Hongguang Emperor Zhu Yousong proclaimed himself emperor in Kaiyuan, Liaodong on the first day of July. In just two months, he took control of the nine important towns of the Ming Dynasty and captured the entire Zhili and most of Shandong. The progress was still very fast.
After Zhu Yousong settled in the Forbidden City, Li Xianzhong had the good sense not to go to Cining Palace to renew his affectionate relationship with Zhang Yan.
Cao Huachun was originally the eunuch in charge of the Li Supervisor, and he was also from the Intelligence Department.
Li Xianzhong continued to let Cao Huachun serve as the Chief of Ceremonies and monitor the entire harem for him on the grounds that Cao Huachun took the initiative to surrender and had done a great job in protecting the royal treasury and classics.
Zhu Yousong's confidant Chang Yun was in the position of eunuch Bingbi, the eunuch of the ceremonial department.
In order to monitor Zhu Yousong, Li Xianzhong arranged for Duoduo to be the eunuch in charge of Qianqing Palace!
With the Queen Mother Zhang Yan and Cao Huachun and Duduo jointly controlling the harem, Li Xianzhong was very relieved, otherwise he would not have dared to easily invite troops to go south!
Of course, in his plan, the rights of civil servants were to be suppressed.
But he did not want to interfere through the power of the eunuchs. The eunuchs should just supervise the inner court.
With their own existence, the imperial power has actually been greatly suppressed, and the rights of eunuchs actually come from the imperial power.
In history, the Han, Tang, and Ming dynasties were the three dynasties with the most concentrated and powerful imperial power.
Therefore, the current ceremonial eunuch is nothing more than a seal. Li Xianzhong still wants the eunuch to return to his original work in the inner court.
Now that there is an Intelligence Department, there is no need for Dongchang to exist.
However, Li Xianzhong still retained the Jin Yiwei, otherwise his intention to cut off Zhu Yousong's eyes and ears would be too obvious.
Tian Ergeng was originally the governor of the left and the commander of the Jinyi Guards. Now that Emperor Hongguang is in power, he, a "black registered" who has been ordered to be executed by Chongzhen, can naturally regain his original name.
Jinyiwei continues to be in charge of Tian Ergeng!
However, now Mao Yuanyi is also responsible for educating Li Xianzhong's sons, and he is also the Minister of the Ministry of Justice, so Tian Ergen still holds the position of deputy commander of the Intelligence Department, helping Mao Yuanyi share part of the work.
Therefore, Jinyiwei is more like a subordinate agency of the Intelligence Department.
Now that the war has begun, a large number of troops have surrendered, and military expenditures have suddenly increased.
The number of border troops who surrendered in the four northwest towns was 62,000, the number of troops who surrendered in Xuanda was 30,000, and the number of troops who surrendered in Jizhou Town was still 20,000 after being disbanded.
The number of border troops who surrendered alone was 112,000.
As many as 100,000 soldiers surrendered in the capital, including 80,000 in the three major battalions of the capital.
Then there were 15,000 troops stationed in Monan, 50,000 troops in the Liaodong Army in Shandong, 100,000 troops in the Yulin Camp and Liaodong Army who followed Li Xianzhong into the Pass, and 50,000 troops stationed in the Liaodong area.
A total of 427,000 officers and soldiers are paid by the Ministry of War every month.
The military salary alone exceeds 850,000 taels a month.
If you include the consumption of food and grass, ammunition supplies, and equipment replacement, the monthly military expenditure exceeds 1.5 million taels.
This does not include the soldiers in Korea, Ryukyu, and Taiwan who are self-sufficient areas, as well as the local left-behind troops directly under Shandong.
It was just an army directly under the central government of the Hongguang Imperial Court.
And this only counts the land division and does not include the navy. In order to reduce the burden on the court, Li Xianzhong has put the expenses of the Liaodong Navy on the accounts of the East Ryukyu Company.
The 23 million taels of silver that Li Xianzhong had saved over the past ten years could only last for more than a year at most!
