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Zhu Yuanzhang was born as a poor peasant, so he naturally knew the importance of growing crops.

Right now, Daming has slowly entered a stable period,

After Lao Zhu established the Ming Dynasty and implemented drastic and effective reforms to the political system, he immediately began surgical treatment to heal war wounds and restore development.

In the last years of the Yuan Dynasty, after more than ten years of bloody battles, what Zhu Yuanzhang took over was a mess in which all aspects of the economy and society collapsed and agricultural production regressed.

During this period, the land of China, the vast land, is full of desolate scenes of mourning and starvation.

For example, the land of Suzhou and Hangzhou was a famous city during the Five Dynasties and the Northern Song Dynasty, and it was also the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty.

In the Yuan Dynasty, the population here reached more than one million, and it was the least damaged area at the end of the Yuan Dynasty. In the turmoil of the last year, the death rate of such a place reached two to three out of ten.

This is the case in the prosperous Jiangnan, so it is especially true in Jiangbei.

The prosperous Yangzhou was occupied by the armed landlord Zhang Mingjian during the war at the end of the Yuan Dynasty. Due to the shortage of military rations, he even killed the common people in the city to serve as military rations.

When Zhu Yuanzhang's troops took Liao Daheng to Yangzhou, there were only 18 residents in the city.

However, because the old city was empty and difficult to defend, the new prefect had no choice but to cut off a corner in the southwest, build a city wall, and use it as the prefectural city of Yangzhou.

Faced with this dilapidated and decaying situation, Lao Zhu was faced with a question, which is to adopt a policy of "fishing from the river" or "resting with the people"?

Of course, Zhu Yuanzhang, who came from a poor and humble background, could naturally understand the suffering of the people, so he chose the latter without hesitation.

Not long after Lao Zhu came to the throne, he summoned prefectural and county magistrates from all over the country.

Tell them that the world has just been pacified, and the people's financial resources are very difficult, just like a bird that has just learned to fly cannot pluck its feathers, and a tree that has just been planted cannot be shaken.Now it is necessary to "relieve and live in peace".

The essence of the so-called policy of maintaining peace and prosperity is "nourishing the people and enriching the country".

It is to feed the common people engaged in production, provide them with production conditions, and let them create wealth for the country, and the country will naturally become prosperous and strong.

In the words of Zhu Yuanzhang, "The country is rich when the people are satisfied, and the country is safe when the people are free. There is no one who is poor but the country is rich and safe."

In Chinese history, agriculture was the most important production sector in feudal society.

And Zhu Yuanzhang naturally put the development of agriculture in an important position in restoring and developing the social economy.

Then, since we want to develop agricultural production, we must ensure that there are sufficient labor resources in the front line of agriculture.

But in the Yuan Dynasty, slavery was very popular.There are as many as thousands of exorcists and child slaves of some dignitaries and relatives.

After experiencing the great peasant uprising at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, many slaves were liberated, but quite a few peasants became slaves of wealthy landlords during the war.

For this reason, in the fifth year of Hongwu (1372), Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the whole country and local ordinary landlords not to keep slaves and maidservants, and offenders would be punished with a stick of one hundred.

All the slaves and maidservants raised were released as good citizens.

All men and women who were pawned and sold into slavery due to famine were redeemed by the Ming government.

In the 19th year of Hongwu (1386), the Chief Envoy of Henan Province had redeemed 274 men and women who had been sold by folks in Kaifeng and other prefectures.

There are many temples in wars, which is something that has happened in all dynasties.

In order to liberate social productive forces, Zhu Yuanzhang strictly controlled the development of temples based on the national conditions of previous dynasties, and clearly ordered that each prefecture and county can only have one large temple.

Women under the age of 40 are prohibited from becoming nuns.

And monasteries are strictly prohibited from accepting children as monks.

Young people over the age of 20 who want to become a monk must apply for their parents and get official approval. After three years of becoming a monk, they have to go to Beijing for an exam, and those who fail to pass are sent to the people.

The gradual implementation of these policies has added a large labor force to the society.

With these vital forces, Zhu Yuanzhang's main measures to develop agriculture were to reward land reclamation and practice farming.

At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, the peasants revolted, the landlords fled, and the population decreased, leaving a lot of wasteland.

After the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, these areas suitable for cultivation had a large number of abandoned cultivated lands urgently waiting to be reclaimed.

In order to develop these wastelands as soon as possible, Zhu Yuanzhang took the measures of granting land to the people and rewarding wasteland reclamation.

In the first year of the founding of the People's Republic of China, Zhu Yuanzhang issued an edict to the world: All the land abandoned in the war and reclaimed by others will become the property of the cultivator.

If the original landlord returns, the government will give the same amount of wasteland as compensation.

