After about two months of fighting, the Xianbei, Wuhuan, and Xiongnu forces in Bingzhou were defeated by the Han army.
Basically, they were either dead or captured, or some of the well-informed ones escaped, but no matter what, Bingzhou had basically returned to the jurisdiction of the Han Empire.
The territory that they had slowly eroded and occupied over more than a hundred years was fully returned to the control of the Han army. Guan Yu and Qianzhao even visited the Great Wall that had been in disrepair and worshiped ancient people on the edge of the Great Wall. Warrior, express your feelings.
Liu Bei no longer worried about the war and left the clean-up work to the general's office. He began to communicate with Man Chong and discuss with him the next plan to restore the governance of the state.
War is a means, and domination is the end.
Although Bingzhou was recovered, the long-term absence of the Han Empire government also led to the emergence of large and small separatist forces within Bingzhou. Each of them has its own armed forces, its own production lines and production capabilities for weapons, food and other materials. .
They are not good people.
this is a problem.
The more pressing issues are the disposal of prisoners of war, the repair of dilapidated city walls, roads, bridges and other infrastructure, as well as the reclamation of abandoned land.
So Liu Bei and Man Chong discussed a charter together.
First of all, those captured Xianbei, Wuhuan, Xiongnu and other people were dealt with according to the long-standing practice.
Women of childbearing age will be included in the Bingzhou household registration system to increase the population.
Craftsmen and shepherds with special skills were also selected and kept for their own use. They worked as prostitutes for three years to polish their wild nature, and then were incorporated into the household registration and became Han Chinese.
The rest of the people without any skills were made into official slaves, and they resumed their subjective initiative in the construction of Bingzhou.
In the past few years of Bingzhou's waste management, the infrastructure, city walls, roads, bridges, etc. in various places have been completely damaged. If it is to be completely restored to normal, it will take at least half a year and the investment of a lot of resources. This also requires a lot of manpower to execute.
There are not many Han people in Bingzhou, and even fewer can engage in agricultural production. Therefore, the limited agricultural population must be used to restore agricultural production. Those captured guys are the best source of labor force.
If their number is not enough, Liu Bei plans to transport a batch from Youzhou to Bingzhou to help.
You are not separated from each other!
Resuming agricultural production while working at the same time places high demands on the administrative capabilities of the Bingzhou government, and even higher demands on Manchong, the governor of the state who became a monk halfway.
Man Chong needs to burst into tears.
Then there is the issue of Bingzhou Han people.
In the past, when the imperial court was absent, the Han people in the occupied areas of Bingzhou either survived under the protection of powerful clans like Liangzhou, or they became wandering armed groups. There were few obedient people and yeoman farmers in the conventional sense. .
The managed population basically only exists in part of Taiyuan County, Shangdang County and Xihe County. In order to survive, people in other areas have already developed the local economy in a manor-like and fragmented state. They want to return to the past. It is very difficult to compile the production status of households and people.
The first to bear the brunt were the local powerful families. They played a big role in the Han army's attack on Bingzhou. However, after the war, their existence became an obstacle to the imperial government's governance of the place.
At the same time, the existence of Zhang Yan and Yu Fuluo is also troublesome, especially Zhang Yan. There is still no explanation for the large population in the mountain.
After a long period of chaos, Bingzhou lacks household registration, but has a large population that cannot be used. In this way, how should the post-war Bingzhou economy develop?
When Liu Bei was discussing the matter with Man Chong, Man Chong mentioned something to Liu Bei. He said that if he wanted to gain population, in addition to war and plunder, one way to get local wealthy families to release their slaves was.
Manchu Chong established Liu Bei and promulgated a court decree to legally stipulate the total number of slaves that powerful families could have in the Bingzhou area, thereby limiting their power, and through such actions, they could also obtain enough population for the development of Bingzhou.
Man Chong's suggestion made Liu Bei pay attention to a fact that has been ignored by many people for a long time.
Among the social classes of the Eastern Han Dynasty, there was a social group that was even more humble than the common people - slaves.
The Eastern Han Empire was not without slaves. Slaves still existed until the Manchu Qing Dynasty. It was just a question of more or less, and various names.
A considerable part of the large population that Liu Bei reorganized into households in Liangzhou was originally a slave. Among the tenants that were actively and passively handed over by the major families, a considerable part were actually slaves.
In the Han Empire, there were five main sources of slaves - prisoners of war, criminals, people sold for debt, plunder, and children of slaves.
Its core feature is that there is no personal freedom. They are generally regarded as property rather than people and can be bought and sold at will.
Markets for buying slaves at will existed widely in many big cities in the Eastern Han Empire.
