Jiajing Chengming

Chapter 368 The poor officials were overjoyed and grateful for the emperor’s grace!

Yang Yiqing and other ministers in the Imperial Study understood that the emperor wanted to make scholars from poor families the main force in the officialdom!

Because they had to admit that these benefits given by the emperor to the Ministry of Personnel were naturally unattractive to the children of wealthy families who were accustomed to extravagance and debauchery, but for scholars from poor families, they were enough to make them work with peace of mind and be grateful to the court.

After all, their food, clothing, housing and transportation are all taken care of, and senior bureaucrats can also have a few government-hired servants to serve and take care of them.

For poor scholars with low demands or literati who are determined to be honest officials, they will naturally not be upset because they no longer have the opportunity to embezzle large amounts of donations.

Zhu Houcong then asked the cabinet ministers, the Minister of Personnel and the Minister of Revenue to meet in the Wenhua Hall to decide how much public money to give to the Ministry of Personnel every year.

When the Minister of Personnel Zhao Huang learned about this, he naturally sighed at the emperor's great grace.

Of course he felt that the emperor’s grace was enormous!
Because he was the Minister of Personnel, he had the power to decide how to spend the money.

This also means that in the future, whether the officials of the Ministry of Personnel want to obtain benefits or not will have to depend on his opinion, which will naturally make it easier for him to manage the Ministry of Personnel.

This is different from the previous situation of the Ministry of Personnel.

The Shangshu had no idea how much silver the Ministry of Personnel had donated before.

Although there is a clear price for donating silver, in fact, if the person who donates money wants to get the position, he has to give benefits to the officials secretly.

The officials of the Wenxuansi naturally received the bribes directly, and even the Shangshu and the Shilang had no idea how much they had received.

It was just that the officials of the Ministry of Literature would pay tribute to the Shangshu and Shilang according to the usual practice.

Therefore, how much money the officials of the Ministry of Personnel such as the Shangshu and Shilang could earn sometimes depended on the moods of the officials under them.

As long as the officials below don't want to improve themselves and don't give them money, they can do nothing.

After all, this is grey income that cannot be seen in the open, and they cannot openly criticize the officials under them for not giving them benefits.

Now that the money comes from above, it will naturally be beneficial for Zhao Huang, the Minister of Personnel, to centralize power in his own Ministry of Personnel.

However, Zhao Huang, the Minister of Personnel, could only use the money to protect his own power and could not embezzle it.

Because this money is allocated from the national treasury, it needs to be recorded in the accounts. There must be detailed records of how it was spent and how much was spent.

Therefore, Zhao Huang could only decide how to spend the money but could not take it all away.

But in any case, this is beneficial to centralization for the emperor.

He can control the Ministry of Personnel more easily by manipulating the Minister of Personnel.

The Minister of Personnel, Zhao Huang, naturally wanted more official money, so he reported all kinds of expenses of the Ministry of Personnel inflated, even the expenses of toilet paper were reported twice as much.

However, Wang Ao, who was in charge of the General Administration of Revenue, and Xi Shu, the Minister of Revenue, were very tight-lipped about the court's money. During a meeting in Wenhua Hall, they forced Zhao Huang to reduce the amount of money for the envoy to 700,000 silver dollars.

Even so, this figure still exceeds the income from donations to the court in previous years.

Because the imperial court received nearly 500,000 silver dollars in donations every year.

However, this is only the donation income on the surface. In fact, the corruption income generated is much more than the amount paid to the court on the surface.

Even if we assume that during the Wanli period, the eunuchs collected mining taxes instead of civil servants, and only paid 20% to the court, the actual amount of corruption income was about 2.5 million silver dollars.

Now the court has stopped collecting nearly 500,000 silver dollars in donations each year and has spent an additional 700,000 silver dollars. Although this has increased fiscal expenditure by nearly 1.2 million silver dollars, it has eliminated a corruption market worth 2.5 million silver dollars.

When Zhao Huang received the 700,000 silver dollars in embassy money and was told that the emperor allocated the money to help the officials in the Ministry of Personnel solve their difficulties in food, clothing, housing and transportation, poor scholars such as Fu Hanchen, who was observing the government in the Ministry of Personnel, were extremely happy.

