The Ming Dynasty began from Sarhu

Chapter 731 Liu Kan's Three Strategies
On March 15th of the seventh year of Guangde, more than 360 candidates from the north and south gathered in the Wenhua Hall of the Forbidden City in Nanjing to take part in the palace examination held once every three years.

On March 15th, Emperor Guangde Liu Kan took time out of his busy schedule and rushed to Wenhua Hall in person to serve as the invigilator of the palace examination.

The topics of the three policy questions this year were also formulated by Liu Kan himself.

Emperor Guangde posed three questions to the future bureaucratic elites of the Great Qi:

First, even though the disaster is still there, the people are uneasy, thieves are rampant, and there are disturbances on the borders, (Da Qi) has abundant wealth and food. Why is this happening?

It is still questionable whether Qi State has enough wealth and food at the moment, but "the people are uneasy, thieves are rampant, and there are disturbances on the border" are facts that are happening. Even the corrupt scholars who turn a deaf ear to what is happening outside have heard of them.

Just as Emperor Guangde was presiding over the spring palace examination, thousands of miles away in Liaodong, farmers who had been bankrupted by the landlords, joined forces with the laid-off soldiers and launched an unprecedented rebellion in Liaodong. They seized cities and land, robbed the wealth of local tyrants and evil gentry, killed civil servants sent to Liaodong by the court, distributed land equally, exempted labor service, restored the old system, and restored the "Qi Dynasty Land System" of the time of the retired emperor.

The Liaodong rebellion had not yet been quelled, and the chieftains in Sichuan and Yunnan began to take advantage of the situation to rob. They saw the opportunity and frequently harassed Hubei and Hunan, plundering people and stealing property.

The various military corps stationed in the two lakes region had just undergone a disarmament process, leaving them demoralized and short-staffed. Forced to maneuver extensively, the Qi army was increasingly overwhelmed by the recurring Tusi rebellions. The local tyrants and gentry, previously purged in the two lakes region, seized the opportunity to regroup and re-emerge under the guise of militia. With the tacit approval of the imperial court, these local tyrants flourished like mushrooms after rain, quickly occupying areas beyond the imperial control and becoming the vanguard of the fight against the Tusi in the southwest.

In just two years, the Great Qi went from being pacified on all sides to being plunged into endless wars.

However, Emperor Guangde Liu Kan believed that all the rebellions were just minor issues and were nothing at all. He thought that the rebellion could be completely quelled by sending one or two main corps.

What really made Emperor Guangde anxious was that the original intention of formulating the new policy was to benefit the people and free them from the harsh and tyrannical rule of the era of the retired emperor. However, after the new policy was introduced, it was resisted and opposed by people from all over the country.

When my father was alive, he once said that the truth is often in the hands of a few people. Liu Kan now increasingly agrees with this truth.

The people can let it go, but they can't make it known.

Even if you try your best to consider the people, these unruly people will not appreciate it.

Overnight, Emperor Guangde found that he had too many problems to deal with. The court now needed people everywhere and needed to send capable forces to various provinces to implement new policies. There were very few capable officials like Kang Jingxiu.

Relying solely on our current team is far from enough to cope with the current dangerous situation.

The current situation is that the people's morals are no longer as they used to be, and cunning people are everywhere. Therefore, Emperor Guangde's second policy is:

"Today, the people's customs are corrupt, and haste leads to small gains. We now want to correct their ways and restore the ancient ways. What methods can we use?" This title means that the people of the Great Qi Dynasty are currently corrupt. The people are impatient for quick results and greedy for small profits, without considering the long-term plans of the court. Therefore, reviving the people's customs and allowing them to return to their original nature is the top priority. So how can this goal be achieved?

Like the first question, this one also has no solution.

If the first two policy questions were somewhat tricky, then the third question was a fatal one.

The difficulty of the eight-legged essay lies in the fact that one must first be familiar with the "Four Books", because the third question of Emperor Guangde's test is a passage directly excerpted from the "Four Books".

The topic is as follows:

"The king hastened to issue the order for rebellion. The King of Yan has been reckless in his wars. Emperor Wu has exhausted all the might of the land, enriching the country and strengthening the army, but to what benefit has it brought to the people?"

This passage is from Mencius: "The king should issue an order quickly, return the flags and banners, stop the important weapons, consult with the people of Yan, and then leave after he has appointed a ruler. Then it may still be possible to stop it."

The general idea is that the king should quickly issue an order to send back the captured elderly and children, stop moving the treasures of Yan State, discuss with the Yan people to select a new monarch, and then evacuate Yan State, then there is still time to stop other countries from mobilizing troops.

The reason why this question is called a fatal question is that if you are not careful, you will get the wrong answer.

Fortunately, all the candidates who participated in the palace examination were well-read scholars, otherwise they might have thought that the question was "The king orders you to rebel." If they answered the question according to this idea, it would not be a simple question of whether they could pass the examination, but it would be hard to say whether they could preserve their lives and property.

After Emperor Guangde came to power, he fully restored the imperial examination system. Compared with previous dynasties, the most important innovation of the imperial examinations in the Guangde Dynasty was that the scope of the examinations was limited to the "Four Books", and all test questions were selected from "The Great Learning", "The Analects of Confucius", "Mencius" and "The Doctrine of the Mean".

It is said that this is to ensure fairness. Families that can read more books and receive a more comprehensive education must be rich or noble. In this way, children from rich families will inevitably have an advantage in the imperial examinations. In order to put everyone on the same starting line, only these four books were selected.

Of course, facts proved that Emperor Guangde was overthinking it. Since most of the scholars studied the Four Books and Five Classics and had basically no economic knowledge reserves, the countermeasures they proposed to the policy questions in the palace examination tended to be general.

The countermeasures of the top scholar Liu Lishun grasped the focus of Emperor Guangde's concern. In his response, he criticized some ungrateful and hasty villains. These villains did not want to repay the court's kindness, but only wanted the court to continue spending money and food to support them, let them continue to be lazy, and continue to live in garrisons, workshops, and schools, even though the treasury of the Great Qi was already unsustainable.

Liu Lishun advocated that these cunning people should be strangled resolutely, because these treacherous people were extremely vicious and were no longer the emperor's subjects and were no longer worthy of being called human beings.

Therefore, we should march our army to Liaodong, the southwest, and all the counties that have betrayed the emperor, leaving no one alive. If we want to govern the world, we must first "settle the people's hearts" and take drastic measures to show your majesty's bodhisattva heart.

(End of this chapter)