Emperor Zhengde

Chapter 75: The Weakness of the Common People and the Two Enemies of the Empire

Gejiazhuang is a natural village in the Guanzhong region that is unknown to most people.

Since the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, there has been peace here for more than a hundred years, and the imperial court has always been lenient in taxation. Now the small Gejiazhuang has hundreds of households, and even gradually has the phenomenon of a market, that is, a regular market before it becomes a town.

Gejiazhuang is a village where self-cultivating farmers live together, and such villages are the foundation on which the Ming Empire relies.

The Ming Dynasty central government could only collect money and grain taxes from these villages to ensure the political and military operations of the entire empire.

But what makes Gejiazhuang different from the private manors of the gentry group is that it does not have a village wall to defend against foreign enemies. Moreover, villages like Gejiazhuang are in Guanzhong rather than northern Shaanxi, so there is naturally no need to worry about the invasion of the Tartars.

Although it is a very cold winter season, Gejiazhuang is very lively at this time. During the slack season, the villagers all stay at home to make clothes or do carpentry work.

Some well-off farmers have begun preparing to slaughter pigs. Large wooden barrels are being filled with buckets of boiling water. White steam is rising, covering the village in a lively atmosphere. A big fat pig nearby is howling miserably, causing a group of village children who are watching the slaughter to giggle with their broken teeth showing.

Some farmers are also preparing to marry off their daughters and welcome their parents. The sounds of gongs and drums in the snowy world form the most beautiful notes in the peaceful and tranquil rural life, and the red sedan chair also forms the brightest color.

Needless to say, there are the sounds of chickens, dogs and barking.

Before the Little Ice Age, before the privileged tax-free gentry class had completely devoured the empire, in the 18th year of Hongzhi in the Ming Dynasty, the lives of the common people could be considered prosperous and peaceful.

However, due to human selfishness and the unstoppable desire for interests after gaining power, plundering and killing are inevitable.

The first to start the massacre were the real Tartars, a group of Tartars let in by Shaanxi Provincial Inspector and Censor Lu Zhonghe. After helping Shao Daxia and his men kill the officers and soldiers escorting Wang Shu, they began to look for villages to implement their usual plan to get rich.

The first village to be massacred was Gejiazhuang.

The Tartar who was rushing in the front came rushing over and saw several Han children playing with snowmen at the entrance of the village. Without saying a word, he chopped three or four children in half with a knife. The blood immediately spilled on the faces of the snowmen, and the snow-white snowmen turned into bloody men.

These Han children from Gejiazhuang had no time to cry. Their tender white hands and legs were scattered on the ground like dead branches in winter, trampled into mud by the Tartars' horses' hooves on the snow.

More and more Tartars came riding on horses, baring their sharp teeth like wild wolves. They galloped directly over the haystacks built by the Han villagers. They ignored the barking of the yellow dog in the village and directly split a Han villager who was stunned at the door into two halves. The blood immediately spilled in front of the house, and only the wide-open eyes retained astonishment and pain.

One of the Tartars just smiled coldly, stepped on the villager's body and entered his home. When he saw the wheat, he put it on his shoulders, and when he saw the chicken, he grabbed it in his hands. When he saw a woman hiding at the foot of the bed, he threw away the wheat and chicken and pounced on the Han woman. Suddenly, the woman's screams were heard in the house.

Countless tragedies began to unfold. The Han villagers who were preparing to enjoy a pig-killing banquet were all hacked to death. They had worked hard for a year and finally waited until the end of the year to have a good meal, but they became the souls killed by the Tartars!

A sedan chair that was about to be carried to the neighboring village for a wedding stopped at the entrance of the village.

The four villagers who carried the sedan chair were all killed.

The groom who had just married his sweetheart was left with only half of his body.

The bride was lying naked on the bloody snow. Half an hour ago, she was still a 15-year-old Han girl, waiting for her childhood sweetheart, the groom, to come and pick her up.

