Author: Our team Zhang Lan
Speaking of this kind of thing at first glance is not surprising, think carefully and sweat straight out of the cold sweat "think about the extremes of the event", first of all, value
What I have to talk about is "the family property of the first assistant Chen Yan at the end of the Ming Dynasty."
All the friends who understand the living drama of the late Ming Dynasty are no strangers to this "Chen Yan Shoufu". As the chongzhen emperor's favorite courtier before hanging, Chen Yan was good at greeting horses for many years, coaxing the Chongzhen emperor to be comfortable many times, and successfully created his own "Qing official" personality. After the Chongzhen Emperor hanged himself, he staged another funny scene: at first he wanted to run, but because there was too much family property, he simply paid forty thousand taels of money to bribe the peasant army, but suddenly hit the knife edge, was robbed of the house by the peasant army's open fire, buried all the silver in the cellar of the family, and finally was pulled out by Li Zicheng and beheaded, which was considered to be alive and "dead".
However, through the whole process of Chen Yan's "death", there is a scene that makes people take a breath of cold air: where did he get so much money.
You know,
One of the major problems of the Ming Dynasty that was often complained about by "contemporary experts" was that "officials' salaries were low".
According to the ming dynasty's salary standard, Chen Yan alone initially bribed the peasant army with forty thousand taels of silver, and he could not save it for a lifetime without eating or drinking only on the "dead wages". What's more, the main impression given to posterity at the end of the Ming Dynasty was "poor", especially during the seventeen years of Chongzhen's reign, the famine swept across the north and south of the river, and the national treasury was empty. Not to mention the hunger and death in the northwest region, when the minister Liu Zongzhou passed by the legendary rich land of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, he saw the local "people are still poor to this day", and the scene was unbearable to see.
Not to mention that the Chongzhen Emperor Zhu Youjian, who was theoretically "rich in the four seas", wore patched clothes when hanging, and the only 200,000 taels of silver left in the palace were also divided by the little eunuchs. It can be said that it is the poor and dead.
However, chen Yan's huge wealth was not surprising at all in the late Ming Dynasty when he was "poor and dead". The turbulent late Ming Dynasty was also a period of unprecedented prosperity for the commodity economy in ancient China. The developed commodity economy brought about a large influx of silver. According to the estimates of many contemporary scholars, in the last forty years of the Ming Dynasty, 200 million taels of silver poured into China from Japan alone. This can only be regarded as a "small head". The amount of silver pouring into China from the Americas and other places was even greater. Some Western scholars even joked that "the Chinese emperor can build a palace out of silver bars shipped from Peru." Say that Chongzhen is alive and poor? They certainly didn't believe it!
However, this huge amount of wealth actually had nothing to do with most ordinary people, but it was extorted by bureaucrats, gentry, nobles, eunuchs and other power classes, including Chen Yan.
Thus, at the end of the difficult Ming Dynasty, two extremes were formed, on the one hand, the people who were hungry enough to eat the Guanyin soil, and on the other hand, the "elites" who were rich in mountains. As early as the Chongzhen period, the official Zeng Yingxun lamented that "the gentry and the rich today are all clothed, rented, and taxed, and they sit on their seats and suck the essence of the people." Li Xuan, a member of the martial arts force, even more exposed that if he did not talk about others, he would say that those "clear streams" who showed people with the "Way of Peace and Poverty" were also "the property of the big ones is millions, and the middle ones are one million." ”
Even in Liu Zongzhou's eyes, the common people have reached the Jiangnan region where "the people are still poorer", but at the end of the Ming Dynasty, there was another side of "jiangnan rich families": the Qinhuai River was brightly lit, the "Donglin Fushe elite" came and went, and the brothels along the river "the husband and wife of the family were Donglin". The local famous doors, such as the Qian family in Suzhou, "collect 970,000 rents every year". There are also "famous doors" such as the Dong family of Wuxing and the Xiang family of Jiaxing, and the family property is more than one million and two. Their residences were "intended to be in the palace", and they "collected strong and strong slaves" every day, "fought and killed", "collected debts and were eager to pay taxes", and monopolized a large amount of wealth.
And the little money that Chen Yan puts in this group of "privileged classes" is actually a normal level. However, such a large group of "rich people" who monopolized wealth turned a deaf ear to the difficulties of the late Ming Dynasty and only covered their own money and did not let go. The result is:
After Li Zicheng occupied Xi'an, he took away "no less than millions" of his wealth from Xi'an.
After occupying Beijing, he stole another 70 million taels of silver. It should be known that after the Jin people occupied the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, Beijing, they turned the whole capital of Beijing into boxes and cabinets, and only then did they loot four million taels of silver. On Li Zicheng's side, the "rich people", including Chen Yan, all gave him a big blood supplement.
