In the fourth year of Zhengde, when Zhu Houzhao had not traveled through time, another person discovered that a large number of fields in military camps had been occupied. The people who occupied the land often used private sergeants to cultivate more than a thousand hectares of land, but they "did not lose any grains."
The so-called grain is the 'agricultural tax' that military households need to pay. Over the years, there are still some officials who point out the situation of not losing grains, but most of them just pay lip service.
For the first time, the person who seriously wanted to operate on these people was actually Liu Jin.
He sent a censor named Zhou Dong to Ningxia. After arriving, he attacked the Ningxia capital commander.
However, Liu Jin and the people he sent were not "professional" in themselves. Liu Jin himself thought that he had the power and could not cause any trouble. However, after Zhou Dong arrived in Ningxia, he ate, drank, and took things as he pleased, and even changed the weights and measures (will (one hectare of one hundred acres was changed to one hectare of fifty acres), and by checking the land in this way, no one from the capital commander to the hundreds of households and general banners below occupied land.
To put it bluntly, this guy is not here to do things, but to make a fortune.
So in the end it was of course a vigorous start and a complete failure.
Mao Zedong said that when doing anything, you must first distinguish who your enemy is and who your friend is.
The matter of military settlements involves both the frontier and the inland garrison. The people who occupy the land are firstly the officers themselves, secondly the eunuchs, thirdly the clans, and fourthly local tyrants who are dependent on power.
The Ming Dynasty had a rule of sending eunuchs to guard the army and to supervise the army. These people could be treated as holy lotuses in various guards?
And Liu Jin is a eunuch himself, so if he does this, he will easily dig his own grave.
But having said that, Liu Jin's investigation and the emperor's investigation are two different things. Liu Jin's power is not stable after all. If someone objects and names them as an 'eunuch' and kills them as a 'Qingjun side', the emperor will make a big fuss. , once you give up on him, he will die.
It is different when the emperor comes to investigate. Although the opponents can still use the banner of Qingjun, the emperor will not give up on himself. Well... there was an emperor in the Song Dynasty who gave up on his own, but Zhu Houzhao would not give up.
In fact, in the last years of every dynasty, they faced land annexation, and the harm was basically similar: the people were in dire straits, the army was short of pay, in arrears, and lacked combat power.
The Ming Dynasty implemented a garrison system. After the fields of military villages were annexed, the lack of combat power of the garrison soldiers became more serious. During the reign of Emperor Yingzong of the Ming Dynasty, there were even records of a terrifying number of 1.2 million people fleeing military households.
Therefore, reforms are needed to redistribute wealth and revitalize military power.
But if we really want to promote this reform, there will be a voice that "offends too many people and is afraid of unrest." It was as if these people were divine soldiers descended from heaven, with three heads and six arms, and no one could move or touch them.
This is very strange - are these guard soldiers strong?
Or is it that when it comes to fighting foreign enemies, it's a mess, and when it's the turn to rebel, it instantly turns into a divine weapon? Isn't there a contradiction in this?
It's really confusing.
In fact, it is difficult to judge how strong this group of counterattack forces is. Even Zhu Houzhao, a later generation, cannot understand it. After all, Liu Jin's inspection of the military settlements was very effective.
If the rebellion of the feudal lord is used as a symbol, then there is actually nothing to fear.
Because that rebellion was a joke, it was wiped out in ten days, even worse than King Ning.
In short, if you want to ask for directions, first send Zhang Cong to the northwest in the name of cleaning up the racecourses and military camps. Let's see how powerful the so-called counterattack is.
In fact, there is no need to panic.
In that place, there were 30,000 soldiers of Zhou Shangwen who were recruited. Strictly speaking, they were not soldiers of the garrison. Their military supplies and food were provided by the imperial court.
Speaking of which, no matter what the military system in the past dynasties was, it would all be converted to recruiting soldiers in the middle and late stages. That is, all the original soldiers and horses were no longer useful. When a war happened, they had to spend money to train new troops. In the Ming Dynasty, in fact, the recruitment system had already appeared since Tumubao.
Another group is the Hetao soldiers led by Wang Shouren. They have eight guards in total, four of which are cavalry and four are infantry. These people can be regarded as guardsmen, but they are all new to Hetao, and their fields have just been divided. Basically, there are no obvious and serious land invasions.
Although the number of these 70,000 troops lags far behind the garrison troops in Gansu and Ningxia, their combat power is far ahead.
One of the commanders is newly-feng Pinglupp, and most of the middle-level officers are from military academies. They are a 'rising new force'. With the current young emperor, there is no shortage of glory and wealth. If anyone can To instigate rebellion against them, one would have to be a sage in a cult, and one would have to make everyone abandon their wives and children to believe in this cult.
Not to mention the other one, Wang Shouren.
One is in the west and the other is in the north, and they control the interior in a pincer shape.
If someone really rebels, how can we defeat these 70,000 people? We have to pray hard.
If Zhang Cong's reasons were passionate and emotional, then Zhu Houzhao's preparations were confident and rational.
Based on this, there was a scene where the emperor and the ministers were seriously planning this matter.
The same four years of Zhengde, the same thing.
Different time and space, but different situations.
The person who wants to do this now is not the official, but the emperor. The power he possesses is not just a censor and the illusory power of the emperor. This time, he has real physical power.
Forbidden City, Qianqing Palace.
On the afternoon of June 21, the emperor discussed this issue with his ministers for the first time.
And he came prepared. After everyone arrived, he first gave them some intuitive concepts of numbers.
