I open a history tutorial class in Daming

Chapter 139 Chongzhen with the aroma of tea

Song Shen thought of something.

When everyone was staring at Zhu Youjian, he quietly turned his back and silently asked the system in his heart:
"System, if I draw the three rewards that Zhu Youjian brings with him, can I use them both in space and in reality, or can they only be used in the real world?"

[Reply host, during class time, if you do not violate the rules, you have full disposal rights over the students and the system. ]

Then it can be used!
Song Shen breathed a sigh of relief.

After getting information from the system, he knew that these students would continue to enter the virtual world in their spare time to be emperors. Although strictly speaking they were just a string of codes, they were intercepted from real people by the system after all, so Song Shen could not treat them as just codes.

Now, Zhu Youjian happened to be here, and there was a very reasonable channel...

Thinking of this, Song Shen looked at Zhu Youjian, whose eyes were shining as he chatted with Zhu Yuanzhang.

"Um, Zhu Youjian, come here."

He waved over there.

Before Zhu Youjian could react, Zhu Yuanzhang kicked him hard in the butt, and he staggered to Song Shen.

"Sir, what do you want from me?"

Just a moment ago, Zhu Yuanzhang had already explained to Zhu Youjian how powerful Song Shen was. He did not dare to be arrogant anymore and even addressed him with more respect.

Song Shen waved his hand indifferently:
"It's okay, I just have something to ask you--"

"By your time, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and corn had already been introduced to the Central Plains. Have you seen them?"

Zhu Youjian's expression was visibly blank for a moment.

He hesitated and said:

"Sir, can you describe what these three things look like?"

Song Shen was not vague either. He immediately walked to the podium and projected the pictures he had used to look up information onto the screen.

Zhu Youjian looked closely and slapped his thigh:
"Aren't these sweet potatoes and corn?"

"These two have been presented to the palace since the Jiajing and Wanli periods. After that, someone in the imperial farm specially bred them. I have also eaten them several times. I heard that the yield is good, but for some reason, the people don't like to grow them, and it is impossible to force them to grow them."

"But the remaining kind, I have never seen it before..."

Song Shen frowned and said nothing, but Zhu Yuanzhang next to him became anxious first.

Zhu Yuanzhang stared with a pair of eyes bigger than a cow's, his face full of disbelief:

"How is that possible! With such a high yield, the people would be crazy not to plant it!"

"I am a farmer, don't try to fool me. I thought you were an honest man, what nonsense are you talking about!"

For a moment, the atmosphere in the classroom was a little awkward.

Let’s not talk about what the people of the Zhu family thought, the emperors of other dynasties all turned green with envy when they looked at Zhu Youjian.

Whether it was Ying Zheng, Liu Che or Li Shimin, they were all extremely envious of a king who had lost his country at this moment.

They have already entered the tutoring class, and it is still unclear whether the country will perish or not, not to mention that Chongzhen himself already had two high-yield crops, corn and sweet potatoes, and from what Song Shen said, it seems that there were potatoes as well.

If the imperial court wasn't so useless and tried harder, how could the people who can barely get enough food be unwilling to grow this!

Although Zhu Youjian was young, the memorials he read every day were not read in vain. Diligence always paid off. For example, now, this question finally fell within the scope of his knowledge.

For the first time, he shook his head and refuted his ancestor:
"No, the people really don't want to plant it."

"People have long discovered that these two crops have higher yields than rice and wheat, but they don't taste as good as rice and flour, especially sweet potatoes. Eating too much will cause bloating and acid reflux. Whether it's for personal consumption or to pay rent, people are more willing to grow rice and wheat."

"And their production volume is not high enough to warrant tax reductions and exemptions by the imperial court to promote them."

"Let's take a step back and say that even if I want to promote it now, there was a severe drought as early as the seventh year of Tianqi, which was the year I ascended the throne. Shaanxi was the worst hit area, and a large number of civil unrest has already occurred."

"Other places...although the situation is not as serious, there are signs of it."

"Under these circumstances, it is extremely difficult to promote two types of food that the people are unwilling to grow!"

In the classroom, everyone looked at Zhu Youjian with frowns, and then looked at Song Shen with questioning eyes.

They all wanted to know whether the situation during the Chongzhen period had really become as bad as Zhu Youjian had said.

Song Shen opened his notebook at the podium and looked up something in the database. He was silent for a long time before he spoke.