There, people and livestock were locked in cages and sold together. As long as the price was right, you could buy a slave and take it home to serve you, enjoying all his efforts openly.
Breaking away from the grand slave market, slaves still exist in other places, but they are not called slaves. Instead, they are called slaves, maids, children, or ministers according to their different identities. ,concubine.
Although these slaves with different names have different identities and living situations, and some can even live a very prosperous life, there is only one thing in common - they can all be bought and sold as property.
In terms of legal status, their status is extremely humble, even inferior to common people. If they want to change their status to common people, they even need to meet some special conditions.
For example, it is recorded in the Han Dynasty that official slaves and maidservants over fifty are exempted from becoming common people. This means that official slaves controlled by the government can be exempted from crimes and become common people when they reach the age of fifty.
But if you think about it carefully, in that era, how rare was it for a slave to live to the age of fifty in extremely harsh living conditions?
Even if you really live to the age of fifty, you will still be old, sick, and thin, and you will have no property or even family. At this time, you will be free and become a commoner. The government does not want to keep a mouth in vain. Instead of To say it is "benevolent government" is better to say it is murder.
Another possibility is that after the master dies without a legal heir and no one inherits the family property, the slave can legally become a commoner.
All in all, once you become a slave and want to regain your status as a free citizen, you can only try your luck. Except for rebellion, individuals have no other possibility to change their destiny.
But not every slave can rebel, because slaves are not even qualified to make friends. They cannot drink alcohol or gather at will. If they do not listen to the master's reprimands, they will be whipped.
This situation widely existed among the social classes of the entire Han Empire, and their number was also very large.
During the reign of Emperor Jing of the Han Dynasty, there were 30,000 official slaves raising horses in the northwest.
During the reign of Emperor Yuan of the Han Dynasty, official Gong Yu once wrote a letter stating that among the slaves controlled by the central government, there were more than 100,000 idle slaves with nothing to do, and hoped that they would be exempted from being treated as common people.
During Wang Mang's reign, he even demoted more than 100,000 people who made money privately into slaves.
The number of official slaves controlled by the central court in the entire Western Han Dynasty was hundreds of thousands.
In addition to the large number of official slaves, the existence of private slaves was also extremely common, especially in the families of powerful officials. Social production was affected because of too many private slaves. Emperor Ai of the Han Dynasty even issued an order stipulating the number of private slaves that officials could have.
For example, there were 200 slaves and maidservants of princes and kings, 100 princes and princesses, and 30 lords and officials in Guannei. According to these regulations, the number of private slaves that the 120,000 princes and officials in the Western Han Dynasty could legally own was as high as 3.6 million.
These are public and private slaves that have ties to the government. The number of slaves owned by powerful local families that have nothing to do with the government far exceeds this scale, and the court cannot count them.
Even ordinary common people who were slightly richer could own slaves.
A person who makes a living by digging wells can buy an old slave to serve him. A small businessman with two properties has three slaves to serve him. A small landowner with more than thirty acres of land has seven slaves.
This situation showed no signs of improvement in the Eastern Han Dynasty. On the contrary, the number of slaves in the Eastern Han Empire showed an increasing trend year by year as the dynasty came to an end.
Judging from the situation around Liu Bei, the Liu clan in Zhuo County was only a small local clan before Liu Bei became famous. The entire clan had a few hundred people and thirty or fifty households.
Among them, 40% of the slightly wealthier families had slaves serving them, and the number of slaves ranged from five to ten.
After he became successful, among the major families in Zhuo County, including the Lu family, none of them had slaves.
Even Ji Jian was the slave of a street gang boss at the beginning. Liu Bei was not even a gang boss at that time. Later, after Ji Jian's gang was wiped out by Liu Bei's gang, Ji Jian became a prisoner. He admired Liu Bei's force and asked for help. Liu Bei's slave.
At that time, Liu Bei admired Ji Jian's martial arts and refused to let him be a slave. He made him his younger brother without signing a contract with him. Later, he went through the back door of the government and helped him restore his household registration as a free citizen. That's why Ji Jian was devoted to Liu Bei and was willing to work for him. He died.
Every non-official scholar Liu Bei came into contact with after coming to Luoyang, and asked about the situation in their homes, they all said that they were served by slaves. Even in his own home, there were ten reliable slaves arranged by his father-in-law Han Rong. Serve.
According to the provisions of current laws, the current number of officials, clerks, princes, and the overall population, Man Chong estimated that the total number of slaves of all types in the Eastern Han Empire was eight million.
However, Man Chong believed that this number was still a conservative estimate, and there were still many things that could not be counted. He estimated that the entire slave population probably accounted for 15% of the total population of the Han Empire.
(End of chapter)