For unowned wasteland, farmers are rewarded for their efforts to reclaim it, and their ownership is recognized, and they are exempted from the land tax for three years, and some individuals will never be taxed.

As a result, many farmers changed from slaves to self-cultivators, and their social status and family life were greatly improved.

The social economy in the early Ming Dynasty showed a prosperous scene.

In the development of agricultural production, this old Zhu from a poor background creatively implemented the policy of farming.

Tuntian is divided into three types: Mintun, Juntun and Shangtun.

Mintun mainly migrated unemployed peasants, descendants and criminals from areas with little land and dense population to areas with large land and sparse population for reclamation and farming.

The government gave them travel expenses, cattle, vehicles, seeds and a certain amount of grain.

No tax will be collected from them for three years.

In the third year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang moved more than 4000 households of landless peasants from Suzhou, Songjiang, Huzhou, Hangzhou, and Jiaxing to Linhao for reclamation, and more than 32000 desert households to Beiping to farm.

Of course, some are mandatory in the immigration team.

In the third year of Hongwu, Lao Zhu moved 14 Jiangnan Haomin households to Fengyang to farm, because they helped Zhang Shicheng refuse to defend the city and took sanctions.

In the Hongwu era, the immigration and farming never stopped, and the total number of immigrants in the settlement reached hundreds of thousands of households.

The military station is undertaken by the army of the guard.

At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, Zhu Yuanzhang made a decree, "All guards in the world should be farmed."

He asked the troops in the border areas to guard the city three times and farm the land seven times; for the troops in the inland areas, they should guard the city two times and farm the land eighth.

The imperial court allocated 50 mu of land to each soldier, and distributed cattle, seeds and agricultural tools.

The farmer did not pay taxes in the first few years, but after that, he only paid one bucket of tax and grain per mu, and the rest was used as military rations for the guard.

In the early Ming Dynasty, there were more than 100 million troops, and most of their rations came from military villages.

Therefore, Zhu Yuanzhang once proudly said, "I raise millions of soldiers, and I don't cost the common people a grain of rice."

The last commercial settlement is a supplement to the military settlement.

At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the government implemented the "Chinese Salt Law", requiring merchants to transport grain to the border for warehouses, and then bring salt to the inland to sell the salt in order to obtain huge profits.

Later, merchants simply recruited people to cultivate in the border areas, and the grain they obtained was warehoused locally to save shipping costs.

In this way, Shangtun appeared.

Zhu Yuanzhang's policy of rewarding land reclamation has achieved remarkable results.

In the 24th year of Hongwu, the area of ​​cultivated land in the country reached 3874746 hectares, more than double that of the first year of Hongwu.

The government's tax revenue has also increased significantly.

In the 26th year of Hongwu, the national tax and grain amounted to 32789800 shi, which was three times the annual tax and grain income of the Yuan Dynasty.

At the same time, the population increased by more than 700 million people.The social economy began to experience unprecedented prosperity.

Growing crops is inseparable from water canals, and Zhu Yuanzhang attached great importance to water conservancy construction.

In the year when Zhu Yuanzhang came to the throne, he ordered that local officials must promptly report any suggestions made by the common people on water conservancy.

Later, he also specially instructed the minister of the Ministry of Industry that all ponds, ponds, lakes, and weirs that can store and discharge water to prevent drought and flood need to be repaired according to the terrain.

By the 28th year of Hongwu, a total of 40987 ponds and weirs had been opened, 4162 rivers had been dredged, and more than 5000 ditches and embankments had been built.

In the 23rd year of Hongwu, 25 people were used to repair the seawalls of Chongming and Haimen in the south of the Yangtze River.

In the 25th year of Hongwu, more than 4000 feet of Dongba River in Yinshu, Liyang, Jiangnan was built, and 40 people were organized to fight.

These water conservancy projects provide favorable conditions for the development of agricultural production.

Before the Ming Dynasty, cotton was very precious.

Commoner clothes worn by ordinary people are made of linen.

By the middle of the Ming Dynasty, cotton cloth had become the raw material for people's clothing.This is the result of Zhu Yuanzhang's comprehensive implementation of the policy of emphasizing cash crops and rewarding mulberry and cotton in the early Ming Dynasty.

Farmers who have five to ten mu of land must plant half a mu of mulberry, hemp, and cotton each; those with more than ten mu of land must grow mulberry and cotton proportionally.

Later, Zhu Yuanzhang also instructed the Ministry of Household Affairs to order the people all over the country to grow mulberries, jujubes, persimmons and cotton, and those who violated the order would have their entire family sent to the army.

The development of economic crops not only provided raw materials for the development of handicraft industry, but also promoted the prosperity of commerce.