For example, later when the Qing army went south, Ding Kuichu, who had been an official during the Chongzhen period of the Ming Dynasty to the governor of Liangguang, first did not pull a dime against the Southern Ming anti-Qing forces, and then loaded his own more than 2.5 million taels of silver into thirty large ships, and led the whole family to run upside down to join the Qing army. Unexpectedly, after Qing Jun smiled and accepted the money, he tied up the entire Ding family with a wipe of his face, killed Ding Kuichu in front of him, and then cut off Ding Kuichu's head. This "blood replenishment" is that life is gone.
In the years when the mountains and rivers changed color in the late Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, how many people who only knew how to accumulate wealth but were not responsible for "rich people" played the role of "replenishing blood" and witnessed the deep lesson of "imbalance in the distribution of wealth in society".
The allusion to this similar "careful thinking and fear" is a case that seems "not too big" during the Daoguang years of the Qing Dynasty:
“
Qiu surname
The People's Unjust Case".
The case itself is really uncomplicated: a prisoner surnamed Xiao in Guangdong Province killed two Qiu people because of the dispute over housing prices. However, such a clear-cut case then entered a lengthy litigation process: from the twenty-second year of Jiaqing to the fourteenth year of Daoguang, in the seventeen years of the government, the Dao, the cloth administration, the bureau, the bureau, the inspector, the governor, and other levels of the government, the case was tried one hundred and seventy-seven times, and the result could not be produced for a long time. So that the murderer has long been at large...
Such a thunderous scene, the film did not dare to make up this, but it happened in the daily life of the Qing Dynasty at that time: although we often say that "the Qing government is corrupt and incompetent", compared to "corruption", the "incompetence" of the Qing government is also very shocking:
Before the Opium War alone, the Qing government's government overlapped and complicated the doors at all levels, the efficiency of the first-level work was extremely low, and it was common for a simple case to drag on for a long time.
For example, in the "Liang Gui case" in Sichuan in the thirteenth year of Daoguang, Ming Jiaqing had been clearly tried and confirmed innocent in three years, but then he was detained for thirty-five years, until Daoguang was released in thirteen years...
Similar scenes were actually not uncommon in the Qing Dynasty at that time: for example, during the Jiaqing period, there were more than 3,000 backlogs of cases that were not handled in a certain year in Fujian Province. In the thirteenth year of Jiaqing, there were 6,080 cases in Zhejiang according to the backlog of cases in Zhejiang. Even the circumstantial evidence of people implicated in the delay in the case is more than 50,000 in the "Qing Shi Lu" alone. As for the "case of hanging and wrongly judging", that is, the innocent who was wrongly killed, it is even more "repeated in all provinces" -- it is really difficult to want the officials of the Qing Dynasty to do something right and take time out to do things seriously!
Why is it so hard? In addition to the corruption of the Qing Dynasty that penetrated deep into the bone marrow, it was also a "lazy wind" that was terminally ill. As early as the Qianlong period, "first-class deception" became the "fashion" of the Qing Dynasty officialdom. In the words of the chancellor Hong Liangji, "The prefecture and county are mengdaofu, the provincial government is under the supervision of Meng, and the governor is based on the emperor." Since you can "monty", of course, you can also grind foreign workers.
For example, during the same Daoguang year, before the famous "Lin Zexu Ban", the Daoguang Emperor also struck a heavy blow to ban opium nationwide, and as a result, how did the "feudal officials" in various provinces respond?
In Henan, where opium was "planted" at that time, the inspector of Henan said that the local "people's customs were simple and simple, and there was no seed for sale."
The inspector of Guangxi was also unashamed, and there were many tobacco houses under mingming's rule, but he dared to say that "there is no kind of smoke and smoking and selling.". Such a big thing, dare to blow.
Such a scene is also like the sigh of the Daoguang Emperor: the only deceitful word is the talisman of the courtiers--to be a good official in the Great Qing Dynasty, you must be confused.
Since the Daoguang Emperor was all rutted, the officials of the Great Qing Dynasty were naturally fooled. Cases related to the lives of ordinary people are commonplace for several years and decades, as long as their official positions are stable, how can they care about the lives of the people? Therefore, the "incompetent" Qing Dynasty, even during the two Opium Wars, the inefficiency of its actions was heinous, and finally opened the prelude to the modern history of backwardness and beating with a humiliating defeat.
Speaking of the backwardness of the late Qing Dynasty, compared with the "corruption" and "closed country" that have been talked about so far, the lesson of "lazy government and misleading the country", just by looking at a few cold records in the historical materials and the people's livelihood suffering behind the records, there is a lot of careful thinking and extreme fear, and the alarm bell after "fear" is long.
References: "History of the Fall of Chongzhen", "History of peasant wars in the late Ming Dynasty", "True History of the Ming Dynasty", "Research on the Political Crisis in the Jiaqing and Daoguang Periods of the Qing Dynasty"