Speaking of Gu Dingchen, a cabinet scholar during the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, perhaps no one had heard of him.
Gu Dingchen is a Yuanlang who is on the same list as Yan Song. However, the "History of Ming" did not have a high evaluation of him, saying that when he entered the cabinet, he was only "full of positions".
Did the person who wrote the "History of Ming" talk blindly with his eyes open?
Gu Dingchen was a reformer even earlier than Zhang Juzheng.
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Gu Dingchen's origin should be the most special in the past. Because, he was an illegitimate child.
Gu Dingchen was the child born to his father, Gu Ke, when he was in his fifties, and had an affair with the young maid of the family.
Therefore, Gu Dingchen was not welcomed by his mother-in-law Wu from a young age, and was not recognized at all. And his father, who was afraid of his wife, consciously did something wrong, and did not dare to take too much care of him.
According to the records in Gu Dingchen's Jinshi Dengke Records, he also had two older brothers on it- Gu Shi and Gu Yizhi. It was no wonder that his son, the son of a, was not rare in his family.
Gu Dingchen once had a time when he was studying alone in an ancient temple, and his life was very poor.
Gu Wenkang Weiqi (鼎臣), a concubine in his later years, was born a son of a concubine, his parents were disrespectful, poor, and he studied in the ancient temple.
- "Wan Li Ye Won, Volume VIII"
Fortunately, Gu Dingchen's personality is not the kind that will drill the tip of the bull's horn.
Although life is hard, he is very good at finding fun for himself. When he was tired of reading, Gu Dingchen would steal other people's dogs and burn them to improve his diet with the "wild children" who were also unattended nearby.
When they burned dog meat, when there was not enough firewood, they chopped the wooden statue of the Arhat Buddha into firewood. Such a mischievous and mischievous person, the people around him all looked down on him, but Gu Dingchen did not care at all.
He who is a scoundrel with a group of scoundrels steals the neighbor's dog to cook; when the salary is exhausted, he analyzes the puppet Arhat to offer cuàn, until the erosion and the childishness are eaten together, and the people blame it and ignore it.
Who would have thought that the "little bastard" who was not welcomed by the family at that time and mixed with wild children was actually admitted to the yuan in the eighteenth year of Koji (1505).
Gu Dingchen may have suffered too much when he was a child, so his health has not been very good.
In the leap april of the second year of Jiajing (1523), the 50-year-old Zuo Zhide Gu Dingchen, due to illness, was once again neglected and requested to be treated and recuperated in his hometown. The Jiajing Emperor granted his request and ordered him to return to work after recovering from his illness.
Zuo Zhi de Gu Dingchen used the disease to beg for treatment in the register, and obtained the will, so that the illness was cured urgently and went to the post as before.
- Records of emperor Ming Dynasty, Volume 26
Gu Dingchen's sick leave allowed him to avoid the fierce "great etiquette" dispute.
Gu Dingchen stayed in his hometown of Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, for several years, and only in April of the sixth year of Jiajing (1527) did he recover from illness and return to his post, and still returned to serve as a lecturer on the feast day.
(Jiajing 6th April) Jiayin University Scholar Yang Yiqing and other remarks: Zuo Chunfang Zuo Zhi de and Hanlin Academy attendant Gu Dingchen recovered from illness and resumed his post, please still serve as a feast day lecturer.
- Records of the Ming Dynasty, Volume 75
Gu Dingchen's past few years in his hometown were not in vain.
Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, was the country's most important place for enlistment at that time, and Gu Dingchen had the privilege of learning first-hand information at the grassroots level in recent years, thus discovering the deep-seated reason that although the taxes were heavy at that time, the taxes collected by the state were getting less and less: that is, local officials and powerful people deceived the real situation of grain fields.
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As soon as Gu Dingchen returned to the imperial court, he could not wait to write down some of his views on the "accumulation of money and grain" in Jiangnan, report to the Jiajing Emperor, and propose four reform measures for conscription.
There are two deep-seated reasons for the decline in enlistment year by year:
The first is to re-verify and measure the fields and acres.