"The great drought during the Chongzhen reign began in northern Shaanxi in the seventh year of the Tianqi reign, expanded to the entire Shaanxi province and Henan in the third year of the Chongzhen reign, spread to the capital in the sixth year of the Chongzhen reign, and spread to Shanxi, Shandong, and southern Zhili in the eleventh year of the Chongzhen reign."

"By the 14th year of Chongzhen, drought had hit 12 of the 13 provincial governments in the two capitals of the Ming Dynasty. Only Guangdong, Fujian, and Yunnan had no records of drought. This was called the Chongzhen Great Drought."

"From the situation, the drought in northern provinces has lasted for ten years, and the extreme drought in Shaanxi has lasted for fifteen years. A large number of hungry people have become refugees or joined the uprising army. Externally, the Qing army keeps knocking on the border. Under internal and external troubles, even if the emperor has three heads and six arms, it is difficult to promote any high-yield crops."

Zhu Youjian rubbed his face woodenly.

"It turns out that God wants to kill me..."

He expected that the mess he took over would be very bad, but he did not expect the Chongzhen drought that lasted for more than ten years.

If this isn’t God’s will to destroy the Ming Dynasty, then what is it?
"but--"

Song Shen changed the subject and turned to look at Zhu Youjian, his face full of genuine doubt:

"In the past thousands of years, there have been many natural disasters more serious than this in the Central Plains, right? Not to mention the prosperous times, just in our classroom, when Li Shimin first ascended the throne, locusts swept across Chang'an City. After that, all kinds of natural disasters emerged one after another. Which do you think was worse, your Chongzhen Dynasty or the early Zhenguan period?"

Zhu Youjian is stuck.

Zhu Yuanzhang felt very empathetic when listening to the first half of Song Shen's speech. He was not thinking of the emperor, but how helpless and painful ordinary people would be when faced with such a situation.

After all, if Zhu Yuanzhang had encountered such a thing during his reign as emperor, he would not hesitate to directly reduce taxes and fleece other people, and would never have caused a peasant uprising to break out throughout the country.

But when Song Shen asked this, Lao Zhu also frowned - yes!

Haven't natural disasters and man-made disasters occurred frequently since ancient times? If the whole world could have ten years of good weather and good harvests, it would be because there was a fire and smoke coming out of the imperial tomb. Although ten years of drought was terrible, it was not as terrible as that, right?
It's not a severe drought across the entire country. The drought started in Shaanxi and gradually spread.

Zhu Youjian wanted to refute:
"Do not……"

This time, it was Zhu Biao who interrupted him with a frown:

"No what do you mean? What's wrong with what you said, sir?"

"Mr. Song, please tell me more about the Chongzhen period. I really want to know whether this was the end of the Ming Dynasty or a man-made disaster."

In fact, Zhu Biao rarely said unpleasant things, whether to court officials, his family, or even more so to his classmates.

Even when Zhu Yuanzhang had quarreled with other emperors before, Zhu Biao rarely took sides. He would only be rude to the scum among his descendants like Zhu Qizhen.

His current attitude clearly shows that he has some doubts about Zhu Youjian's character.

——For man-made disasters and the destruction of a country, who else but the emperor can bear such a heavy blame?

Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhu Di both knew his temper very well, so they both shut up and stared at Zhu Youjian with threatening eyes, signaling him not to interrupt the gentleman.

Zhu Youjian:......

You guys should figure it out, who interrupted who! It was clearly this ancestor who interrupted me!
But no one cared about him.

Song Shen pondered for a moment, and after going over Chongzhen's life in his mind, he spoke with a sigh.

"I just said that there are both natural disasters and man-made disasters, but obviously, the man-made disasters are more important."

"It's really hard for me to evaluate Zhu Youjian. If you want to say how stupid he is, he's not that stupid, otherwise Wei Zhongxian wouldn't have surrendered so obediently."

"But if you want to say that he is a smart man, I absolutely disagree. It's not that he has a problem with his brain, but mainly because of the Ming Dynasty's training system for princes. Zhu Youjian received the same education as other princes, all of which were about being a minister. Even before he ascended the throne, he might have already thought about how to be a free and easy prince in the future."

"Perhaps it is precisely because of his background and education that some of the actions he took were completely incomprehensible to people."

"For example, some people in later generations like to give advice on the country after drinking a few glasses of wine. If you ask them what their dream is if they can return to the Qin, Tang, or Ming dynasties, they will say that they can accurately draw a world map by hand and rise to prominence. They will put the map in front of the emperor and point their finger at you - go colonize the New World!"

