The Ming Dynasty did not revolutionize

Chapter 341: Assessment of the Prince of Liang
After Zhu Jianxuan and other clan leaders finished announcing the imperial edict, they spoke again and arranged something.

The first prince of the Ming Dynasty, Prince Liang, is already seventy years old this year, which is far beyond the sixty-year-old age stipulated in the previous imperial edict to choose a successor.

Coincidentally, when Prince Liang came to the capital this time, he brought all his sons and daughters with him, so they could directly take part in the assessment.

So Zhu Jianxuan told King Liang to bring all his sons into the palace on February 3rd. Zhu Jianxuan wanted to examine their abilities on the spot and decide who would be the crown prince of King Liang.

All other vassal monarchs, if they are over 60 years old, must send their sons to him after returning to their country.

Everyone must arrive in Shuntian Prefecture before the end of the 17th year of Tiangong, and Zhu Jianxuan will decide on the candidates for the crown princes of all vassal state monarchs who are over 60 years old before the end of the 18th year of Tiangong.

After hearing this, Prince Liang Zhu Jiancan bowed and agreed with mixed feelings.

King Liang had been mentally prepared and had even asked about this matter before the New Year, so it was natural for him to accept the reality.

Whether to follow the traditional patriarchal system and let the eldest son inherit, or let the emperor decide who will inherit, it is not something he can decide according to his own preference.

Moreover, if he let the emperor make the choice and decision, his children would not privately complain about his favoritism.

If you don't have the right to choose, you will have no responsibility.

All we can do is cooperate with the emperor, serve as a model family for the new inheritance system, and even win the emperor's favor a little.

Zhu Jianxuan’s birthday gifts ended here.

The monarchs of each vassal state returned to their residences and began to pack their things. After the Prince of Liang was selected, they would find a time to bid farewell to the emperor and return home.

The nobles and officials returned home, and the Ming court officially started work the next day.

From the 21st day of the first lunar month to the 1st day of the second lunar month, Zhu Jianxuan had another job, arranging experience for his son, who has become an adult this year.

I have six sons who are turning twenty this year.

Zhu Jianxuan was assigned to the Anshan Iron and Steel Plant in Liaodong, the New Yellow River Gate in Wushe, Henan, the Qingdao Port in Jiaozhou, Shandong, the Xin'anjiang Reservoir in Chun'an, Zhejiang, the Lanzhou Railway Station in Gansu, and the Chongqing Immigration Office in Sichuan.

In recent years, in addition to the North-to-South Water Diversion Project, which has been in full swing, the construction of water conservancy projects in other areas of the Ming Dynasty has not stopped.

Zhu Jianxuan had remembered some famous water conservancy projects in his previous life. Based on the good evaluations by later generations, he listed those projects that could be attempted to be built and experience could be accumulated.

For example, the Xin'anjiang Reservoir, which later became Qiandao Lake and is also the water source for Nongfu Spring, has now been completed.

The relocation of local vassal states in the Ming Dynasty has come to an end, and the seventeenth year of Tiangong is the last year.

Because Zhu Jianxuan originally intended to build a reservoir in the Three Gorges, the court deliberately reminded the two vassal states of the Duke of Yu and the Duke of Shu that they could freely move as many people as possible out of the country.

At the same time, the imperial court also stepped in directly and took the initiative to relocate more people that the two families could not manage and sent them to other new African vassal states for resettlement.

Whether it was the immigration of the two vassal states themselves or the immigration of the imperial court, the first thing they did was to relocate residents along the river.

Areas close to the river are inherently easier to relocate than inland areas, and the subsequent construction of reservoirs will first flood the people along the river.

This kind of planning is in line with the interests of the imperial court and the local governors, so it will naturally be implemented more smoothly.

The urban area of ​​Chongqing Prefecture has been basically emptied out, with only an empty shell remaining to maintain its existence. Working in the urban area is no different from working in the townships and villages.

However, the problem now is that the Three Gorges Reservoir has not yet been built. After the good places along the river are vacated, residents from other surrounding areas may move there on their own.

Inspecting and controlling this situation was the main task of Chongqing Prefecture officials.