Fu Hanchen was a Jinshi who just passed the imperial examination this year. He was assigned to the Ministry of Personnel to observe government affairs because he ranked high in the imperial examination, in the top 30 in the second class.

But his family was not well off, and the rent from the donations had to be used to support the family and give back to the clansmen. So he could only live on a meager salary and bonus, renting the worst house in the guild hall, and his food and clothing were very simple. Now, because it was the end of the year, he had to rely on buying rice and oil on credit to make a living, and he could only walk to the government office every day. He could not buy a horse, nor could he afford to hire a sedan chair bearer.

Of course, even so, he was still much better off than ordinary people. After all, he could still eat a full meal every day and eat meat every day.

But now that the court has solved his problems of food, clothing, housing and transportation, he can naturally use his salary and bonus money for other consumption, such as buying some books, paintings, or a few maids and servants to serve him, or even saving it.

Therefore, this was naturally a great thing for scholars from poor families like Fu Hanchen who had just entered the officialdom. They could not help but sigh for the emperor's grace and even worked more actively, especially when they knew that the unspent annual ambassadorial money would be given as additional subsidies or bonuses. They could not wait to go home and work overtime for court affairs so that their superiors could see how diligent they were. Not only would they not delay completing things until the deadline, but they would also complete them ahead of time.

In order to make better use of the diplomatic envoy money, the Minister of Personnel Zhao Huang also requested an imperial decree to set up a diplomatic bureau in the Ministry of Personnel, adding a chief officer to manage the bureau and an observing scholar to assist in the management.

then.

Wei Liangbi, a Jinshi who passed the imperial examination in the second year of the Jiajing reign, was appointed as the head of the Public Envoy Bureau. Fu Hanchen was appointed as the assistant director by the Minister of Personnel Zhao Huang because he did not make a fuss when Zheng and Shen committed suicide.

The two of them were then directly under the leadership of Zhao Huang and were responsible for the expenditure of the 700,000 silver dollars.

It can be said that he is a low-ranking official with a good salary.

However, as young men who had just entered the officialdom, they did not dare to act recklessly. Naturally, they honestly looked for vacant land that could be purchased and developed in the outer city not far from the Ministry of Personnel.

The outer city of the Ming Dynasty is just being built, so there are still a lot of vacant land. However, many of these vacant lands already have owners, who are either rich or noble, and most of them are government lands.

Because Zhu Houcong cleared the farmlands in the capital when he ascended the throne, he forced many powerful and wealthy gentry to return a lot of occupied official land.

Moreover, due to the need to build an outer city, a lot of official land planned for the city was not distributed to the newly arrived refugees as farmland, but was retained as official land for future planning and use.

The Ministry of Personnel was located on the left side of the Qianbu Corridor facing Zhengyangmen, so Wei Liangbi and Fu Hanchen selected a vacant lot in the outer city area between Zhengyangmen and Chongwenmen, along the west river of Chongwenmen, as the future official residence area for the officials of the Ministry of Personnel.

Then, on behalf of the Ministry of Personnel, they found the Tamada Hakuba family, which was currently responsible for one of the construction projects in the city, to undertake the construction of this project.

Not long after that, Yutianbo's family, Jiajing's maternal family, came here with their own engineering team to tamp the foundation, lay bricks and frame wood.

As Jiajing's cousin, Yutianbo Jiang Lun was naturally not afraid of the Ministry of Personnel withholding wages.

Of course, the Ministry of Personnel was not afraid that Yutian Bo would falsify projects or ask for an exorbitant price. After all, the Ministry of Personnel had the power to inspect honors, verify seals, and evaluate merits. Moreover, the civil servants were not ordinary people and would not dare to make trouble to the emperor just because they suffered losses at the hands of their in-laws.

Therefore, when Fu Hanchen and others saw a large number of migrant workers, organized by the Yutianbo family, working busily to build a centralized residential residence for their Ministry of Personnel, their eyes were filled with expectation and gratitude.

What he expected was that after he moved in in the future, he would no longer have to pay rent and would have a larger and more convenient living space; and what he was grateful for was that the emperor would be so compassionate to them, the low-ranking ministers, and spend a lot of money to ensure their lives. He felt that if he did anything to let down the court because of this, he would really not be a human being.

(End of this chapter)