Back to the end of Ming Dynasty to be a warlord

Chapter 423
Sure enough, after a few scholars who wanted to welcome Zhu Cijiong were found out, the eunuch sent by the emperor was the first to stand up and loudly denounced the treason.

Although not every scholar said that they wanted to welcome the new emperor, and some of them were beaten so badly that they couldn't bear to be honest, but the eunuch didn't believe their statement about welcoming Zhu Cihuan.

In the struggle for imperial power, it is often better to believe it, and it is often necessary to consider the worst.

After the interrogation, these scholars were behind the Erli Society, and behind them were the wealthy families in the south of the Yangtze River.

This made the eunuch even more restless, which shows that the Jiangnan wealthy family intends to support Zhu Cijiong's ascension to the throne.

This shows that the wealthy families in the south of the Yangtze River do not support the present day, and this is not rebellion.

So after a night of interrogation, and under the pressure of the eunuchs, Yang Chao had no choice but to mobilize troops to put Nanjing under martial law, close all the city gates, and arrest all the scholars gathered outside, no matter whether they had not participated in the attack on the imperial palace, they were just at the entrance of the Confucius Temple Those who studied, still couldn't stand the hard work at all, and those who hid in a brothel for fun, were all arrested.

Ten thousand scholars, all of whom conspired against each other, and all of them were beheaded?
This involved too much, the eunuch representing the imperial power hoped that Yang Chao would come forward and recklessly kill all these people.

But Yang Chao is not a fool, these are all Jiangnan scholars, and they are all elites in their own territory.

Standing behind them are all wealthy families in the south of the Yangtze River. If you let yourself kill the scholar, offend those wealthy families, and then set up a conspiracy, then the wealthy families will not be able to rebel if they don't want to.

As for Wang Xiong, as a scholar, as a class of gentry, he naturally wanted to intercede for these scholars.

And Wang Xiong represented Zhejiang at this time, and to be precise, he was the most powerful governor faction in Zhejiang, so the eunuch secretly remembered it in his heart.

As for Zheng Hongkui, he was very detached and didn't care about the life and death of these eunuchs at all.

Finally, under Wang Xiong's insistence, Yang Chao sent a fast horse to report to the court and ask the court for a decision.

Zhu Cihuan's actions were very fast. Within ten days, the people he sent arrived. The Minister of the Ministry of Punishment personally appeared, together with the Minister of the Ministry of Rites and the three divisions of the Jinyiwei for interrogation.

During the trial, although Yang Chao and the others couldn't get in the conversation, they could still sit and listen with them.

Zhou Yingqi, Minister of the Ministry of Justice who presided over the trial, was from Yongjia County, Zhejiang Province. He was the sixth-generation grandson of Zhou Xuan, the number one scholar in the orthodox reign of the Ming Dynasty.

Huang Jin, Shangshu of the Ministry of Rites, is an acquaintance of Yang Chao. After Long Wu ascended the throne, he was invited to become the Shangshu of the Ministry of Rites. Huang Jin is a relatively upright person. During the interrogation, he was very angry. Insist on really convicting a crime of treason, and if you are convicted of treason, you will be decapitated. There is no room for change.

Only Ma Jixiang, the commander of Jinyiwei, has a tough attitude, that is, the evidence of rebellion is solid, and a rebellion must be established to kill all these scholars.

Ma Jixiang is from Daxing County, Shuntian Prefecture, that is, from Beijing. He was born as a Wu Jinshi, but he is good at flattering people. So he became the commander of Jinyiwei and formed a group of mobs to guard Emperor Longwu.

Let Ma Jixiang be Zhu Cihuan's confidant first. He is determined to kill those who try to promote Zhu Cijiong. The emperor will never compromise on this point.

The three sides quarreled endlessly, the scholars were trembling, and the family power behind them also felt that the sky was about to collapse. The wealthy families were unwilling to be captured without a fight, and started various self-help measures. Asked.

At this time, Yang Chao felt that he had actually matured and stepped forward. He neither expressed his support for Zhou Yingqi not to pursue the matter, nor did he agree with Huang Jin's suggestion of beating the board to teach him a lesson and let him go. requirements.

"There is nothing wrong with a person, and mistakes can be corrected. There is nothing good about them. It is not impossible for these talented people to conspire against each other, but they have to be punished for trespassing in the palace with weapons. The governor thinks that these talented people should all be sent to the army!"

Yang Chao didn't support murder either, but it was a heavy punishment. Expropriation was considered a felony second only to the death penalty, so Ma Jixiang agreed, and Huang Jin agreed after weighing it down. Although there was only one week left, he couldn't bear it, but There is nothing to do.

At the same time, in Suzhou, the Huangfeng Mansion does not accept gifts from wealthy families, but as long as the land of any wealthy family is cleared, he will give a guarantee to the wealthy family, expressing his willingness to come forward to prove that the wealthy family is innocent, which is absolutely the same as rebellion. It doesn't matter.

Immediately, as if the Jiangnan nobles had found a life-saving straw, they rushed to Huang Feng's mansion, Yang Chao's first aide, and the speed of Huang Feng's mansion's clearing of the land in Suzhou was suddenly accelerated.

Under such circumstances, the wealthy clans actively cooperated, and even had some unhappiness in order to clear up someone else's fields first.

It only took 20 days, and the clearing work, which was delayed for more than half a year, was completed. The entire Suzhou Mansion measured a total of 12 hectares of fields. It is really unbelievable. One hectare is 1000 mu, and the entire Suzhou Mansion has more than [-] mu. field.

