Taiheiki

Chapter 6: Land and House Exceeding Regulations
Cai Buyi didn't answer. Zhao Yannian laughed and said, "It's inconvenient to say? Haha, I knew this person was no ordinary person. I feel at ease that I lost to such a hero!"

Cai Buyi looked at Zhao Yannian, who seemed to be waiting for death with his eyes closed, and suddenly asked, as if possessed by a ghost, "Are you really going to join the Shanyue?"

"Not bad?" Zhao Yannian opened his eyes and sneered, "Why? Strange?"

"Those people are ruthless murderers, barbarians, and thieves!" Cai Buyi angrily said, "When you followed Li Jingzhou (former Grand Marshal Li Gu, who once served as the Governor of Jingzhou and quelled local uprisings, a renowned scholar throughout the land, but was later murdered by Liang Ji due to his disagreement with him over the enthronement of Emperor Huan) to conquer the Southern Barbarians Shanyue, didn't you understand their moral character? Cao Wujiu lent money recklessly, oppressed the people, and harmed your family. It's not excessive for you to exterminate his entire clan. But why did you join the Shanyue? Don't forget you fought against them before!"

"Because I was wrong at the beginning!" Zhao Yannian said with a cold expression.

"What?" Cai Buyi almost thought something was wrong with him.

"Li Jingzhou made a mistake back then! There weren't many barbarians or bandits among those Shanyue people. Most of them were ordinary Han people, no different from me or your soldiers. If there was any difference, it was that they farmed and ate in the mountain valleys, paying no head tax or rent, nor any labor or military service. There were indeed some bandits among them, but they were a minority. The majority were honest citizens."

"Nonsense!" Cai Buyi sneered. "You're leaving the peaceful plains of a county to go to a remote and impoverished mountainous area. And you still call yourself a good citizen? Do you think I'm a fool?"

"I saw all of this with my own eyes. Believe it or not!" Zhao Yannian said, "As for why you chose to go to the mountains instead of staying in the plains. By the way, from what others have said, your last name should be Cai, right?"

Cai Buyi was a little confused by Zhao Yannian's unconventional thinking, but he nodded anyway: "Yes, what does this have to do with what you just said?"

"Jingzhou Cai family?"

"Ok!"

"Who is Cai Feng to you?"

"It's my uncle!"

"So we are from the same clan? It's no wonder you think so!" Zhao Yannian said with a smile.

"What do you mean?" Cai Buyi asked angrily.

"Nothing! You asked me why the common people don't want to live in the plains and counties, but go to the mountains and forests to make a living. Then I have a question for you: how much land do you have in your family? How many servants and retainers do you have?"

"This..." Cai Buyi was stunned by the question and was speechless for a moment. Zhao Yannian smiled and said, "You can't answer it, right? If my guess is correct, your family has at least 70 or 80 hectares of land, hundreds of servants and guests, and the land and property are definitely beyond the legal limit! Is that correct?"

Facing Zhao Yannian's questioning, Cai Buyi remained silent, a rare occurrence. After a while, he finally defended himself, "There are many families in the world that violate the rules, and it's not just our Cai family!"

"That's right, but it's precisely because there are so many people with excessive land and property that the common people have fled to the mountains to survive. You must know that if you offend the county magistrate, you will only die, but if you offend a wealthy family, your entire family will be exterminated!"

"You can't say that!" Cai Buyi sneered, "My Cai family is honest and kind. We treat our guests and servants like family members, no different. You're living a good life, but you're exiled to the mountains and become a lawless criminal. How can you blame us?"

By this point, the two men were arguing fiercely, sparks flying. Their argument, in fact, represented a long war that lasted for four hundred years throughout the Han Dynasty—a war between the state and the newly powerful landlords for control over the landless peasants.

Five months after the Battle of Gaixia, Emperor Gaozu of Han, Liu Bang, issued a decree recognizing the Qin Dynasty's legacy of a system of military nobility based on merit, which later became known as the Twenty-Level Military Nobility System. Under this system, citizens were entitled to varying amounts of land, houses, and slaves depending on their rank. Throughout the rest of the Western Han Dynasty, the imperial court's granting and selling of nobility became widespread. Later, most nobility titles no longer came with accompanying land, houses, and slaves. Consequently, adult males in the Han Dynasty generally held varying degrees of nobility, as evidenced by the later unearthed bamboo slips from the Juyan Han Dynasty.