"Tsk, even someone as unreliable as me knows that we have to wait until productivity is up and large ships can be built before we can do anything about it. People like that don't care about anything. They just need to give orders. As for what should be done in the middle, how to balance the mentality of various forces, how to use people to control the subordinates, they think it's all bullshit. Why should they care about it?"

"Well, Chongzhen is that kind of person."

Song Shen was not afraid at all of the consequences of holding a meeting in close proximity.

After all, he was the one who could tell Ying Zheng that the elixir was poisonous right after class. People who liked him could take care of his feelings, but judging from Chongzhen's current performance, even if people had a hard-core filter about his martyrdom, it would most likely be shattered soon.

As soon as I entered the tutoring class, I was thinking about asking my ancestors to show their weakness and help me...

Apart from Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhu Di, who else didn't notice that something was wrong?

It must be said that Zhu Yuanzhang and Judy are real father and son, and they are both soft-hearted in the same way. On the contrary, Zhu Biao, who was highly expected by Zhu Yuanzhang but died young, seems to be completely different from these two.

It felt a bit like good shoots coming out of bad bamboos. In short, Song Shen felt that he had found a similar person -

Watch expert.

Zhu Biao's nose is like a detector; he can always accurately find the smell of tea.

For example, Zhu Youjian is a teasing guy... To put it nicely, he only knows how to be a minister but not the emperor's mindset. To put it bluntly, he can only be a bootlicker but not a man holding a fishing rod.

It's annoying to look at.

Zhu Yuanzhang frowned more and more as he listened, and couldn't help asking:

"Well, sir, how exactly does he fail to employ people? Could it be that he killed a eunuch party member as you just mentioned?"

I think his name is Wei Zhongxian?
Song Shen shook his head and said:
"Of course it's more than that."

"When I read this history before, I thought he was very strange. Why was it that Yang Sichang and Hong Chengchou were fine with everything, but Sun Chuanting was always wrong? Did Sun Chuanting provoke him or something?"

"Then we see that Wang Weizhang, Chen Biqian, Wang Jiazhen, Shao Jiechun, Chen Zubao, Yan Jizu and others had no previous military achievements or evidence to show that they were capable, but Zhu Youjian insisted on entrusting them with important tasks, asking them to fight the Tartars, suppress the rebels, and do this and that. It didn't matter if they lost, they would be dismissed and beheaded."

"If you don't understand who I'm talking about, let me give you an example. I have a few unfilial descendants in my family who spend their money on gambling over and over again. When they lose, I rush to clean up their messes. But I have a very smart, capable and filial child who manages the family business in an orderly manner. One day, he walked in with his left foot first, so I kicked him out of the house."

"Yang Sichang and Hong Chengchou were the former, and Sun Chuanting was the latter."

"Oh, yes. Later, the Ming Dynasty fell, and Hong Chengchou surrendered to the Qing Dynasty and became a slave to the Qing Dynasty. Then he started to attack the Southern Ming Dynasty that had fled to the south."

"Would you like to taste it yourself?"

As he spoke, even Song Shen himself could taste the flavor.

He stroked his chin and thought--

Who knows, what if Chongzhen is a time traveler like himself?

Look, in the last years of a dynasty that was in turmoil and surrounded by tigers and wolves, the father died, the emperor's brother died, all the brothers died, and a 16-year-old boy ascended the throne, sat on the throne to eliminate evil, and then started a prosperous revival. This standard script of a time traveler's political conspiracy is much better than the crappy blind man's script I have now!

Unfortunately, the result was really bad, maybe the script was not good enough.

It is also possible that in another parallel universe, Yang Sichang and Hong Chengchou were both famous loyal ministers, and those people who were inexplicably reused were also future famous generals. As a result, because the current Emperor Chongzhen was really unruly, he made people not want to fight for the court anymore. It's hard to say.

Just when Song Shen was secretly applauding his own literary talent.

He heard Zhu Youjian's trembling voice:
"Ancestors... ancestors... please don't do anything, just talk nicely. I, I am still very useful!"

"Weren't you interested in the sweet potatoes and corn just now? I can bring them to you! Really, those two things are available in the imperial kitchen, and there are also seeds left in the imperial farm!"

Looking back, Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhu Di put down their sleeves again after rolling them up.

Old Zhu's face was full of amiability:
"Really? What if you don't bring it tomorrow?"

(End of this chapter)