The land atlases drawn during the Hongwu and Orthodox years of the Ming Dynasty have long been inconsistent with the actual situation in the Jiajing period.
For example
Gu Dingchen requested that when the peasants were idle, the government should send people to re-measure the fields on the ground, and according to the style of the "Fish Scale Atlas" during the Hongwu years, the heads of households and the land situation should be registered and recorded, and according to this report, "those who should be reclaimed, those who should be corrected should be corrected, and those who should be removed should be removed from the open-mindedness", and printed into a book, and the official government and the people kept a copy in their hands as the basis for collecting taxes.
In addition, every year, the actual amount of taxes collected, stored grain (left in local prefectures and counties), grain shipped (transported to other places), and additional consumption (loss fee) are clearly calculated, and the calculation results are published in urban and rural areas to be open and transparent, so that there will be no cases of officials defrauding the people and repeated collection.
The second is to reform the tax collection method.
Before Chenghua and Hongzhi, the Ming Dynasty had a fixed set of procedures for tax collection: Lijia was responsible for urging, grain households were responsible for payment, grain chiefs were responsible for collecting and transporting grain, and prefecture and county officials were supervising. Everyone did their part and went to peace.
In recent years, with the emergence of land annexation, barren land, and land collapse, it has become increasingly difficult to collect money and grain.
Originally, in the twenty-eighth year of Hongwu (1395), it was ordered that the newly reclaimed land after the twenty-seventh year of Hongwu would no longer be taxed. However, during the Xuande period, this provision was overturned and became "taxed on reclaimed wasteland that was not originally included in the tax, and on fields that did not produce grain because of flooding or saline land." ”
Between Xuande and Xuande, those who reclaimed the barren fields and rebuked those who had no grain were all checked into the endowment, and the number overflowed into the old.
- "Ming Shi, Vol. 77, Zhi 53, Food Goods I"
And these tax gaps caused by the lack of grain production must be filled by the length of the grain and the length of the grain.
Gu Dingchen found that in order to complete the assessment targets, the officials directly gave the grain chief a collection task, and even increased the burden, and if they could not complete it on time, they would punish the grain chief.
There is also polarization in the length of grain:
During Zhu Yuanzhang's period, most of the grain chiefs were held by local rich peasants. These people, who have a relatively high status and status in the local area, are also more attractive and easy to receive grain; in addition, if they really encounter some cases of "having land and no grain", they also have the ability to fill the gap.
Moreover, in order to encourage these rich families to serve as grain chiefs, they were not only given some power in the local area, but they were also allowed to escort the "Jing grain" into the capital with the officials, and they could be received by the emperor, and if they were properly dealt with, they could be appointed to official positions.
The grain elders, when Taizu was taizu, made the people who had many fields do it, and supervised the taxes of their villages. In July, the governor of the prefecture and the county party committee accompanied Jing to lead the survey and the line. Grain and stone, one person in the chief and one person in the second, lose when the time comes, they are summoned, the language is combined, and the use of the word is promoted.
- "Ming Shi, Vol. 78, Zhi 54, Food Goods II"
However, as the grain shortage to be compensated by the grain chiefs became larger and larger, and since the officers and soldiers were fully responsible for transporting grain, the grain chiefs did not need to go to Beijing, and these rich families were no longer willing to serve as grain chiefs. Therefore, most of the people who later became food chiefs were poor and vulnerable families, or rogues who planned to take advantage of the opportunity to loot the people.
In response to these problems, Gu Dingchen requested that the household department review the selection and number of grain chiefs and let them collect grain according to the old practice. Those state and county officials who do not appoint the governor to urge the minister, but torture the chief of grain to exceed the quota to meet the grain collection target, will be questioned; if he causes death, he will be punished as a "crime of investigation".
Although the Jiajing Emperor affirmed Gu Dingchen's proposal, he obviously did not attach particular importance to it, but only generally said that it was left to the officials below to implement it.
