Daming: I asked you to hang yourself, but I didn’t ask you to rebuild the Ming Dynasty

What a great way to avoid taxes!

Unless they are unlucky - as soon as they put the land under the lord's field register, the lord was removed from the list...

This is one of the most advanced ways to play. You need to bribe the local officials, change the local government's land register, and then charge headlong against the feudal king, and then you can eat meat!

With the cover of officials and the name of feudal lord...

I'm so worried that this dog emperor can't even investigate this matter!

This is the third way.

There is another kind that is relatively rare, but those who can do it are all big guys!

When Taizu of the Ming Dynasty established the Ming Dynasty, he once conducted an inventory of the world and produced the "Da Ming Household Notes" and the "Da Ming Tax and Service Yellow Book".

These two are the census and field census in the early Ming Dynasty.

For nearly 300 years in the Ming Dynasty, and even later the Manchu Qing Dynasty, taxes were collected based on Zhu Yuanzhang's inventory of fields and population.

The originals of these two yellow books are in the capital, and each local government copied its own part and kept them in the local treasury.

When collecting taxes every year, the government government will distribute the receivables of each county under its jurisdiction to the county government, and then the subordinate officials of the county government will collect them separately.

In other words, the last people to collect taxes are the county officials!

This is easy to handle!

Who can be a government servant, who is not a bastard of the gentry?

In other words, the key to this matter lies in the copy of the yellow book from the government office!

As long as it is changed, you no longer have to worry about land issues...

In the late Ming Dynasty, how many fields were under the names of gentry, and how many fields were under the names of feudal lords?

How many fields have "disappeared out of thin air"?

This is a confusing account...

Anyway, the land that the country can collect taxes on is still so large and there are still so many fields, but the taxes paid to the court are getting less and less, and the burden on the mud-legged people is getting heavier and heavier!

From the 26th year of Hongwu (1393), when the Yellow Register was completed, to the 15th year of Hongzhi (1502), the total number of registered fields in each prefecture dropped from 850 hectares to only 6723 hectares.

In just one hundred and nine years, it dropped by more than half!

Outrageous isn't it?

Anyway, the registered fields are gone...

It’s very strange that it just disappeared out of thin air!

As for how much land is currently on the land registers of various prefectures...

Hey!

This matter - Liu Fangliang, this old Liu, should have a say!

Back in Wuqiang, Old Liu defrauded 400 million taels of silver...

Well, it’s not much, just equivalent to the land tax revenue in the late Ming Dynasty.

But, it’s just one county!

(What is the industry’s summary of the fall of the Ming Dynasty? There has never been a saying that the emperor was fatuous and the military was backward, but——

Natural disasters and man-made disasters!

Your taste, your fine taste!

A natural disaster, that is, the El Niño phenomenon in later generations.

To put it bluntly, the climate has become weird, with continuous disasters in some places and continuous good harvests in some places...

In the late Ming Dynasty, the disaster-stricken areas were mainly in Jiangbei.

There were several bumper harvests in the south, and the price of rice even dropped below five cents of silver!

Although a large number of fields in Jiangsu and Zhejiang are no longer used to grow grain and have been converted into cash crops, the south is not just Jiangnan!

In many places, rice is harvested twice or even three times a year!

It can be said that the South as a whole is not short of food. Otherwise, the price of rice would not be so low.

And what about the disaster-stricken Jiangbei land?

The price of rice was once as high as 12 taels of silver per stone, or even more!

Even if there is a gap in the overall grain production, starting from the Song Dynasty, China has learned to go to Vietnam, where "lost millet becomes fields", buy back grain, and use world grain trade to solve domestic famines.

Champa Rice is so famous!

By the end of the Ming Dynasty, the people had no food to eat, so a great uprising broke out across the country!

It’s true that natural disasters are nothing but man-made disasters! )

……

Zhu Youjian used a large army to drive Yuan Zongdi towards Xiangyang. This is a good thing and can be described in one stroke...

……

Jiangnan.

Fang Zhenghua had already found several courtyards and asked his followers to lurk there.

He himself went to Fengyang Mansion Royal Prison.

Fengyang is the hometown of Zhu Yuanzhang and the central capital of the Ming Dynasty.

In order to reduce the feudal vassal, the Ming Dynasty built five prisons in Fengyang since the Yongle period, known as the Five High Walls.

As long as the clan made a mistake, the emperors of all dynasties would imprison the clan in Fengyang Prison.

This is a way to reduce your rank.

By the time Chongzhen hanged himself, 265 people were still detained in Fengyang Prison!

These people are all descendants of the Zhu family.

What Fang Zhenghua was looking for was none other than Zhu Yujian, Emperor Longwu who was famous in the history of Southern Ming Dynasty.

This is a poor man.

Zhu Yujian's father's name is Zhu Qiqi, and his grandfather's name is Zhu Shuoji.

When Zhu Yujian was a child, the old Tang king Zhu Shuoyu preferred the sons born to his concubines and did not like the prince Zhu Qiqi.

Therefore, his son Zhu Qiqi and his grandson Zhu Yujian, who was only 12 years old at the time, were secretly imprisoned in the palace.

Prepare to starve their father and son to death.

At this time, among the Nanyang branch of the Baishui Zhang family, there was a person named Zhang Shutang who was a minor official in the Tang palace.

Zhang Shutang felt sorry for Zhu Qiqi and his son, so he secretly brought food to them.

In order to prevent the descendants of the Tang Dynasty from being ignorant, they even brought books and gave them to Zhu Yujian to read.

This level lasts for 16 years!

Zhang Shutang also gave away meals and books for 16!

(From this point of view, Emperor Longwu should really thank Zhang Shutang for having such a great reputation.

I once wrote a book about Zhang Shutang, with him as the protagonist. At that time, I went to Nanyang to do research:

When Emperor Longwu was released and went south, Zhang Shutang led his men to cut him off from the throne. In the end, it is not known whether he died in battle or lived in seclusion. There is no record of him after that. )

In the second year of Chongzhen, the old King of Tang was seriously ill and dying. Seeing that Zhu Qiqi was starving to death, the other sons of King Tang were eager to ascend to the throne, so they poisoned him to death!

The direct grandson Zhu Yujian is still being imprisoned even though his father is gone.

The prince of Tang Dynasty died, which was a big event.

Chen Qiyu, one of the guardians of the Henan branch, came to express his condolences to Zhu Qiqi. (Minshoudao is equivalent to deputy province.)

Under Zhang Shutang's informant, Chen Qiyu found out about this incident, so he came to warn King Tang again.

The old Tang king was afraid of being blamed by Emperor Chongzhen, so he had to make Zhu Yujian the grandson of the Tang king.

He was secretly imprisoned since he was a child. When he was first released, Zhu Yujian couldn't even tell the difference between pigs and sheep...

Not long after, Zhu Shuoji died of illness, and Zhu Yujian succeeded to the throne of Tang Dynasty.

In the ninth year of Chongzhen's reign, Zhu Yujian was angry that his two uncles poisoned his father, so he ordered them to be killed with a stick (one dead and the other wounded) because of their mistakes.

At this time, the Donglu invaded, and Zhu Yujian ignored the imperial ban and secretly recruited thousands of men to go north to King Qin.

After walking for dozens of miles, when they arrived at Yuzhou, the Donglu had already retreated.

Zhu Yujian did not encounter the Tatars. On the contrary, when he came back, he encountered the peasant army (probably a small group of troops from the fifth battalion of Ge Zuo). The two sides fought several times, with each winning or losing.