In the early Ming Dynasty, the handicraft industries, especially textiles, mining and metallurgy, porcelain and shipbuilding, developed the fastest. The cotton in Songjiang was once known as "clothes and quilts all over the world", and the textiles in Suzhou and Hangzhou were sold all over the country.

Nanjing Longjiang Shipyard has manufactured large-scale seagoing ships, warships, ocean-going ships and other ships.

The abundant industrial and handicraft products provided a wealth of commodities for domestic and foreign markets, and thus a large number of industrial and commercial cities emerged.

Zheng He's seven voyages to the West during the later Yongle period further opened up new markets for Chinese and foreign trade on the basis of Zhu Yuanzhang. These are inseparable from the vigorous development of social productivity in the early Ming Dynasty.

Of course, despite the rapid development of agriculture and handicrafts in the early Ming Dynasty and the obvious improvement of the people's lives, Zhu Yuanzhang, who was born in civilian clothes, still did not forget the sufferings of the people and the hardships of life.

He often said to his courtiers, "If you are in a hurry, you will stumble, if you are in a hurry, you will die, and if the people are in a hurry, you will be chaotic."

He often finds ways to reduce the burden on farmers, and tries his best to achieve: "Restrain what you take, and use it with restraint."

And this involves the Tax and Service Law enacted in the early Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang stipulated that five liters of grain should be taxed per mu of common land.Calculated on the basis of the lowest yield per mu at that time, it was one stone of thirty taxes.

Corvée generally consisted of one man from Arita Ichiha who went to Beijing to serve for 30 days every year during the slack season.

Zhu Yuanzhang also ordered people to take the prince Zhu Biao to inspect the countryside to see the hard life of the farmers with their own eyes.

After the prince came back, he also seriously taught, "Whenever you eat food, you must think of the hard work of the peasants. Take it with restraint and use it with restraint, so that they will not suffer from hunger and cold."

Where there was a famine and a poor harvest in various places, he ordered them to be exempted from rent and tax; when the disaster was particularly serious, he also asked local officials to lend rice to the victims, or to give relief to the victims of rice, cloth, and banknotes.

Zhu Yuanzhang ordered a nationwide household census in the 14th year of Hongwu.

Because the cover of the household registration book is yellow, it is called the yellow book.

Then, in the 20th year of Hongwu, he compiled the fish scale atlas on the basis of general land surveys across the country.

It records the number of acres, quality, and radius of the land in each township. Because the shape of the painted fields resembles fish scales, it is called the Fish Scale Atlas.

The establishment of the Yellow Book and the Fish Scale Book, to a certain extent, restricted the phenomenon of powerful landlords concealing their property and evading taxation, making feudal taxation more fair and reasonable, relatively reducing some of the burden on farmers, and improving their enthusiasm .

After the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, it was planned to build a palace in Nanjing.

The person in charge of the project sent the drawing to him for approval, and he immediately removed all the exquisitely carved parts.

After the project was completed, he asked people to paint many shocking historical stories on the wall for decoration, so that he would never forget the historical lessons.

An official wanted to use beautiful stones to pave the ground of the palace, but he gave him a severe lesson on the spot.

The cars, utensils and clothes used by Zhu Yuanzhang should be decorated with gold by convention, but he ordered copper to be used instead.

The mattresses he used when offering sacrifices to suburban temples were all made of red cloth; the imperial bed in the Qianqing palace was also painted with golden dragons very lightly, which was not much different from the beds of middle-class people; the daily breakfast was only vegetables. dine.

Under the influence of Zhu Yuanzhang, the concubines in the palace also paid great attention to frugality.

They never dress up in disguise, and the clothes they wear have been washed several times.

A servant was walking in the rain in a pair of new boots, and he was so angry that he scolded him.A man on horseback wore a very gorgeous new dress. Zhu Yuanzhang asked him, "How much did this dress cost?" The man replied, "Five hundred guan."

Zhu Yuanzhang said, "Five hundred guan is the annual expense of several farmers, but you use it to make a piece of clothing. Such extravagance is really a waste of things."

Zhu Yuanzhang didn't like drinking, and he issued many orders to restrict wine making.

He doesn't like luxury, but pays attention to practicality.

He ordered the eunuchs to grow vegetables beside the palace walls instead of building towers and pavilions.

In order to let his sons get exercise, he ordered the eunuchs to weave hemp shoes, bamboo and cane, and stipulated that the sons should ride seven tenths of the horse and three tenths of it on foot when they go out of the city.

Because of his poor background, he had no chance to study since he was a child.

After joining the army, he maintained a diligent and studious style until he became emperor in his later years.

After fighting and governing, he often invited Confucian scholars to tell about classics and history.After decades of hard self-study, he can not only write letters and military orders, but also write poems and fu.He strictly demanded himself all his life, never slack off, and never corrupted.