynasty today cannot afford to lose its slaves, just as the West in later generations cannot afford to lose Jerusalem.

Nowadays, the Han Dynasty even has taxes on slaves.

Of course, it was not the slaves who paid the taxes for themselves, but the slave owners who paid the slave taxes because they owned slaves.

The amount is not that high, five times a year, which is six hundred coins per year.

As a person of later generations, Liu Rong's perception of slavery was obviously not much better.

Even though he knew that slavery had not yet been completely abolished and that the Han Dynasty still relied on slavery to act as a lubricant between social organizational structures, Liu Rong still instinctively hated and rejected this evil slavery system.

What should we do if objective conditions do not allow removal, but subjectively we do not want to keep him?

Liu Rong thought of a good idea.

——It is indeed difficult to accept that the Han people and Chinese nobles were enslaved and served as servants.

But if the slaves were foreigners, such as the nomadic people in the north, the Baiyue people in the south, or the southwestern Yi, Korea in the northeast and other "foreigners", then it would seem relatively easier to accept.

If all the slaves of the Han Dynasty today - at least most of the slaves, especially those responsible for heavy labor - could be replaced by foreign nationalities from the existing Han people, Liu Rong would feel much better.

But this is all Liu Rong's wishful thinking.

It is impossible to say that Liu Rong's order, or soft advocacy and promotion, can make all the slave owners in the world regain the freedom of their Han slaves, and then spend money and find ways to buy those stupid foreign slaves who can't even understand "human language".

Well, if you can’t understand Chinese, then you can’t understand human language.

So Liu Rong thought of what the late emperor had taught him: take advantage of the situation.

——Use gains and losses to guide the people and make decisions according to their own ideas.

Specifically for slaves, the difference in cost-effectiveness was artificially created to force slave owners, driven by interests, to choose more "cost-effective" foreign slaves and abandon less cost-effective Han slaves.

This price-performance ratio is astonishing and obviously cannot be reflected in the price of the slave trade - Liu Rong does not have the ability to set a price for the slave market.

But Liu Rong was able to regulate the slave tax.

In the past, all slaves, regardless of whether they were foreigners or Han Chinese, were treated equally, and each slave was taxed 600 coins per year.

In order to guide the people of the world to avoid buying, selling or owning Han slaves as much as possible, and to use foreign slaves as much as possible, Liu Rong made a prompt decision and issued an edict: Han slaves would still be subject to a slave tax of five cents per year, or six hundred coins.

However, the tax for foreign slaves was reduced to one cent, which was 120 coins.

Liu Rong's argument was also very nice: exempt all slaves from tax in order to reduce the burden on the people of the world.

It seems that there is not much difference, but in fact, in the eyes of those stingy slave owners, this means that the cost of owning one Han slave is equal to that of owning five foreign slaves!
Then the remaining questions are much simpler.

After buying slaves, can the value produced by one Han Chinese be comparable to that of five foreign slaves?
Obviously this is debatable.

In most heavy labor activities, the value of a Han slave was often not even as great as that of two foreign slaves.

If you are lucky enough to buy the best quality, big-breasted and brainless foreign slave, then you can be as good as "one Hu against five Han"!
But in some special areas of work, such as welcoming and seeing off people, recording accounts, or technical jobs such as coachmen, grooms, chefs, etc., it is obvious that Han slaves are still irreplaceable.

Therefore, shortly after Liu Rong issued the edict to "reduce slave tax", the market responded quickly.

Among the Han slaves, the prices of "technical slaves" who have cooking skills, carriage driving skills, or have regular facial features and clear articulation have risen sharply!
At the highest point, the price for one male slave even reached 80,000 coins!
In sharp contrast, Han slaves, who had no skills and could only sell their labor, were becoming increasingly unpopular in the market.

The previous price of an adult male slave, which had been maintained for many years, was 40,000 coins, and that of a young slave, which was 15,000 coins. The price was reduced all the way to 20,000 coins for a male slave and 10,000 coins for a young slave, but still no one was interested.

The situation of female slaves was similar.

Except for a few beautiful ones who can still be sold at high prices, the prices of ordinary female slaves have been falling again and again.

Although the drop was not as severe as that of the male slaves, it was still a drop of at least one third.

Then, of course, there was the hot sales of foreign slaves.

——The prices of Yue slaves in Lingnan, Korean slaves in Northeast China, and Yi slaves in Southwest China all rose rapidly, and both men and women exceeded the price of Han slaves!

Among them, those who can speak Chinese will be charged extra, those who know basic knowledge will be charged extra, and those who are clear-headed and not stupid will be charged even more!
The main point is: Han slaves are worthless, but foreign slaves are more valuable the more they look like Han people.

(End of this chapter)