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

The studio's deep blue overhead light shone on the stage, like a searchlight piercing through the fog of history. Zhu Dijun pressed his hands firmly against the table, his upper body close to the camera, his eyes revealing an extreme coldness that had seen through the cannibalistic nature of capitalism for centuries.

"Family members, in the last chapter I asked you an extremely crucial question. The Ming Dynasty's treasury is empty, the border troops' salaries are gone, and even selling their children can't pay the extra three cents per mu of land. So where did all this vast wealth of the land go?"

He suddenly grabbed the pointer and slammed it down on the large screen. With a deafening crash, the tragic scenes of disaster victims were forcibly torn apart, replaced by a scene of glittering lights and mountains of gold and silver at a coastal smuggling port!

"The official economy is stagnant, with starving people everywhere! But the underground economy is experiencing an unprecedented and distorted frenzy!" Zhu Dijun's red light drew circles wildly on the map of the southeast coast, tightly binding Wang Zhi's base and the stronghold of the Jiangnan gentry together.

"This is the true face of the 25th year of the Jiajing reign! The booming smuggling industry under the maritime ban!"

Zhu Dijun strode to the whiteboard and wrote four bloody characters in black marker: "[Collusion between officials and businessmen]".

"The Ming Dynasty implemented a strict maritime ban, forbidding ordinary people from going to sea. This policy sounds like it was to prevent Japanese pirates, right? Wrong! Utterly wrong! When a policy is extremely harsh and unreasonable, it is definitely not for national security; it is specifically designed to create monopolistic profits!"

He pointed to the massive smuggling fleets on the screen, laden with silk and porcelain. "Ming Dynasty silk and porcelain were the world's finest hard currency at the time! Shipped to Japan, into the hands of the Portuguese, they were exchanged for crates and crates of Japanese Iwami Ginzan silver! Did this enormous wealth flow into the Ming Dynasty? Did it enter the national treasury?"

Judy Jun let out a loud laugh that could have blown off the roof, a laugh filled with biting mockery.

"Not a single penny! It all went into private pockets! It went into the hands of Wang Zhi, the maritime smuggling tycoon, and into the hands of the powerful families and local officials in Jiangnan who acted as their protectors!"

"This creates an extremely perverse death spiral!"

He drew heavy circles on the whiteboard with a red pen: "The stricter the imperial court's maritime ban, the higher the barrier to smuggling becomes, and the more terrifying the profits become! The more lucrative smuggling is, the more these officials and merchants will fight tooth and nail to maintain the maritime ban policy. Tough guys like Zhu Wan, who dared to investigate smuggling, were directly killed by them! What was the result? The imperial court couldn't collect a single penny of customs duties, became desperately poor, and in the end, could only turn around and frantically exploit the poor farmers in the interior!"

The live stream chat exploded instantly.

"Monopoly creates exorbitant profits! Isn't this a classic case of privileged classes squandering their inheritance?"

["On one hand, he shouts in the imperial court that ancestral rules cannot be violated and that the maritime ban must be firmly upheld, while on the other hand, he counts the Japanese silver he has obtained through smuggling in his bed!"]

"No wonder Xia Yan and Yan Song's gang of civil officials are arguing every day; they're all fighting over this piece of fat meat on the sea!"

In a parallel Hongwu era of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang stared intently at the sky, then slammed his hand down, shattering a corner of his desk. A splinter pierced his palm, and blood dripped onto the memorials.

"The maritime ban we established was to guard against the remnants of Fang Guozhen's forces! Yet, during the Jiajing reign, it has become an excuse for these hypocritical thieves to line their own pockets!" Zhu Yuanzhang's eyes were bloodshot, his murderous intent spreading throughout the hall. "These thieves in official robes deserve to die even more than the pirates at sea!"

Against the backdrop of the sky, Zhu Dijun's scalpel followed the coastline, brutally plunging into the heart of the Jiangnan region of the Ming Dynasty.

"Smuggling emptied the country's tax base, but do you think these officials' shady dealings ended there? Let's look at the ultimate destruction faced by the Ming Dynasty's inland agricultural economy in the 25th year of the Jiajing reign!"

The image on the large screen switched from the sea to the water towns of Jiangnan. What should have been an endless mulberry grove had now become a patch of unfamiliar tree species.

Four large characters were displayed right in the center of the screen: 【改桑种楮】!

"Family members, those who know about the history of Emperor Jiajing's pursuit of immortality know that this emperor needed a very special type of Xuan paper with a fine texture to write Qingci (a type of prayer paper) for worshipping Heaven. The raw material for this paper is the bark of the paper mulberry tree."

Zhu Dijun's speech quickened, revealing a sense of satisfaction in exposing the lie.

"The imperial court decreed that the Jiangnan region must pay tribute of this type of paper made from mulberry bark on time and in the required quantity every year."

"When the emperor has a request, how do the subordinates comply?"

Zhu Dijun pressed his hands firmly against the podium, getting close to the camera.

"Songjiang and Suzhou in Jiangnan were the heart of the Ming Dynasty's silk industry! For generations, the common people relied on planting mulberry trees, raising silkworms, and weaving silk to pay taxes and make a living!"

"But these local officials responsible for assigning quotas, in order to collect enough paper mulberry bark to claim credit and line their own pockets, directly sent their yamen runners to the countryside, forcing the people at knifepoint to cut down all the mulberry trees they depended on for survival! They forcibly replaced them with paper mulberry trees!"

