In the Ming Dynasty, the canal army was initially responsible for water transportation. Since Hongwu, the Cao Army has been arranged to farm around the canal and be responsible for tasks such as transporting grain and maintaining the canal. The person in charge is the General Water Transport Corps.
During the Hongwu period, the capital was in Nanjing, and the water transport task was very easy. In order to attack Mongolia, water transport to the north and Liaodong was mainly transported by sea during the Hongwu period. At its peak, 700,000 shi a year were all transported by sea.
After Yongle moved its capital to Beijing, it initially focused on maritime, land and river transport. The first water transport commander was Pingjiang Bo Chen Xuan. At that time, he was in charge of the canal, land transshipment and sea transport. In its heyday, sea transport was under his control and control. Down, it also exceeds 700,000 stone.
Chen Xuan is a pioneering figure in the history of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. In his hands, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal truly became the main artery of the Ming and Qing dynasties.
This person is sincere and sincere and must do everything personally. He first dredged the Huitong River, and then creatively used the large and small rivers and mountains in the north to build many reservoirs to store water and hundreds of sluices to ensure that the canal had water available during the dry season. In his hands, the Grand Canal was finally connected for three thousand miles.
The canal management system, water storage methods, shallow boat manufacturing, storage and distribution and other canal maintenance and operation methods established by Chen Xuan were used until the end of the Qing Dynasty.
When he established the system, he changed the Cao Army into two parts. One part maintained the security of the canal and protected the safety of the canal, which was still called the Cao Army; the other part was changed to transport grain and was called Yuding.
By the Wanli period, the number of paid Cajun troops had not changed much, and had been around 40,000. However, due to the multiplication of Yunding on both sides of the canal, the number of Cajun soldiers had grown from 80,000 to more than 300,000.
In the Ming Dynasty, there were about 5,000 canals on the canal. There are ten to twelve porters in a boat, and twenty boats form a gang. They supervise each other and secure guarantees for settlement. They are called cao gangs. There are 250 cao gangs in the entire canal. ——The Caogang as mentioned in later generations is a semi-underground underworld gang. Although it is also composed of Caoding, it was established during the Yongzheng period.
These Caoding are responsible for transportation tasks. Including the preparations, the full number does not exceed 80,000 people. So what do the remaining two hundred thousand caoding do? The land was farmed for Cajun officers and government officials at all levels - the farmland that once belonged to the imperial court or the polder fields that were not recognized by the imperial court were basically in a semi-serf state and miserable.
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Pan Jixun reported to the court that too much manpower was needed to control the river. Various localities have imposed labor levies, which has delayed farm work and made the people suffer. Now that the imperial court intends to use the sea canal, the unused canal troops and transportation Ding Pan Jixun have to be rounded up - Your Majesty, these people may not be enough. You must strictly require all provinces and localities to levy and send out what should be collected!
When the officials who opposed shipping saw this guy jumping out, they immediately focused their fire on him. Are you bragging? It costs 500,000 to repair a river?
Pan Jixun couldn't resist. With the permission of the court, he put together the river control tasks that had been divided and issued. The master plan was published in the newspaper. When everyone looked at it, they all took a chill - well, this idea makes people shudder. It's not quite enough.
Immediately, the local official who received the task of regulating the river became red-eyed. This was a good starting point for both sides. If we want to achieve both excellence, the best way is not to requisition local labor, but to use only migrant workers. Isn’t this account clear?
A person with double excellence will get an iron rice bowl for his children. It turns out that the grace of a descendant of Yin can't even be thought of if he can't reach the third rank or above!
So motivated people wrote to Pan Jixun one after another: Associate Minister Pan Shilang, have you forgotten? My fifth uncle is the same age as you. Don't be too arrogant. Give me 30,000 to 20,000 yuan. I'll mobilize the squires here to take care of the food, and I'll give them fifty rich men's wages a day!
Here in the capital, you come and go, and the competition is in full swing. "Huang Ming Nanjing Daily" was not idle, and followed up in real time, publishing and commenting on both sides' arguments in the newspaper. Although it was delayed by five days compared with the news from the capital, the citizens of Jiangnan were still enthusiastic. I found this newspaper to be really good. After reading and listening to it, I could discuss national affairs.
As for the news in the newspaper that if the imperial court used the sea canal, it would save millions of dan of grain. People in Jiangnan stretched their necks and waited for the imperial court to reduce their burden.
The seemingly fair stance of Nanjing Daily gradually tilted the odds of victory between the two sides. And Wang Shizhen, who opened a column in the newspaper, wrote powerful articles like daggers and spears, and finally defeated the opposition's public opinion among the people.