Lanzhou is the western gate of the Central Plains. From here, you can enter the Hexi Corridor and go deep into the Western Regions. The railway station here is of the largest scale.

Zhu Jianxuan sent his sons away, and after they reported that they had arrived at their destination, he officially began to deal with the issue of the Prince of Liang.

On February 3, Prince of Liang Zhu Jiancan brought his seventeen sons into the palace and paid a visit to Emperor Zhu Jianxuan in the palace by the Shichahai Lake.

Zhu Jianxuan accepted the worship of these nephews, and then looked through the list prepared by the Ministry of Clan Affairs, which included their ages and some brief introductions.

Zhu Jianxuan discovered that the seventeen sons of King Liang were clearly divided into two groups.

In front are the eight older sons, whose ages are roughly evenly distributed between thirty-five and fifty years old.

Then there is a very obvious fault.

The oldest of the remaining nine sons was only eighteen years old, and the youngest was only nine years old.

When Zhu Jianxuan looked at this distribution, he immediately thought of Li Yuan’s two groups of sons. There was a gap of fifteen years between them, and their situations were somewhat similar.

The children before King Liang were born when he was the crown prince.

Moreover, she was born before Zhu Jianxuan was five years old, before he officially began to display his special abilities and started to participate in court affairs and industrial construction.

From the time Zhu Jianxuan was five years old until he officially replaced him as the crown prince, Prince Liang did not give birth to a son for more than ten years.

By the time he became King of Liang and went to Africa to open up wasteland, he was already fifty years old and began to have children more frequently.

This shows that the Prince of Liang had already adapted to the prince's mental pressure and it would not affect his life.

The mental pressure caused by Zhu Jianxuan really broke his psychological endurance and reached a level that would affect his normal life.

King Liang eventually became King Liang. After the huge mental pressure was gone, he was able to have children at the age of sixty, which shows that he was in good health.

For Zhu Jianxuan, the problem became how to choose an heir when the Liang prince's descendants were clearly divided into two groups.

The older children mentioned above had experience as heirs of the crown prince and might even have coveted the throne.

When they face their uncle who took their throne, they may have special thoughts that others do not have, and they may not be respectful enough in their mentality.

The latter group of young children were born as heirs of princes, and by the time they were just beginning to understand things, they were already emperors.

Their attitude towards themselves should be more respectful than that of the big brothers before them.

But these kids are really too young, the oldest is 17 or 18 years old, and most of them are under 15 years old. They are just a group of children now.

King Liang himself may not have paid much attention to these children and may not have had the intention to educate and train them specifically.

Zhu Jianxuan pondered for a few seconds, then looked up at Prince Liang standing next to him:
"Brother, which child do you like more?"

When King Liang heard the question, he was obviously stunned, and then immediately fell into a dilemma.

This question seemed simple, but King Liang did not dare to answer it directly based on the surface meaning.

If you tell the emperor which son you like and he chooses according to your wishes, then you won't be at a disadvantage.

At most, his other sons would talk about him in the future, but it would be enough for the one he liked the most to become the crown prince.

But if he told the truth and the emperor deliberately did not choose the one he liked, he would lose both the wife and the army.

The son that he favors cannot become the crown prince, and even if he does become the crown prince, he does not have a good impression of him. The key is that he may even target the child that he favors.

After that, I felt very uncomfortable at home.

After much thought, Prince Liang did not answer the question directly. Instead, he came to advise Zhu Jianxuan:
"Since Your Majesty has already established the system, we should act in accordance with Your Majesty's system. The selection of the prince should be determined by Your Majesty's holy heart, and no one else can interfere."

Zhu Jianxuan shook his head helplessly:

"Brother, what you said makes sense. This matter really needs to be chosen by me. No matter what criteria I use or how I choose, no one else can interfere."

After Zhu Jianxuan finished speaking, he ordered the servants to come in and arrange the chairs, put out stationery and rulers, and prepare for the first written test.

After asking the seventeen nephews to sit down, Zhu Jianxuan began to orally dictate questions on the spot and asked them to answer them with pen and paper.

