eldest son of Ming dynasty

Chapter 812 Twenty Years of Zhengde

In the twelfth year of Zhengde's reign, Xia Yan, the son of Jiangxi Province, passed the imperial examination.

The top three Jinshi were actually very low in the rankings, but I don't know what he had in mind. He was actually sent to Changzhou Prefecture to serve as the magistrate of Yixing County when he was conferred an official position.

The power of the county magistrate in this dynasty is not light, and all matters in the county can be determined to a certain extent by themselves.

In these positions, anyone who has achieved some political achievements can easily be selected for promotion by the officials. If they are particularly outstanding prefects, chief envoys, etc., they can easily be promoted to the capital by the emperor.

Therefore, Xia Yan can be regarded as one of the luckiest people among the Jinshi.

Unfortunately, less than three months after he was appointed, he wrote a brief report on the bad governance of the dynasty, pointing out that Liu Jin and other traitorous officials had caused great harm to the people. The elders and ministers in the court were all in favor of him, and they only wanted high-ranking officials to receive generous salaries...

After the memorial was delivered to the central government, the imperial edict rebuked him for his emphasis on boasting and his emphasis on practicality. His first term in office was extremely short, he talked a lot, and he had no merit in his work, but he seemed to have the talent to help govern the world. So he was demoted to the magistrate and county magistrate of Yixing.

Zhu Houzhao thought he was straightforward enough, but he was still surprised by such a historical figure.

In the fourteenth year of Zhengde's reign, the 70-year-old cabinet chief Wang Hao was dismissed from his post due to illness. Although the emperor stayed in office many times, life, old age, illness and death were matters of heaven and beyond human control. It was a trivial matter for Wang Hao to pass away due to illness, and Zhang Cong, the second assistant to the cabinet, took the lead in succession.

There is a lot of discussion in the world.

Zhang Cong was harsh, his methods lacked the style of a gentleman, he was jealous of talents, and he had no tolerance for others, so he was disliked by most people.

Xia Yan has a very upright character. He feels that as a minister, he has the duty to give advice, so he gives advice again for this purpose.

Zhang Cong is not Wang Hao.

After the cabinet chief made things difficult for him, Xia Yan was demoted for the second time. The Ministry of Civil Affairs issued a document stating that he should be removed from Yixing County as the county magistrate and appointed as the chief registrar of Shuangliu County in Chengdu Prefecture, Sichuan.

Even good places like Jiangnan wouldn't let him stay.

No matter how hard this low-level official tried, he could not make any noise in the court. Later, his character was ostracized in the local area, so he could not survive as the chief registrar.

Because he was demoted one after another, in the seventeenth year of Zhengde, he was asked to serve as a low-level official. Xia Yan, who could not bear the humiliation, resigned angrily. I quit!

Zhu Houzhao was secretly observing this person. After receiving the news in the capital, he couldn't help but feel a little annoyed.

When Wang Shouren was demoted to Yi Cheng, he did not say he would resign. How could someone of his caliber carry the world?

So Zhu Houzhao secretly appointed Xie Pi, who was the governor of Sichuan at the time, to find Xia Yan's fault and imprison him for half a year.

After half a year of day and night, Xia Yan escaped from prison because he was rescued by the famous local scholar Yin Jialing. However, after he was released from prison, the government still wanted him to serve as the head of a county.

This is a position that was first established after the 17th year of Zhengde. There is one person in each county, who is the auxiliary officer of the county magistrate and has the rank of eighth grade.

The field chief only specializes in acres of land, and is responsible for controlling the quantity and ownership of paddy fields, dry fields, and forest lands in the county. The most important responsibility in daily life is to be responsible for matters related to the sale and transfer of fields.

And according to the actual situation, the fish scale atlas will be updated every three years.

As for the taxation of money and grain, it is not within the scope of Tian Zhang's responsibilities. Whether the summer and autumn taxes are large or small each year has nothing to do with him. Tian Zhang's assessment and evaluation all depends on whether the fish scale atlas is true and accurate.

The field measurement started in the twelfth year of Zhengde and lasted for five or six years. The fish scale atlas produced at such a huge cost can easily be inconsistent with the facts.

Because Tian will be transferred and traded,

Because the original landowner will get sick and die,

Even when my father died and the brothers separated,

These many situations are happening at any time, so it is extremely difficult for the court to grasp the situation of acres across the country in real time.

For the county magistrate, under the tax package system, he certainly hopes to meet the tax targets set by the government every year. This started in the early Ming Dynasty.

The difference is that the Ming Dynasty has now abolished the population tax. It is an obvious trend. For example, Jiangnan has completely abolished the population tax, and everything is anchored in the fields.

In this way, the more acres of land, the more taxes should be paid, and the fewer acres of land, the less taxes should be paid.

In other words, anyone who is a county magistrate will think that if the county has fewer registered acres, naturally the fewer taxes it needs to pay.