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At the end of October of the third year of Wanli, Zhang Juzheng presided over the imperial meeting. After some discussion and approval by the emperor, the imperial court finally issued the sea-cao policy, and this policy wiped out the last resistance:
The imperial court agreed to divide the annual water transportation task into two halves. Half natural color, half colored.
Beginning in the fourth year of Wanli, the original color of two million stones was divided into twenty parts, each of which was 100,000 stones, and was contracted to maritime merchants who were interested in bidding; the other two million stones were all reduced in color - on the one hand, it was a whip for the future. On the other hand, it promotes currency circulation.
If a maritime merchant wants to do this business, he must pay a thousand taels of silver insurance every year to prevent encounters with dragons, the so-called tornadoes. The imperial court did not collect the insurance money, and the maritime merchants set up an insurance committee independently to determine the losses and pay them out on their own, but they were subject to supervision by the Ministry of Revenue.
After the maritime merchant transports the grain, he will bear the same amount as he gets off the ship, and the losses will be borne by himself. If you encounter a storm and the insurance money is not enough to pay the compensation, you have to pay it yourself. If you can't pay the compensation, you will go bankrupt and liquidate, and at the same time, you will lose the qualifications of the carrier.
The imperial court did three things. First, the local government collected the grain and transported it to the dock; second, the imperial court set up a department to receive the grain, inspect the quality and pay the freight; third, ordered Yu Dayou to use Dengzhou as a base to form a coast patrol fleet to protect Safety of grain transportation by sea.
As soon as this policy came out, all the merchants in the world who wanted to clear their names all had tears in their eyes, shouting that this emperor is great, and the emperor's grace is boundless! We immediately responded to the call and took out half of the smuggling boats for water transportation!
Why are they so motivated? It turns out that there are rumors in the world that as long as you can get the water transportation qualification, even if the court launches a large-scale investigation of smuggling in the future, half of your business can be saved. These maritime merchants understand better than the landowners that eggs should not be placed in one basket.
In this way, in the end, only the more than ten thousand officials up and down the canal hated Wang Zongmu to the bone - you, a damn chief, actually brought this unit to a pulp! Wang Zongmu, Wang Zongmu, let’s fuck your ancestors for eight generations together!
As soon as the scolding was finished, the imperial court's resettlement policy for them came. The Department of Sea and Water Transportation and Grain Transport was established under the Ministry of Household Affairs to specifically manage sea and water transportation affairs. Wang Zongmu was given the title of Zuo Shilang of the Household Department and was also in charge. At the same time, he selected 132 capable ministers from the Cao officials to go to the capital to serve as officials in the capital.
Now this group of people was also divided. They reported to each other and held back each other for the vacancy in the Maritime Canal and Grain Transport Department, which had about a hundred people. They almost lost their brains.
It’s ridiculous, and totally unexpected. The imperial court changed the river canal to a sea canal, and in the end it was the Metropolitan Procuratorate who suffered the most. On the one hand, the imperial court established a "special class for river-to-water reform", and also transferred cadres from the Ministry of Revenue, the Ministry of War, and the Supervisory Office, and more than a dozen inspection teams to confirm responsibilities, supervise, and check the account books and backlog of cases over the years;
On the other hand - according to what Ge Shouli, the censor of Zuodu, recorded in his notes after his retirement, from the third year of Wanli to the fifth year of Wanli, the Inspectorate received real-name reports about the corruption of water transport officials, which filled two large bookshelves. ——Waiting for his retirement in the fifth year of Wanli, the Metropolitan Procuratorate, which has been expanded again and again, has not even finished investigating half of the clues.
As for the Metropolitan Procuratorate, which was so weak in its investigation of corruption, and the Jin Yiwei, who was so weak in the process of ransacking their homes, the most they said to the many prisoners who were picked out was: Just wait, as long as you wait three more months, the place will not be Is that too much?
What they mean is that at the end of the third year of Wanli, the imperial court established the Gyeonggi Capital Water Transport Department under the Sea and Water Transport Department, which was divided into internal and external departments. The internal department was in Beijing and was responsible for the land transportation from Tongzhou to the capital and the cashier affairs of the warehouses;
The Foreign Affairs Division is responsible for the transshipment from Zhigu to Tongzhou; at the same time, the Maritime and Caultry Grain Transport Division has set up branches in Huguang, Songjiang, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Fujian, Jiangxi and other places to be responsible for the handover and supervision of local grain transshipment to the terminal - all There are a total of 1,600 to 700 vacancies. I searched for relatively clean ones in the original river and canal department, but I didn't find all the vacancies.
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