Sky Curtain: The opening scene explains the four major cases of the Ming Dynasty plus the early Ming

In the shadows of the studio, Zhu Dijun suddenly stepped forward and slammed the blackboard eraser he was holding onto the podium with a dull thud.

"Family members! In the last chapter, we discussed how the rebellion of the imperial clan caused Jiajing to be extremely fearful of the Datong military garrison, which was the first reason for killing Xia Yan. The second reason is the PTSD caused by the collusion between internal and external forces left over from the Renyin Palace Incident!"

Zhu Dijun grabbed a blood-red marker, turned around, and forcefully wrote a large character that occupied half the whiteboard.

【money】!

"The third reason, which is also the most realistic and the core reason that could drive the Ming emperor and his officials to a dead end, is money!"

Zhu Dijun turned and looked directly at the camera, his eyes revealing a coldness that saw through the collapse of the feudal empire.

"Let's take a look at what the Ming Dynasty's treasury was like around the 24th year of the Jiajing Emperor's reign! Many people have read in unofficial histories that the Jiajing Emperor issued an edict at this time to stop some unnecessary royal projects and procurements, and to strictly control royal spending. Don't you all think that this old immortal suddenly changed his ways? Did he suddenly realize he was worried about the people's hard-earned money?"

He let out a wild laugh that could have blown the roof off.

"Wrong! Utterly wrong! Jiajing's logic is extremely cunning! He saved these pittances not out of compassion for the common people, but to fill the huge financial hole left by wars and smuggling! And more importantly, to squeeze out money to continue building his palace that supposedly communicates with the gods!"

An image of an account book was dragged to the center of the large screen.

"At that time, the national treasury of the Ming Dynasty, Taicang, had an annual deficit of several million taels of silver! What to do? Jiajing was desperate and made a groundbreaking invention in ancient accounting!"

Zhu Dijun frantically typed on the keyboard, and four large characters slammed onto the screen: 【Four Pillars Register】!

"This is practically the Ming Dynasty version of double-entry bookkeeping! The beginning balance is the old balance; the current period's income is the new income; the current period's expenses are the current expenses; and the ending balance is the final balance! Every single one of these four columns must be precise!"

Zhu Dijun grabbed the pointer and slammed it hard onto the form.

"Jiajing Emperor required all levels of financial institutions to submit quarterly reports on the four pillars of accounts, which were then cross-checked by the Ministry of Revenue, the Censorate, and the eunuchs of the inner court! Was this a ruthless move? Extremely lethal! Once the accounts were checked, all the corrupt officials below were exposed. For example, the case of the Jiangxi Provincial Administration Commission at that time implicated a large number of corrupt officials!"

The live stream chat was instantly flooded with comments.

"Holy crap, Emperor Jiajing can audit accounts?! Is this some kind of time traveler?!"

"Finding corrupt officials is a good thing; won't the money be recovered?"

"The money has been returned, but this auditing system has caused widespread panic and fierce resistance throughout the entire Ming Dynasty bureaucracy!"

Zhu Dijun took a sip of water and lowered his voice.

"When officials across the land are trembling with fear because of the Four Pillars of Destiny, how could these parasites sit idly by and wait to die? They can only plunder the land through the lowest, darkest channels!"

The screen rapidly switched, revealing a vast expanse of white salt fields.

"What was the most crucial source of revenue for the Ming Dynasty? The salt administration!"

Zhu Dijun drew a huge funnel on the whiteboard.

"In the fifth year of the Jiajing reign, the court briefly reinstated the 'four-six split system' for salt reserves, barely maintaining a balance in the salt administration. However, around the twenty-fourth year of the Jiajing reign, Altan Khan was waging war every day outside the Great Wall in the north, and border defense expenses were skyrocketing! In his pursuit of money, Jiajing did something extremely short-sighted and foolish, directly undermining the foundation of the Ming Dynasty's salt industry!"

"Indiscriminate distribution of surplus salt!"

Zhu Dijun moved closer to the camera, speaking rapidly like a machine gun.