The way Zhu Jianxuan asked questions on the spot was the same as the way he usually educates his own children.

The topics covered are extremely broad, including history and government affairs, geography and biology, physics and chemistry, mechanics and construction, poetry and literature, as well as mathematics.

However, the emphasis is on the scope of coverage and logical judgment rather than the details of actual production, calculation, and phonetic level.

What Zhu Jianxuan wants is “problem-solving ideas”.

Zhu Jianxuan also regarded this assessment as a rehearsal for his future selection of successor, so he arranged and handled it very carefully and actually watched them answer the questions on the spot.

The exam lasted for three days, with two exams per day, each lasting two hours. After the exams, Zhu Jianxuan marked the papers on the spot.

Zhu Jianxuan did not give a specific score either.

Instead, I looked through the answers of my nephews and eliminated those who could not understand the questions, had problems with expression, lacked logical ability, and had complaints. After three days of examination, nine of the seventeen nephews were eliminated, three of whom were over thirty-five years old and six were under eighteen years old.

A total of eight nephews passed the preliminary selection, three of whom were under eighteen years old, and the youngest was just twelve years old, and was obviously smarter than other children of the same age.

On the fourth day, Zhu Jianxuan, Prince Liang and all his nephews went to the parade ground in the new palace.

Let my nephews ride horses, drive cars, and shoot guns. If they didn't know how to do it before, they learned it on the spot, using their learning ability and speed instead of proficiency.

Eliminate those who have poor physical coordination and poor learning ability.

After another three days of observation and learning, four of the eight nephews passed the re-selection, and the eldest son of King Liang was also screened out in the process.

Because Zhu Jianxuan discovered that his eldest nephew had some resistance to these things.

It's like a white-collar worker who has been sitting in an office for a long time goes to a construction site and feels uncomfortable when he sees everything. The key is that he doesn't want to come into contact with these things.

On the sixth day, Zhu Jianxuan once again went with King Liang and his four remaining nephews to his own office.

Zhu Jianxuan selected several representative events from the memorials and memorials he had read, and asked the Zhongshu Sheren under the cabinet to copy down the events themselves in the memorials.

The copied events were handed directly to the four nephews, who were asked to write down their thoughts, comments and suggestions on how to deal with the incidents on the spot.

And they were required to complete the on-site processing within one hour.

Zhu Jianxuan watched the whole process, seeing them reading and suppressing the rebellion. After they finished writing, Zhu Jianxuan took it and reviewed it on the spot.

Zhu Jianxuan first glanced through it, was a little surprised when he saw their answers, and then suddenly laughed.

Zhu Jianxuan once again found that he was influenced by some habitual thinking from his previous life.

Among the eight events I chose, two were quite controversial according to my experience in my previous life, but to the natives of this world, there was no obvious controversy.

According to Shenzhou tradition, any serious case involving children under the age of ten must be reported directly to the emperor.

Therefore, Zhu Jianxuan selected memorials from two related cases for examination.

The first case involved an eight-year-old child and a nine-year-old child, both of whom were from the same village.

The eight-year-old child was showing off the bamboo toys his family bought. The nine-year-old child asked for them back, but the eight-year-old child refused to give them to him.

The nine-year-old got angry and beat the eight-year-old.

The second case involved a group of children around ten years old bullying a nine-year-old child.

This arrangement actually did not cause much doubt for the natives, as it had always been the way the ancient Shenzhou had ruled.

After Zhu Jianxuan understood this, he began to think about why there was such a big difference between the ancient and modern approaches to this issue.

Zhu Jianxuan actually has experience in similar issues.

Many differences between ancient and modern times are often the differences between European and American traditions and Chinese traditions.

It was the military and political strength of modern Europe that forcibly promoted European traditional systems and ideas throughout the world.

European traditions overlay traditions from other regions, creating a sense of dislocation between the past and the present.

Perhaps the same logic applies when it comes to children.

According to materialistic thought, matter determines consciousness, and social existence determines social consciousness.

The attitude towards children and fertility is determined by the size of the population, which in turn is determined by food production.