Looking at income, in fact, the maritime trade that supports Li Xianzhong's income has not increased at all.
Places like Zhili and Shandong do not produce export products such as silk, porcelain, and tea at all.
In addition to the fact that the capital can sell more goods and increase some commercial tax revenue, it would be great if the income of other prefectures can maintain their operations!
Tianjin will be planned to become an important commercial port in the north, but no benefits will be seen in the short term.
The Second Prefecture of Denglai can still increase some business taxes because it has been occupied for a relatively long time.
The gold mine located in Zhaoyuan, Shandong Province, can produce 30,000 taels of gold every year, which is actually only 300,000 taels of silver.
The only short-term benefit of taking over Zhili and Shandong is that it will gain a lot more land and save money on buying grain and cotton.
When Fan Wencheng, the Minister of Revenue, reported this pile of accounts to Li Xianzhong, he was also shocked!
Although he knew that collecting Chongzhen's mess was a burden, he never expected that this burden would be so heavy.
So he began to disarm.
The northwest region has not yet been recovered and it is impossible to disarm on a large scale. 50,000 people are retained in the four northwest towns.
The 50,000 people in the three towns of Jizhou, Tongxuan and Datong are actually not many, but now Monan, Liaodong and other places are the territory of the Ming Dynasty. The Great Wall passes here already belong to the mainland, and 20,000 people were eventually laid off.
Then the next step is to abolish the 100,000 people in the capital. With its own Liaodong Army and the Yulin Battalion commanded by Hong Chengchou, there is actually no need for the Beijing Battalion to exist at all.
It is impossible for these 100,000 people to fight.
However, taking into account the feelings of Zhu Chunchen, Zhang Weixian and others, in the end Li Xianzhong symbolically reserved 10,000 people for the three major battalions of the capital, and directly eliminated 90,000 people.
They are all old brothers, and Li Xianzhong also had a direct showdown with them. He will definitely have no money to eat in the future.
However, he has more profitable projects. In the future, as long as they follow him in overseas development, they will be able to earn back gold and silver.
Li Xianzhong: This is not a metaphor. The Japanese country really has mountains of gold and mountains of silver.
Zhu Chunchen must fully support Li Xianzhong. He has 2.4 million taels of silver deposited in Liaodong Bank, and the 5% interest alone is 120,000 taels a year.
Zhang Weixian, on the other hand, does not value money as much as Zhu Chunchen. As long as they don't stand on the wrong team, the money in their hands is enough to preserve the wealth of several generations.
He values the future of his son Zhang Zhiji more.
Zhang Zhiji's performance this time was extremely eye-catching, and he was the first to win the capital.
Li Xianzhong had promoted him to the rank of Zuo Commander-in-Chief of the Zuo Army Commandery and asked Zhang Zhiji to follow him in his southern expedition. This was obviously a plan to cultivate him, and Zhang Weixian was naturally very happy.
With the two of them taking the lead, naturally no one in the capital dared to oppose the policy of "the gentry receiving food from one body".
However, Zhu Yousong's personal expenses are also a big expense.
Although when Chongzhen left the capital, many eunuchs and maids followed him out of the capital.
However, there are still five to six thousand maids and eunuchs staying in Beijing.
Zhu Yousong also had his own imperial concubine before, but they were separated long ago when Luoyang fell.
Zhu Yousong is still alone at the moment, and a large-scale draft is definitely not appropriate now.
Li Xianzhong selected several beautiful women from the Intelligence Department as the concubines of Emperor Hongguang.
Although there is no gold or silver in Chongzhen's internal funds, there is still a lot of jewelry, which now belongs to Zhu Yousong.
He allocated another five hundred thousand taels of silver into his internal funds.
Fortunately, Chongzhen also left him a lot of property, including 200,000 hectares (20 million acres) of farmland near Zhili alone.
These farms are all managed by eunuchs, and the rents charged by these eunuchs are very high.
A considerable part of it all fell into his own pocket.
So nowadays, in addition to the eunuchs appointed by the emperor, the management of the imperial village is also supervised by officials sent by the Ministry of Household Affairs.