"To obtain cash for military expenses, the state frantically overissued excess salt permits to sell to salt merchants! What was the result? Inflation! Legitimate salt couldn't be sold, and the land was flooded with smuggled salt and surplus salt. Later, Yan Song's henchman, the corrupt official Yan Maoqing, went south to inspect the salt industry. Under the guise of raising money for the court, he did indeed bring back several million taels of silver for Jiajing to build Taoist temples. However, he relentlessly exploited the local people along the way, driving salt merchants and commoners in Jiangnan into bankruptcy, and the Ming Dynasty's salt laws became a complete mess!"

In a parallel Hongwu era of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang stared intently at the sky, his tiger-like eyes practically spitting fire. He had established the salt monopoly to control the economic lifeline. And these descendants, in their desperate attempt to solve their immediate crisis, had actually led the way in completely destroying the salt and iron monopoly!

On the sky, Zhu Dijun's scalpel continued to penetrate deeper.

"Behind the rampant abuse of salt permits lies another fatal flaw in the Ming Dynasty's military defenses—the complete distortion of the 'Salt Issuance System'!"

He picked up a red pen, wrote the three characters "开中法" on the whiteboard, and then heavily crossed them out.

"How did the 'Open Salt Market' system work in the early Ming Dynasty? Merchants transported grain to the border, and the court issued them salt permits. They then went inland to collect salt and sell it for money. This system was extremely perfect; the border troops had food to eat, and the merchants made money!"

"But during the Jiajing reign, with Emperor Xiaozong as a puppet ruler, the 'silver-based system' I mentioned earlier, used by Ye Qi, replaced the 'open-market system.' Large sums of silver were easily obtained. Border merchants no longer wanted the arduous task of transporting grain, and local officials also sought convenience. They directly changed grain transport to 'silver-based payment'! Merchants paid silver to buy salt permits!"

Zhu Dijun slammed his hand on the podium, making the water glass bounce.

"As I mentioned earlier when discussing Ding Rukui's memorial, even with silver, you can't buy rice at the front lines! Because nobody is transporting grain there! Salt merchants in the interior are going bankrupt because the court is over-issuing surplus salt, leaving their salt certificates worthless! Soldiers on the frontier are starving to death at the foot of the Great Wall with their devalued silver!"

The studio lights turned an extremely oppressive, deathly white.

"Before the official salt quota was issued, the surplus salt was estimated, leaving both merchants and saltworkers in dire straits! This was the ultimate dead end created by the Jiajing Emperor's money-grabbing schemes!"

Zhu Dijun took two steps back and stared coldly at the screen.

"Family members, put this financial context into account, and then look back at Xia Yan's forceful push for the 'Fourteen Strategies for Border Defense' in court. Xia Yan demanded extremely firm action: provide Datong and Xuanfu with substantial military pay and provisions!"

"Jiajing looked at the empty treasury, so destitute that even rats would shed tears, and at the intractable debts on the four pillars of the imperial register. How dare you, Xia Yan, ask me for a massive amount of real gold and silver at this time to wage a war in the Hetao region that no one even knows if they can win?!"

"Jiajing didn't want to spend money, and Yan Song didn't want to return the money he had embezzled. Meanwhile, the local smuggling rings on the border didn't want the black market trade to be disrupted, allowing their profits to be shared with civil officials from the capital. These three extremely large and extremely selfish interest groups formed a remarkably tacit united front on the issue of 'money'!"

"Xia Yan's demand for money to wage war is tantamount to simultaneously overturning the tables of the Emperor, the Grand Secretary, and the smuggling ring in the Northwest Frontier Army! If he doesn't die, who the hell will?!"

After a period of dead silence, the live stream chat exploded.

"Got it! Money is life!"

"This is the true logic of politics; not a single word in the fabricated histories of the Qing Dynasty and the civil service is credible!"

"Xia Yan's death was not unjust; he offended so many powerful forces at the same time."

Judy Jun watched the scrolling comments on the screen, a mocking smile playing on his lips. He casually tossed the blackboard eraser aside.