The land in Western Europe is barren, the soil is shallow and there is insufficient sunlight.

In the Middle Ages, around 1000 AD, local seed harvest ratios were often only one to two.

That is to say, if you plant one kilogram of seeds in the ground in spring, you can only harvest two kilograms of grain in autumn.

In the following hundreds of years, this ratio has been slowly increasing.

It was not until the Age of Discovery, in the 16th and 17th centuries, that the seed-to-earth ratio reached about one to four.

It is for this reason that horse plowing became popular in Europe, and the management model has always been relatively extensive. There is no way to carry out intensive farming because there are no conditions for intensive farming.

The increased output from intensive farming cannot offset the input costs, and the marginal benefits are extremely low.

Due to the lack of food and the long-term state of war among nations after the fall of Rome, the ancient prosperity of Shenzhou never appeared.

Therefore, the population of Western Europe was never large before modern times and never reached the upper limit of the Malthusian trap.

If we observe the population change curve over the entire historical period, the changes in the ancient population curve of Shenzhou will appear to be very regular.

It rose rapidly after the establishment of the new dynasty, and fell sharply in the last years of the dynasty.

At first glance, Europe's population curve does not have the huge ups and downs like the late Shenzhou Dynasty, but if you zoom in and look at the details, it will become an electrocardiogram.

The population of ancient Europe did not really increase steadily and slowly, but rather climbed up with difficulty amidst continuous and rapid changes.

In this situation, European countries' expectations for their population are unlimited.

Therefore, monogamy has always been enforced under the requirements of the Holy See, and therefore there is a general principle of lenient sentencing for children who symbolize the future population.

The reason they give lenient sentences to children is simply because of who they are as children, not because they are ignorant.

The situation in Shenzhou is completely different.

Since Shenzhou has rain and heat at the same time in summer, both heat and rainfall are abundant, which is particularly suitable for agriculture.

As early as the Qin and Han Dynasties, when Shenzhou agriculture still maintained a relatively extensive farming style, the seed-to-harvest ratio could reach one to twelve.

This is six times as many as in medieval Europe.

During the Tang and Song dynasties, a large amount of land was reclaimed in the south of the Yangtze River. In places with more rain and heat, intensive farming methods were adopted, and the seed-to-harvest ratio reached one to twenty.

This is ten times the level in medieval Europe.

The Song Dynasty was the same period as the European Middle Ages. At that time, the yield of one acre of land in China was equivalent to that of ten acres in Europe.

The key is to consider the seeds, manpower and resources invested, and the total return rate is more than ten times.

From a modern investment perspective, this is a very exaggerated proportion.

So there were 100 million people in Shenzhou during the Song Dynasty.

Except for the early years of the dynasty, during the heyday of Shenzhou, excessive population growth might even become a problem.

Therefore, when it comes to cases involving children, Shenzhou Ancient Times mainly considers the actual situation.

The criminal law principle of ancient Shenzhou usually gives light sentences for minor crimes and heavy sentences for serious crimes. Accidental light sentences and subjective heavy sentences.

Pay special attention to the criminal's own "subjective" will tendencies.

Because children lack cognitive abilities, most of the accidents involving child criminals are unexpected, so there was also a fact that in ancient Shenzhou, there were generally light sentences.

There was a story in the Ming Dynasty about a child who killed someone. The county magistrate personally visited him in prison and brought him food.

However, the county magistrate deliberately turned one of the chopsticks upside down so that the two chopsticks were not corresponding, one right side up and the other wrong side down.

After the child picked up the chopsticks, he adjusted one of them before starting to eat.

The county magistrate concluded that the child already had common sense and that his killing was not unconscious, so he adopted a normal sentence.

The reason for Shenzhou’s lenient sentence was the child’s own lack of cognitive ability, not because of the child’s identity itself.

Therefore, normal punishment is usually adopted for crimes with subjective malice.

Even in the case of a light sentence, it is usually just a reduction in the level of punishment, and there is no tradition of direct acquittal.

The modern child protection system is based on Western systems and does not fully conform to China's traditions.

But maybe things will get more compatible in the future...

(End of this chapter)