In order to silence the gentry, Zhu Yousong announced that Huangzhuang would also pay taxes, so that in the true sense, all land would be taxed.
In the Hongguang court, in addition to the tax exemption for a certain period of time for the fields where soldiers died, the farms under the names of Emperor Zhu Yousong and Liaodong County Prince Li Xianzhong also needed to pay taxes.
Moreover, all gentry taxes could not be passed on to the tenants, but had to be borne by both parties in proportion.
Zhili actually did not lack fertile land, but most of the land was controlled by the emperor and his nobles.
Because the noble gentry had not paid taxes and grains for a long time, the imperial court was unable to be self-sufficient in revenue.
Hongguang Emperor Zhu Yousong issued an imperial edict that all people under the rule of the Hongguang court would abolish the poll tax and implement "dividing the land into acres" and "the gentry paying the grain as one body".
And cancel all the "Liao rates", "Lian rates" and other exorbitant taxes levied since Wanli!
And levy commercial taxes in accordance with Liaodong's rules.
He soon won the support of the people!
Even people without land can go to Zhu Yousong's imperial village to become tenants.
And the imperial court stipulated that the maximum rent for all landowners to rent out land was 50%!
Violators will have their land confiscated by the court!
Officials from the Ministry of Revenue have calculated that as a result, the actual burden on the people will be only half of that of the Chongzhen Dynasty, but the tax revenue of Zhili will be at least five times that of before.
Even more if you include business taxes.
Not only can the entire Zhili Province be self-sufficient, but after paying taxes to the central government, each government can also have a considerable fiscal surplus to develop the local economy and engage in construction, increasing the income of local officials.
A large number of candidates who came from the imperial examination in Liaodong were sent to Zhili to serve as county magistrates. They were accompanied by retired veterans from Liaodong, who were used to deal with subordinate officials.
If this group of people didn't know how to look, they would be beheading and ransacking their homes.
They implemented Li Xianzhong's temporary decree and blocked the new law. The mastermind was directly beheaded, and the followers and their immediate family members were exiled to Nurgan Dusi!
For these subordinates, it is impossible for you to expect them to change their minds. You can only use the simplest and crudest way!
Whether they support it sincerely or agree against their will, these policies must be implemented unconditionally!
Anyway, these were orders from Hongguang Emperor Zhu Yousong, and Li Xianzhong would not take the blame.
Although they are old policies of Liaodong, Li Xianzhong still named these policies "Hongguang New Deal"!
After almost 1-2 years, Zhili will be able to fully implement Liaodong's policy.
There is no way that any policy will be effective in the short term. If you want to make money in the short term, the most direct way is to rob.
This is why Li Xianzhong kept Zheng Zhilong and Wang Xifan.
A pirate, a White Lotus Sect, if it is not convenient for you to do it yourself, let them do it.
At present, Zheng Zhilong is still ostensibly the governor of Denglai who was personally conferred by Emperor Chongzhen, and controls the three prefectures of Dengzhou, Laizhou and Qingzhou.
And Wang Xifan even used the banner of the White Lotus Sect to cause serious harm to the four prefectures of Zhending, Hejian, Shunde and Baoding in the south of Zhili.
Not only did he kill a large number of gentry, he also beheaded King Heng in Baoding, which could be regarded as robbing Li Xianzhong of millions of taels of silver.
Li Xianzhong brought 50,000 troops south this time, and together with Hong Chengchou's 30,000 Yulin camp in Baoding, the total number was 80,000.
Soon Hong Chengchou began to introduce the current situation.
In addition to the three prefectures of Dengzhou, Laizhou and Qingzhou occupied by Zheng Zhilong, Shandong also had Jinan Prefecture, Dongchang Prefecture and Yanzhou Prefecture.
At present, Hong Chengchou has regained Shufu in the south of Zhili and Dongchang Prefecture from the White Lotus Sect in one fell swoop.
Wang Xifan took the opportunity to return to Yanzhou, the birthplace of the White Lotus Sect.