On the big screen, countless elderly farmers knelt in the fields, embracing the cut-down century-old mulberry trees, and wailed loudly.

"The mulberry trees are gone, the silkworms starved to death, and the looms stopped. The most crucial silk weaving industry chain of the Ming Dynasty was brutally smashed to pieces by local officials simply because they wanted to write a few prayers to burn for the gods!"

With a roar, Judy Jun slammed his pointer hard onto the whiteboard.

"This extremely short-sighted and distorted industrial structure directly undermined the foundation of the Ming Dynasty's national defense! By the Chongzhen era, due to the lack of mulberry wood and silk in Jiangnan, the Ming army couldn't even gather enough fine silk to make bowstrings when they arrived at the front lines! For the sake of a dream of immortality, they smashed the livelihoods of the people across the land!"

In a parallel Chongzhen era of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Youjian slumped abruptly onto the dragon throne, his face ashen. He finally understood why the quality of firearms and crossbows in the late Ming Dynasty had deteriorated so drastically. The root cause had been severed as early as the Jiajing era, a century earlier.

"but!"

Zhu Dijun abruptly changed the subject, his tone now laced with a chilling sarcasm that revealed his deep understanding of power struggles.

"In this catastrophe of converting mulberry trees to paper mulberry trees, the Jiajing Emperor was absolutely a bastard who disregarded the people's livelihood for the sake of Taoist cultivation, but he was also a complete scapegoat who took the biggest blame in the world!"

The entire online audience was stunned.

"Use your brains and think about it!"

Judy Jun slammed her fist on the whiteboard.

"If the Jiajing Emperor wanted to write Qingci (a type of Buddhist prayer), how many sheets of paper could he possibly use in a year?! Even if he burned a hundred sheets a day, there's no reason for him to have all the mulberry trees in Jiangnan cut down to plant paper mulberry trees!"

"What is the truth?!"

Zhu Dijun opened his arms and cruelly revealed the answer to the camera.

"It's the Jiangnan civil official group! These hypocrites, spouting benevolence and morality, are using the emperor's pretext of 'requiring paper for Taoist practice' to impose countless additional tasks on the people! The common people cut down their mulberry trees and lost their income, unable to pay taxes. These officials and the gentry and landlords behind them are taking advantage of this, seizing all the people's fertile land at extremely low prices!"

"Jiajing Emperor received a few pieces of toilet paper while deep within the palace, earning him eternal infamy! Meanwhile, the civil official group outside, taking advantage of his imperial edicts, amassed a fortune, annexing land in Jiangnan to an outrageous degree!"

The studio lights instantly switched to a somber, dark red.

Judy pulled up a chair and sat down heavily. He raised his head in the shadows, his eyes like those of Death scrutinizing the souls of the dead in hell.

"With land annexation reaching its extreme, the social structure of the Ming Dynasty collapsed completely in the 25th year of the Jiajing reign. The most terrifying systemic disaster in the history of the Ming Dynasty finally erupted."

On the whiteboard, he wrote the two words he hated most and felt most sorrowful about in his life: "offering".

"The taxes are heavy, an additional three fen of silver has been levied, and the mulberry trees have been cut down, cutting off their livelihood. The remaining self-sufficient farmers can't survive, what will they do?"

Zhu Dijun's voice was extremely hoarse, exuding a suffocating sense of oppression.

"They could only watch helplessly as officials and gentry who had passed the imperial examinations enjoyed tax exemptions under the ancestral system of the Ming Dynasty, not having to pay a single penny of land tax!"

"To escape the deadly whips and demands for payment from the government, these common people, with tears in their eyes, willingly gave away their ancestral land rights to the gentry and powerful! Then, the whole family signed indentures, becoming tenants and servants in the households of these lords!"

"This is called a tribute! I give you land, and you use tax-free privileges to protect me. This is equivalent to the Ming Dynasty's official tax base being legally hollowed out from within!"

On the large screen, the green dots representing the national tax base on the map of the Ming Dynasty went out in patches, turning into black dead spots representing the gentry and powerful.

"What was the result? Of all the land in the world that needed to be taxed, only one or two out of ten remained! The country needed to wage war, requiring ten million taels of silver for military expenses, but the entire burden of those ten million taels had to be placed on the shoulders of those poor people who hadn't yet had a chance to contribute their meager share!"

Zhu Dijun suddenly stood up and swept the water glass off the table with a slap.

"This is like cutting flesh with a dull knife! It's driving the poorest people in the world to their deaths! Until finally, they've eaten every last blade of grass. In disaster-stricken areas like Henan, Shandong, and Hubei, people don't even have the chance to be slaves anymore!"

On the holographic screen, flames and the roars of starving people erupted.

"Refugees are everywhere! In the twenty-fifth year of the Jiajing reign, small-scale peasant uprisings broke out one after another! The Ming court couldn't even raise enough money to suppress the bandits, and local officials were frantically concealing the truth to cover up the situation! The entire Ming Empire was like a powder keg filled with dynamite, with the fuse already lit!"

Zhu Dijun took two steps back and coldly stared at the crumbling Ming Dynasty on the screen.

"Internal tax revenue collapsed, and industries were destroyed by civil officials. Externally, the Mongol cavalry knocked on the gates, and Japanese pirates swept across Jiangnan. Sitting in the Western Garden, Jiajing was penniless, military power had fallen into other hands, and he was surrounded by a group of treacherous officials with gaping mouths waiting to devour his family's wealth."