Of course, Suzhou at this time is different from Suzhou in later generations. Suzhou Mansion at this time is a big mansion, including Changshu, Jiading and the places north of Wusong River (Suzhou Creek) in Shanghai in later generations.

In fact, when Zhang Juzheng reformed, the area of ​​land in Suzhou was about [-] hectares. In fact, Yang Chao only squeezed out [-]% more hidden land than Zhang Juzheng.

But Yang Chao was also very satisfied, because after Zhang Juzheng's death, the whipping law was abolished again, and the wealthy family continued to use the previous account books to fool the government. During the reign of Chongzhen, the taxable land in Suzhou did not exceed [-] hectares.

Back then when Zhang Juzheng practiced a whip method, he counted the number of acres of land in the world. In the early Ming Dynasty, more than 800 million hectares of land could be included in the land tax. By the Wanli period, there were less than 400 million hectares left. After more than 200 years of population growth, land development, and tax-paying land On the contrary, it is less than half, which is obviously unreasonable.

The same is true for Suzhou. In fact, Zhang Juzheng just restored the amount of tax paid in Suzhou in the early Ming Dynasty. The land developed in the next 200 years was not knocked out. This time, [-]% was squeezed out by Yang Chao. .

Of course, they must still have land to hide, but Yang Chao knew that he would not be able to figure it out for a while. Governing a big country is like cooking a small fish, and you have to take it step by step.

Yang Chao was also very satisfied with the cooperation of Suzhou's wealthy family, knowing that they had to do so under the pressure of treason. The wealthy family knew how to choose between rebelling against the government and cooperating with Yang Chao to pay more taxes.

After clearing the land in Suzhou, the Huangfeng Mansion immediately rushed to Songjiang Mansion. It took a month to clear the land and obtained [-] hectares of land, which was also twice as much as the [-] mu on their previous roster.

These powerful families have great energy. In the early Ming Dynasty, when Zhu Yuanzhang measured more than 800 million hectares of land, he forced them to use various methods to turn them into more than 400 million hectares. The method was nothing more than lying about floods and barren fields. They also have the ability to reclaim land after flooding.

It is the small landlords and self-cultivators who really abandoned their fields because of the famine. The land of these people is really abandoned, but the strange thing is that these people who have really abandoned their fields have no ability to communicate with the government to change the scale book, and even more bizarre Yes, after many people had to sell their abandoned wasteland to wealthy families, their names were still on the fish scale book, and they worked everywhere, but it was still easy to pay the land tax.

This is the maladministration of the Ming Dynasty. The wealthy families, dignitaries, vassal kings, and aristocratic families who owned most of the land tried their best to avoid paying taxes through concealment, tax exemption, and arrears. Bankrupt farmers had to pay land taxes instead, so rebellion became the only way out. Not to mention the people in the northwest, even the south of the Yangtze River had some signs of it.

Therefore, the common people have three hatreds, one is hatred for officials, the second is hatred for kings, and the third is hatred for powerful families. Therefore, when Li Zicheng conquers a certain place, he will definitely kill officials, feudal lords, and landlords and wealthy families.

But are these people from the bottom really right? Not necessarily. In fact, if you look at these wealthy families without emotion, they stand out in the competition of a social system. They are elites. In the early Ming Dynasty, how could there be so many wealthy families? , not all ordinary people, they climbed to the top step by step through better management and training their children to study for the imperial examination, and became a wealthy family.

By violent means, kill them all, divide their wealth, and then the society will re-compete, and then kill the rich and eat the big family again. It is endless humiliation.

Yang Chao has a world view that traverses history, so naturally he will not hate the wealthy family like a commoner. He is attacking the wealthy family, but he is adjusting, because after the wealthy family has gained a huge advantage through competition, they start to use this advantage to do some inappropriate things. Things, such as tax evasion, made the later poor lose an opportunity to compete, as if the laws of later generations did not prohibit monopoly, but prohibited monopoly enterprises from using monopoly power to attack competitors and gain inappropriate advantages.

Apparently, the current wealthy families have played the role of a monopoly enterprise. They use their own advantages to stifle the hope and opportunity of other classes.

Therefore, Yang Chao's first step is to cancel this unfair advantage of the wealthy family. He must let the wealthy family pay taxes like ordinary people, and even require the wealthy family to bear more taxes.But they will not touch the property of the wealthy family, and they will not kill their people.

Even so, by enlisting [-] scholars into the army, Yang Chao has actually dealt a severe blow to the wealthy family.

These scholars, no matter how you count them, are the elite children of the wealthy families. There may be more than one or two scholars in the families of the wealthy families, but it is not easy for the middle-level families to cultivate a scholar, so this stick beats these wealthy families. I hate it very much, even if it doesn't hurt my muscles and bones, it can be regarded as breaking their hope for many years to go further.

You must know that some of these scholars will definitely produce some candidates and Jinshi. In the future, there will be a few high-ranking officials who will reach the level of cabinet ministers. Leap up and become a national celebrity.

But now the hopes of tens of thousands of middle-level families have been taken away by Yang Chao. It is absolutely false to say that they do not hate Yang Chao. Now the temporary compromise, I do not know how much resentment is secretly accumulated , how many families are waiting for the opportunity to give Yang Chao a fatal blow.

Even Yang Chao believed that if the Qing army came to fight now, there would definitely be a large number of powerful families to help the Qing army fight Yang Chao.

Politics requires both hard and soft tactics, the so-called stick with one hand and carrot with the other, or a sweet date with a stick.

Now that the stick has been given, and a heavy stick has been given, then they have to be given a big sweet date.

(End of this chapter)