For example, if there are actually 12,000 acres, but only 10,000 acres are registered, then there is no need to pay taxes on the difference between the two thousand acres.

Of course, it is very courageous to actually do this. After all, the fields will not disappear for no reason, but some people are lucky and think that their bosses are stupid and can be bullied, and the state will not investigate and punish them.

And a more subtle method is to add new acres of land without being included in the yellow list!

This is the real big deal. It was precisely because Zhu Houzhao discovered this phenomenon in his long-term political practice that he established the post of Tian Chief.

The field chief is only responsible for the number of acres and ownership of the county. The birth of this position is to ensure the accuracy of the data on the one hand, and to contain the county magistrate to prevent these people from becoming lawless.

Xia Yan held this position in Shuangliu County.

Three years ago, the reason why he was willing to return to the government and serve as a low-level official was that outsiders only said that he was afraid of going to jail. In fact, how could a strong man like him bow his head?

The main reason is that in the 17th year of Zhengde, the imperial decree continued to reduce the tax ratio of various prefectures in Sichuan, from one tax per ten in the fourteenth year to one tax per fifteen.

In fact, mainly due to the expansion of Sichuan's tax base, ten years of continuous immigration into Sichuan and the reclamation of wasteland have brought Sichuan's cultivated land to more than 2000 million acres. Because the place is good, the average yield per mu here is not much lower than that of Jiangnan, and is about 2 Between stone and 2.5 stone.

In other words, Sichuan’s tax revenue alone is more than 300 million shi every year.

In fact, Sichuan has more than 2000 million acres of cultivated land. For example, Shanxi has more than 4000 million acres of farmland, Shandong has more than 7000 million acres of farmland, and Henan has hundreds of millions of acres of farmland.

The main reason is that there are few people. Agriculture these days is labor-intensive. There are not so many people, and farmers can only work in a hurry.

Fortunately, although the tax of 300 million shi ranks low in the country, it is not at the bottom, nor is it embarrassing. It is at least better than ten years ago when Sichuan could only turn in about 100 million shi per year.

With such hard work, we have grown threefold.

On the one hand, the state's tax revenue is increasing, and on the other hand, the burden on the people is gradually decreasing. This is the real reason why Xia Yan is willing to become an official.

However, he encountered a trouble today. A big businessman from the county sneaked in and was secretly purchasing fields. The average price per mu was ten taels of silver. This was high enough. It was not the best paddy fields in the south of the Yangtze River. He wanted to sell them. Isn’t it a sky-high price?

It was an April day, and Xia Yan was in the study reorganizing the current situation of the county's property in the past few days. Outside, someone from the government reported that another businessman had submitted an application to change the property ownership.

This was an action prescribed by the imperial court. Although Xia Yan was strange, it was impossible for him to do anything contrary to the imperial decree.

So he put on his blue official robe and went to the Tian Chief's exclusive notary office to raise his head.

He sat on top, while a businessman and a dozen common people stood below. These people included scholars, farmers, and businessmen, to name a few.

Snapped!

Xia Yan said seriously: "Which of you is the buyer and who is the seller?"

The businessman in a green gown is a very young pretty face, holding a folding fan in his hand. He is very chic, "Reporting to Chief Xia Tian, ​​Jiang Daoyun, the villain, is the buyer of this property transaction. The rest are sellers."

"How many acres are there in this transaction?"

"This transaction totals 2,300 acres, Chief Xia Tian, ​​and the total money is 23,000 taels."

"In real estate transactions, the tax is one tael per mu, you know, right?"

"The villain knows that two thousand and three hundred taels of silver are included in the tax. The total is twenty-five thousand three hundred taels of silver. The villain has made all preparations."

More than 20,000 silver, this is neither Jiangnan nor the capital, it is a bit shocking to be said so lightly.

As for the entire transaction process, Xia Yan could not fault it.

The businessman who sold his land lost money in business, so he needed to get the money back to tide him over.

People who sell their fields make even more money, because Sichuan is reclaiming wasteland, and whoever wants to own the newly cultivated wasteland wants to own it, and many people can't plant it, so they sell it.

As for the scholar who sold his land, it was because his father was in debt. He had little income and had a shortfall in silver, so he sold his land to pay off the debt.

……

Xia Yan was quite concerned about the people, so he asked carefully, who else would be in charge of so much? One was willing to sell, the other was willing to buy, and he could still collect some more tax money here, and everyone was happy, so there was nothing to worry about. ?

But Xia Yan was a little more confused. In the past few days, people's land in the county had been purchased on a large scale. This was because Shuangliu County had attracted some big shot. Moreover, he had not heard of any powerful people in the local area, or someone suddenly got rich. ?

Many people attribute this to this. After all, many people went out to sea on boats and indeed became rich overnight.

Xia Yan, who was puzzled, naturally sent someone to carefully investigate the young man who bought the land.

There must be an answer to all this.

(End of this chapter)