"But Jiajing was not only good at auditing accounts and making money, but as a political animal who was extremely skilled in the art of ruling, he also took the vanity project to the extreme. In July of the twenty-fourth year of Jiajing's reign, he did something that the whole world was grateful for."

A golden imperial edict suddenly appeared on the screen—the "Edict of Mercy."

"The Emperor issued an edict to alleviate the people's suffering and to reduce or exempt taxes in disaster-stricken areas!"

"Why? Because during the Jiajing era, the Ming Dynasty experienced a period of frequent natural disasters! Henan and Shandong suffered from droughts and locust plagues year after year. The history books bluntly state four words: 'cannibalism'!"

Zhu Dijun's finger touched the four blood-dripping words on the screen.

"In feudal times, the common people resorted to cannibalism, which was the ultimate warning from Heaven to the emperor! Fearing divine retribution, Jiajing could only grit his teeth and issue an edict to repent, announcing a reduction of 30% to 40% in taxes."

He turned around abruptly and stared intently at the camera.

"But when the imperial edict reached the local areas, did it truly demonstrate leniency?"

Zhu Dijun fiercely wrote two extremely vulgar official slang terms on the whiteboard: "[Fire Loss]!" and "[Drizzle and Kick the Bucket]!"

"The national treasury is depleted, and the emperor wants to pursue immortality; the total amount can't be reduced. How will local officials fill this hole? They'll ostensibly reduce it, but secretly increase it!"

"When the common people came to pay their grain and taxes, the yamen runners would load the grain into the measuring bins. They'd just fill them up normally, right? No! They'd pile it up into a pointed heap, then slam it down on the bin! [A sharp, pointed heap!] With a crash, the grain that fell to the ground became the local officials' legitimate extra income!"

"When collecting silver, they used the excuse that there was loss in melting down broken silver into official silver to forcibly add a 'fire loss' charge to the people! You should have paid one tael, but they directly charged you one tael and five mace!"

In a parallel Chongzhen era of the Ming Dynasty.

Emperor Chongzhen, Zhu Youjian, gazed at the sky, covering his face with his hands. This kind of trick had been played out every day during his more than ten years on the throne. The court announced tax exemptions from above, while officials below took the opportunity to exploit the people to the bone. The common people were so destitute that they had to gnaw on the bark of trees, and in the end, they had no choice but to seek refuge with Li Zicheng.

The autopsy on the celestial canopy continues.

"The common people could no longer survive and had no choice but to abandon their land and become refugees. The edict of leniency allowed 'abandoned land to be cultivated by others.' This tore open an extremely bloody gap for the powerful landlords in Jiangnan! They took the opportunity to frantically seize unclaimed land! They seized thousands upon thousands of acres, yet, relying on their academic achievements, they did not pay a single penny of tax!"

Zhu Dijun's voice was extremely suppressed.

"The Ming Dynasty's fiscal revenue was being chewed up and swallowed up bit by bit by powerful landlords. The national treasury was getting emptier and emptier, the soldiers on the frontier were getting emptier and emptier, and the Japanese pirates were getting emptier and emptier along the southeast coast."

The lights in the entire studio gradually dimmed, leaving only an extremely deep blue beam of light shining on Judy Jun's head.

"This is an unsolvable deadlock. To break this impasse, we must forcibly reclaim the land that those powerful landlords have swallowed up! We must completely smash and rebuild the extremely chaotic tax system of the Ming Dynasty!"

"Especially in the Jiangnan region, a major tax-generating area, it must be brought back under the control of the imperial family, instead of allowing smuggling gangs and local officials to collude and commit wicked deeds!"

Zhu Dijun pulled up a chair and sat down, pointing the laser pointer in his hand at an anchor point extremely far away on the timeline.

"If Jiajing thought of it, then the civil service group also thought of it. Thus, Xia Yan had another reason to die. This is just my personal conspiracy theory speculation. I'm just saying it for everyone to hear, since I have no evidence and it's just me talking nonsense. You can take it as a reference for a conspiracy theory novel."