The current focus of the competition between the two sides is Jinan Prefecture.
Zuo Liangyu's 20,000 Yulin battalion defended Jinan. Mao Wenlong's troops had been attacking the city for more than ten days without breaking through.
Zuo Liangyu was a warlord who only knew how to fight first-hand wars in history. Is this not his style at all?
Li Xianzhong said: "Governor Hong, you can be considered Zuo Liangyu's old boss. He is now trapped in an isolated city in Jinan. Didn't you persuade him to surrender?"
Hong Chengchou said: "I am ashamed, I did send a letter of persuasion to surrender to Zuo Liangyu, but Zuo Liangyu flatly refused!"
This is extremely abnormal and there must be something wrong with it!
However, the Intelligence Department has not sent any useful information for the time being.
Since Zuo Liangyu is seeking death, Li Xianzhong will naturally not tolerate him and just attack Jinan directly.
He then asked Hong Chengchou: "Li Zicheng's general Liu Zongmin is besieging Kaifeng. How is the situation now?"
Hong Chengchou said: "A few days ago, Cao Wenzhao led an army of 20,000 to Kaifeng and fought a battle with Liu Zongmin outside the city. Shun's army was defeated. Now that the siege of Kaifeng has been lifted, Liu Zongmin's troops retreated to Zhongmu County to the west of Kaifeng. Station!"
Li Xianzhong said: "Does that mean that the passage from Chongzhen to the south of Shanxi has been opened?"
Hong Chengchou nodded and said, "That's true!"
It seems that he was delayed in handling matters in the capital, but Chongzhen actually reopened the situation.
But who would have thought that Li Zicheng's 300,000-strong army would actually defeat Taiyuan?
Although Li Xianzhong was unwilling to kill Chongzhen by himself, he could not watch him return to Jiangnan so comfortably.
Li Xianzhong said: "Zu Dashou's 30,000 troops have gone south, but he may not be able to catch up with Chongzhen. Governor Hong Qian led the army to the west to capture Wei Hui Mansion. He must cut off Chongzhen's southward passage and must not let him cross. Yellow River."
Hong Chengchou clasped his fists and said, "I accept your orders!"
Li Xianzhong was relieved when Hong Chengchou was doing things.
At this time, he naturally wanted to go to Jinan to meet Zuo Liangyu!
Before the Ming Dynasty, Jinan's city walls were earthen walls.
In the fourth year of Hongwu (AD 1371), the imperial court carried out a large-scale renovation of Jinan City, turning the original earthen city wall into a brick city wall and strengthening and thickening it. This was also the first time that Jinan City was renovated during the Ming Dynasty.
Since the fourth year of Chenghua reign in the Ming Dynasty, the city had been renovated five times.
Jinan City has a circumference of 12 miles and 48 feet (7160 meters) and a height of 3 feet and 2 feet (nearly 11 meters).
There are 11 towers, 13 enemy towers, 55 flag towers and 3350 crenellations on the city.
The east, west and south gates each have a moon city, an inner and outer two-story gate, and a two-story tower above the gate. Each of the four gates has two official halls and four gun towers. The east, west and south gates of the city all have important gates, and the north gate is the water gate.
There are rectangular turrets built at the corners of the city wall, one at each corner. Only the southeast corner has nine peaks, commonly known as the Triangle Tower (also known as the Nine Girls Tower).
Jinan has always been an important line of defense to prevent the Northern Army from moving south. When Zhu Di was in trouble, he was defeated at the gate of Jinan City. In the end, he could only bypass Jinan City and attack Nanjing!
Seeing Li Xianzhong personally leading the troops, Mao Wenlong hurriedly came to apologize.
Mao Wenlong knelt down and said: "The general is so incompetent that he bothered the prince to lead the troops in person. Please forgive me!"
Li Xianzhong said: "General Mao, you have an 18-pound Hongyi cannon and a mortar, but you still can't take Jinan Prefecture?"