Obviously, with the universalization of titles, the twenty-level military merit nobility no longer had the ability to mobilize social resources for war that it had during the Qin Dynasty and the early Western Han Dynasty. However, the twenty-level military merit nobility played another role under the Han Dynasty system: it brought the vast majority of social members into a unified national system.

That is, under the military merit system, while all members of society had varying degrees of status, their social standing was guaranteed by the state. For example, according to the twenty levels of military merit, the lowest-ranking commoner had one hectare of land, while the Guannei Hou had ninety hectares. However, both the commoner's one hectare and the Hou's ninety hectares were protected by state law. The commoner was the commoner of the state, and the Hou was the Hou of the state. Within this system, the individuals belonged solely to the state, not to anyone else. This was the core logic of the twenty levels of military merit in the Qin and Han dynasties.

Judging from the data unearthed from Han tombs in later generations, the average land owned by ordinary people in the Western Han Dynasty was only 20 to 30 mu, which was far less than the standard of one hectare of land for common people under the system of granting land to those with twenty levels of military merit. Therefore, this land grant standard was actually an upper limit on the amount of land owned by each level. In other words, at the beginning of the Western Han Dynasty, the land grant system and the land restriction system were two sides of the same coin.

For the self-cultivating farmers who made up the vast majority of the Western Han Dynasty population, their tax burden consisted primarily of two components: land tax and head tax, with the latter accounting for a much larger proportion than the former. This was the tax policy that continued from the Qin Dynasty into the Tang Dynasty: taxing people instead of land. In an era with a small population and abundant land, talent was the most important factor in production. The state's institutional design required precise control over every citizen, and naturally, the head tax became the largest component of the tax burden.

Shang Yang's original intention in establishing this system was to encourage the people to cultivate more land, as cultivating more land would indirectly reduce the burden of the head tax. However, in the early Western Han Dynasty, low land rents (even reaching one-thirty during the reigns of Emperor Wen and Emperor Jing) exacerbated land consolidation. Even if farmers lost their land, they could not escape the head tax, which comprised the bulk of their tax burden. Furthermore, titles, which restricted the amount of land the wealthy could own, could be purchased. This accelerated land consolidation, resulting in a large number of landless peasants. Unlike later laws, the Han Dynasty only recognized two categories of status: good citizens and slaves, and did not recognize dependents or tenants. The practice of giving land to good citizens for cultivation and collecting rent was specifically termed "yi shi ba min" ("Lie shi shi bian min"). Interested readers can find this term repeatedly in the "Biographies of Cruel Officials" in the "Book of Han." Consuming civilians was actually illegal during the Han Dynasty, especially in the Western Han Dynasty, and was a primary target of local officials.

Aside from self-cultivating farmers, the Han central government only recognized the legality of private ownership of slaves and servants, and the hiring of other legitimate laborers by legitimate citizens. Therefore, landless peasants who cultivated land for powerful landlords and paid rent became de facto slaves in the eyes of the Han central government. However, during the Han Dynasty, the number of slaves and servants that could be owned by private individuals was strictly limited: a maximum of 200 slaves could be owned by a single individual, and owners were required to pay a head tax for their slaves, which was twice the rate for ordinary people.

In the organizational structure of the first Chinese empire represented by the Qin and Han dynasties, there were only two levels: officials and civilians, or in other words, there were only two levels: the state and the workers. Only the state could possess the labor force without restrictions, and only the state could use the right to use land as compensation in exchange for the workers' products and free services.

When a private individual rents out land to make thousands of farmers serve him for free, in the eyes of the state, this person possesses power equivalent to that of the state, and in fact becomes an illegal feudal lord.

This feudal lord, without regard to the state, gained direct control over a large number of workers. Beyond the scope permitted by the state, he mastered power beyond his own political level and inserted an illegal intermediate link into the original two-tier political system. This was the political logic behind the continuous crackdown on powerful families and manor economy during the Han Dynasty.

Thus, a paradox arose during the Han Dynasty. On the one hand, the central government of the Han Dynasty, through the twenty levels of military nobility granting land and the tax system based primarily on head taxes and supplemented by land taxes, continuously created landless peasants, forcing them to become tenants of powerful landlords. On the other hand, it desperately cracked down on powerful landlords and the manor economy, prohibiting them from occupying large amounts of land and landless peasants.