At this time, she had been tortured to death by five Tartars!

In less than an hour, Gejia Village became a deserted village!

Hundreds of families were wiped out!

No one was spared, young or old, male or female!

Perhaps they will never understand until their death who they have offended or what crime they have committed to deserve such harsh punishment?

...It's not an isolated case.

At this time, Shao Daxia and his gang were also carrying out their plan to get rich.

Although they were not Tartars but just a group of bandits kept by the gentry, they were no more merciful than the Tartars in looting and killing, and were even ten times more cruel.

After all, traitors have always been more cruel to their own kind.

A place called Qili Village is a very ordinary village like Gejiazhuang. It also has dozens of villagers who live a relatively peaceful and prosperous life. It is also a self-cultivating rural village that is not controlled by gentry forces.

After all, Shao Daxia and his gang did not dare to slaughter the gentry's private estates for fear of making things worse.

Hero Shao was the first to rush into Qili Village. He came only to destroy the village and would not leave to rob money, so he showed no mercy. When he saw a peasant woman carrying hot water out, he rushed over and hacked the woman to death at the doorstep. The other village women in the house had no idea what was happening and were helping a young Han woman give birth.

When the hero Shao came in with a bloody butcher knife, the young Han woman had just given birth. The newborn Han baby was just being happily held up by a village woman and was crying loudly to announce his arrival into this world, when he was chopped into two halves by the knife in the hero Shao's hand. The village woman holding the new Han baby was also killed on the spot!

The young Han woman who had just become a mother fainted from fright, but she still could not escape the fate of being ravaged by the hero Shao.

After he killed all the Han villagers in a house, he moved on to the next family.

One by one, the houses were cleared out.

If the woman is a pregnant woman, she will be given an extra knife. The reason is naturally to prevent the possibility of the village still having a villager.

Finally, the house was burned down, and the cattle, sheep, horses, dogs, etc. were driven into the house and burned.

Even farm tools would be destroyed.

In this way, the entire Qili Village will become a truly uninhabited village, and the fields of these self-cultivating farmers will become truly ownerless fields, and can be turned into their fields through the operation of the government.

Such tragedies continued to happen before the authorities discovered it.

Just like every border threat that the Ming Dynasty had suffered in the past hundred years, villages composed of self-cultivating farmers were destroyed one by one. The credit for this went to the Tartars, gentry, bandits and robbers. The bandits and robbers who had no connection with the gentry could hardly last long, so the credit was mainly due to the Tartars and gentry.

Just as Mr. Gu Cheng said, the main reason for the demise of the Han Dynasty in the late Ming Dynasty was the collusion between the Han bureaucrats and landlords and the Manchu military aristocracy. Today, it is still the powerful officials and gentry among the Han people and the bandits outside the Great Wall who are constantly persecuting the common people of the Ming Dynasty and even killing them and depriving them of their most fundamental survival interests.

They colluded with each other and gradually devoured the foundation of the empire.

Perhaps in the long course of history, at most only a few ordinary villages were massacred, but a hundred years later, it resulted in the rise of foreign races, financial strain within the empire, and a sharp decline in the tolerance of the common people.

……

But this brutal form of land annexation would eventually come to an end, and Yang Yiqing, the governor of Shaanxi who represented the interests of the empire, had to send a large force to restore order.

But the thief had already fled, and the Tartars had miraculously disappeared beyond the Great Wall like the wind.

At this time, Shaanxi Provincial Inspector Lü Zhonghe had already gone to Yumen in the name of inspecting the border towns. Here, he received a secret letter from his family: "We have obtained four farms with a total of 24,000 acres of good farmland!"

Lu Zhonghe was very happy and felt the greatest benefit of being an official. What also made him happy was that he was about to be promoted to the governor of Sichuan, which was promised by Li Gefu of the cabinet.

Thank you for the 100 Qidian coins reward from my friend,



(End of this chapter)