At this time, Mao Wenlong's expression was a little embarrassed. He said: "There are also many 18-pound artillery in Jinan City. Zuo Liangyu asked people to use sacks filled with soil as a cover, which weakened the lethality of our shells."
"But please be careful, Your Majesty, the general will definitely attack Jinan Mansion today!"
Li Xianzhong said: "General Mao, please get up and answer the question!"
To be honest, he was more concerned about Zuo Liangyu's sudden change of temperament than how Zuo Liangyu learned to use "sandbags", and why he refused to surrender to death?
He continued to ask: "Besides Zuo Liangyu, who else is there in Jinan Chengli?"
Mao Wenlong said: "In addition to Zuo Liangyu, Jinan City also has Hou Xun, the former right minister of the Ministry of War!"
It was actually Hou Xun. No wonder Zuo Liangyu was unwilling to surrender.
Hou Xun was very kind to Zuo Liangyu, and Zuo Liangyu was originally just Hou Xun's handyman in front of the tent.
One year hundreds of civil and military officials paid homage to the imperial mausoleum.
After the banquet, Zuo Liangyu got very drunk and lost four gold wine glasses.
Zuo Liangyu asked Hou Xun to punish him, but Hou Xun not only refused to punish him, but also promoted him to be a general.
Hou Xun then recommended Zuo Liangyu to Sun Chengzong, which gave Zuo Liangyu his current status.
However, Hou Xun is a die-hard Donglin Party member, and was even considered by Wei Zhongxian to be the leader of the Donglin Party!
He definitely doesn't have a good impression of himself. No wonder Zuo Liangyu didn't even give Hong Chengchou face!
Although he knew that Hou Xun would probably not surrender, he still had to persuade him to surrender out of habit.
Soon Li Xianzhong's envoy came to Jinan City. The envoy said: "Li Xianzhong, the king of Liaodong County, issued an edict to go south to fight against the rebellion. Now all the important towns in the Ming Dynasty have been loyal to His Majesty Hongguang. All Zhili, Shanxi, and Most of Shandong has also declared its allegiance!"
"It doesn't make much sense for you to be trapped in the isolated city of Jinan!"
"Your Majesty still hopes that Shilang Hou and General Zuo will stop fighting in the same room and making unnecessary resistance, otherwise only the people of the city will suffer!"
Flags outside the city blocked out the sun, and Liaodong's elite soldiers formed dense formations in the city!
To be honest, Zuo Liangyu felt a little guilty. He had always fought hard against Mao Wenlong before.
Now that he has to face the genuine Liaodong Army led by Li Xianzhong, he has no confidence!
He said: "Commander, the Liaodong Army under the city is probably no less than 50,000. Li Xianzhong is invincible. There is no point in holding on to Jinan. Marshal Yuan's main force heading north has been wiped out by the Liaodong Army, and the capital has been lost. We might as well surrender. Bar?"
Hou Xun said: "Why, are you afraid of Li Xianzhong?"
Zuo Liangyu said: "Li Xianzhong, the king of Liaodong County, has never been defeated since his debut. The Liaodong cavalry under his command is even more powerful in the world. The general is still somewhat self-aware and does not dare to compete with him!"
Hou Xun ignored Zuo Liangyu and cursed angrily at the envoy in the city: "Li Xianzhong separatized Liaodong and had ulterior motives. Now he used Wanli Wanli's edict to bring trouble to the Ming Dynasty. He will be shamed by the world. Although Hou is not a man, Unparalleled heroes, I am willing to learn from Tie Xuan and Sheng Yong of the previous dynasty and fight to the death for Jinan for the Ming Dynasty!"
"The Li family in Liaodong is a general. Li Xianzhong doesn't need to use his words. If you have the guts, just come over!"
"Hou needs to see if the Liaodong Cavalry is really invincible!"
Zuo Liangyu on the side was trembling with fear. Hou Xun had offended Li Xianzhong to death!
Now they are dead!
After Hou Xun said this, he was about to be fired upon!
When the messenger brought back Hou Xun's words.
Li Xianzhong said: "If you are stubborn, send an order to attack the city!"
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