Under this paradox, peasants could neither securely work as self-cultivators nor as tenants of powerful landlords, ultimately being forced to flee and become refugees. This institutional contradiction led to the rise of refugee flows, such as the Red Eyebrows and Green Forest rebels at the end of the Western Han Dynasty, the Yellow Turbans in the north, and the Shanyue in the south at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty.

Cai Buyi believed that if the state stayed out of their way, these landless peasants could simply become tenants on his estate. While they would have to pay half the rent, it was still much better than the self-cultivating peasants burdened by labor, military service, and taxation, and the refugee problem would naturally be solved. Zhao Yannian believed that if it weren't for these powerful landlords wreaking havoc and oppressing innocent people, the common people wouldn't have fled to the mountains to become Shanyue. In a sense, neither Cai Buyi nor Zhao Yannian was wrong; the fault lay with the outdated Qin and Han imperial system.

Of course, Wei Cong was unaware of the dispute between Cai Buyi and Zhao Yannian. By this time, he had recovered from the excitement of defeating a powerful enemy, and a tremendous amount of fatigue suddenly overwhelmed him. He could only feel his eyelids drooping, as if they were hung with two lead blocks. Wang Shou, who was standing nearby, was very perceptive and immediately shouted to the others, "Age, where are the sheepskins you brought? Bring them out and spread them out so that my lord can rest!"

"Hey!" Wang Ge responded and quickly spread the leather mattress on the ground heated by the fire in the sheltered place behind the stone. Wang Shou carefully checked it and swept away some of the ashes next to it. Then he pulled Wei Cong's sleeve, pointed at the sheepskin mattress on the ground, and made a gesture of invitation.

"Thank you!" Wei Cong didn't care about anything else at this time. He nodded to Wang Shou, then walked to the sheepskin mattress and lay down with his clothes on.

"Where is Mr. Wei?" Cai Buyi asked after looking around after coming back.

"Behind the rock, he's resting!" Wang Shou whispered, "I asked A Ge to spread out a sheepskin mattress!"

"Well, you did well!" Cai Buyi breathed a sigh of relief and sat down cross-legged, a look of fatigue on his face. Wang Shou leaned closer and whispered, "What happened to the patrol? What did the thief say?"

"Don't take a dying man's words to heart!" Cai Buyi smiled. "As long as we take him to the county yamen tomorrow morning, everything will be fine. But Lord Wei, you have to be careful about this matter and don't let anything go wrong!"

"How about I take Wang Ge and send Lord Wei to your farm at dawn tomorrow? How about that?" Wang Shou asked.

"Alright!" Cai Buyi immediately understood. As a patrol officer, he was bound to escort Zhao Yannian to the county seat, but Wei Cong was too conspicuous, and the longer he stayed with these soldiers, the more trouble he would cause. It would be better to let Wang Shou and Wang Ge, the two soldiers who had helped him capture Zhao Yanshou, leave together. This way, there would be less trouble.

"But don't go to my farm. There are too many people there, and it's easy to cause trouble! Do you remember my villa next to Ge Lake? It's the one where I hunt wild ducks and waterfowl every year. You and Wang Ge should go there and stay with Wei Langjun. We'll talk when I come back!" At this point, he took a jade pendant from his waist and handed it to Wang Shou: "Take this and give it to Old Man Zhang who is guarding the house. Tell him to treat you like a servant of mine. Don't treat it with disrespect!"

"Don't worry, Youjiao!" Wang Shou carefully accepted the jade pendant and put it in his arms: "I will take care of everything!"

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The next day, the sun had barely crested the ridgeline as Wei Cong left camp and headed down the mountain. What he saw before him wasn't so much a road as a trail through the grass, snaking back and forth like a snake, sometimes intertwining with the stream, sometimes disappearing entirely. Several times, Wei Cong thought Wang Shou had lost his way, but seeing Wang Shou's confident demeanor, he decided to keep quiet and follow.

"Look, what is this? We are almost there!" Wang Shou pointed at the tire tracks in the grass and shouted happily to Wei Cong.

Wei Cong nodded. He had guessed what was going on, and his sore feet felt much better.

"My dear! You must be tired! Please wait a moment!" Wang Shou, not caring whether Wei Cong could understand him or not, pointed to a donkey cart approaching slowly in the distance and said, "Wait for me to stop the donkey cart ahead and give you a ride!" He then ran to the middle of the road, waved his arms and shouted at the oncoming donkey cart, "Stop, stop!"

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(End of this chapter)