First of all, the specific number of military villages was not known during the Zhengde period, but it was known during the Hongwu period - about 89 million acres.
Because the geographical environment and soil conditions are different, the yield per mu varies from place to place. Normally, one mu of field can yield three to four shi of grain, which is about 400 to 600 kilograms. But the average yield per mu is much lower, about 1.5 shi.
Zhu Yuanzhang initially set the tax at two dou and four liters per mu, but he was the only one who could achieve this tax rate. By the Yongle period, he had already collected less than enough. Later, Zhu Di halved the tax and set it at one dou and two liters, which is 0.12 shi.
Based on 89 million acres, theoretically 130 million shi of grain should be produced, of which 10.68 million shi of grain should be taxed. Of course, this is theoretical. In reality, farming is extremely susceptible to weather conditions, and there is no guarantee that yields will decrease if there is drought or waterlogging.
Similarly, the grains in the field will also fluctuate up and down, but even if the number 10.68 million is multiplied by a loss of 0.8, there should still be 8.5 million shi of grain.
But in reality?
In the first year of Yongle, the number of grains in the field was 23 million shi. Due to the tax reduction, by the eighth year of Yongle, the number of grains in the country was 10.36 million shi. This is barely normal, after all, you get a tax cut.
But then it gets crazy.
In the 21st year of Yongle, the number of grains in the field was reduced by half again, to 5.17 million shi.
There was a brief rise in the first year of Hongxi, reaching 6.13 million shi.
It's a pity that it didn't last long. In the early years of Xuande, the price dropped to 4.6 million shi.
By the ninth year of Xuande, the number of grains cultivated in the country was: 2,307,807 shi.
These numbers are all clearly recorded in the "Records of the Ming Dynasty".
That was still the heyday of Xuande.
In the current Hongzhi and Zhengde years, the number of acres of farmland nationwide must have dropped sharply from the original 89 million acres. The exact number will not be known until an inventory is carried out. However, the number of grains farmed in each household has this number. In the third year of Zhengde, the number was 1.46 million shi. .
Almost negligible.
Therefore, there are records of military settlements in the Ming Dynasty completely collapsing in the middle and later stages.
For this series of things, Zhu Houzhao had asked the attendant's office to carefully check the records of each dynasty and then sort them out.
Numbers speak for themselves. Looking at these numbers, don’t you still understand what to do?
He did not forget to remind, "The numbers here are all from actual records, and none of them are fake."
The actual records of each dynasty are very authoritative records, and they were all compiled by the civil servants themselves. To overturn this, it would not be too much for Zhu Houzhao to dig up the ancestral graves of those who compiled the actual records.
The emperor's tricks are the same as before.
When promoting such major changes, he would never act recklessly. Instead, he would tie everyone onto his chariot, that is, force them to express their stance.
This is so that in case something goes wrong and there is a rebel force, the entire court can be unified in dealing with the outside world, so as not to start splitting from the cabinet and the six ministries.
This is a methodology learned in the new era, uniting all forces that can be united.
If any official expresses inconsistent opinions, in this moral environment, he will not only lose his official position, but also his reputation, and will lose all his achievements in his life. This is a decision that most people would not make.
What's better than before is that Zhu Houzhao doesn't have to use various means. Most of the court now supports him, and seeing these numbers supports him even more.
The cabinets of Yang Yiqing, Wang Hao and Wang Bing, Wang Hua from the Ministry of Rites, Liang Chu from the Ministry of Personnel, Han Wen from the Ministry of Household Affairs, Zhao Shen from the Ministry of Punishment, He Jian from the Ministry of Works, Qi Chengsui from the Ministry of War...
The court officials just sighed,
Wang Hao, who returned to the capital for the first time, said sadly: "At that time, Ma Wensheng, the Duke of Tutu, once said that I don't know when it started, but the farmland administration was abolished, and there are no records left. In the land of military garrison, from ten to fifty-six years ago, the farmland has become in name only. In fact, it has become a reality. Look, where it’s from ten to five or six, it should be from ten to eight or nine.”
Yang had been waiting for today since early in the morning, "Your Majesty, from this point of view, if we want to revive the Ming Dynasty, we must eliminate the disadvantages of the military garrison. Otherwise, the world's defenses will be rotten. If something happens, they will be vulnerable. How can it be called a prosperous age?"
"Wei Chen seconded the proposal." Wang Bing said with a bit of fierceness, "Since ancient times, there has been no fragile prosperity!"
Zhu Houzhao clenched his fists, thinking about the situation of Liu Jian, Li Dongyang, and Xie Qian, and today, his efforts have finally been in vain, "I often think, if these seeds from the court are missing, they can fall on the heads of the people. , everyone in the world is self-sufficient, which is not too bad. But the reality is that refugees are everywhere and hungry people are everywhere. The court is poor and the people are rich. This is a favor to the world. But if the court is poor and the people are poor, I will never tolerate it. !”
Yang Yiqing suggested: "Your Majesty, this matter is of great importance, and it must be carefully planned and deployed. In order to minimize the impact and minimize the loss."
"Um!"
Zhu Houzhao's eyes indicated that the commander of the Jinyi Guards, Mao Yuwen, spoke, "It is rumored that He Jinyi, the commander of the Ningxia garrison, has bribed people in a mess, and seems to have occupied 2,500 hectares of farmland! The ministers thought that the imperial court should order the important ministers to We will clearly understand his crime and order him to return the land within a time limit to serve as a warning to others."
He Jinyi, this is the first unlucky person. To put it bluntly, Zhu Houzhao has been waiting for the day when the time is right for ten years.
"Draw up the decree!"