The household department was evacuated, and the reply said: "When the Chen Ju cuts, it is killed, and the edict is held according to the yamen supervisor." ”
- Records of the Ming Dynasty, Volume 118
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When Gu Dingchen first formally proposed the reform of conscription, he was still only a five-pin exhortation, and in the end people were small and light,unable to implement these measures themselves.
In October of the ninth year of Jiajing (1530), Gu Dingchen, a scholar of the Hanlin Academy, saw that the proposal he had made more than 3 years ago had no intention of being implemented at all, so he urged the Jiajing Emperor to say: "The things that were played before about the treacherous grain chiefs, officials, and powerful partners in the Jiangnan region embezzling grain taxes were what I saw with my own eyes in my hometown, so I reported it to you in detail. However, the relevant authorities put these problems on the shelf and did not implement your instructions at that time. ”
Gu Dingchen also understood that those officials did not actively carry out the execution because the Jiajing Emperor had not designated someone to supervise it before, causing everyone to blame each other.
It is no wonder that the reform of conscription is originally a job that offends people, and if it is not assigned by the emperor himself, even if he is not afraid of offending people, it is difficult to really carry it out.
Therefore, this time, Gu Dingchen proposed that he beg the inspector to let The Governor Yushi Maosiyi check the specific amount of grain in the collapsed fields, and asked them to verify and correct the situation of deception and false reporting within a time limit.
The Governor of the Imperial Household, Yushi Maosiyi, the Governor of the Imperial Household, held a strict deadline to check the indeed amount of grain in the collapsed fields, and correct all kinds of deception and concealment, and to repay them with their records, so as not to delay the order in the past.
However, the Jiajing Emperor still generally asked the "inspector to deliberate and handle it in a practical manner", and did not send this task to the head of a certain official according to Gu Dingchen's suggestion, nor did he give a deadline.
In September of the sixteenth year of Jiajing (1537), Gu Dingchen, who had already become the Shangshu of the Rebbe, once again played a role in the issue of Jiangnan's military service: "Su, Song, Chang, Zhen, Jia, Hu, and Hangzhou seven provinces, the wealth of the world (in fact, the tax is the heaviest), but the small officials responsible for registering the land area and other conditions below, as well as the local strong and powerful, are still cheating the amount of grain in the field, and the taxes they should bear are spread to other small households, resulting in poor small people having less land and heavy taxes, and large households having more land but no need to pay grain." ”
This time, Gu Dingchen, who had always been good-tempered, could not help but complain in the song that officials at all levels had deliberately delayed and not done anything, resulting in that now that more than 10 years had passed, they had not yet sent people to check the amount of field grain that had been deceived and spilled.
Gu Dingchen of the Libu Shangshu said that the seven provinces of Su, Song, Chang, Zhen, Jia, Hu, and Hangzhou were rich and powerful in the world, and the evils of The Lishuhao's strong deception and concealment were especially numerous today, so that the small people had taxes and produced, and the large households had land but no grain, harmed the people, and greatly lost the national plan. The subject has played it twice in previous years, and after more than ten years, he has not heard of a person who can be checked according to the edict.
- Records of the Ming Dynasty, Volume 24
Perhaps it was rare for the Jiajing Emperor to see that Gu Dingchen, who had always been gentle, had also lost his temper, so he ordered the officials below to personally go to the prefectures and counties under his jurisdiction to check the amount of field grain that had been falsely reported and concealed before, and if there was any deliberate response or delay, they would all be impeached.
It is decreed that the governors of the various committees of the officials will carefully investigate the prefectures and counties to which they belong, and their false stories and delays will be impeached.
This year, Gu Dingchen was 64 years old. Gu Dingchen felt that in his lifetime, he could implement his enlistment reform measures in Jiangnan.
However, Gu Dingchen was unfairly evaluated by future generations for doing something.
In December of the tenth year of Jiajing (1531), Gu Dingchen, who was already serving as the right attendant of the Rebbe, presented the Qingzi "Seven Chapters of Bu Xuan Ci" to the Jiajing Emperor for use in the ritual of "praying for heaven and asking for heirs". And stressed the importance of green words.
"Qingzi" is a kind of ritual article used in dojo rituals, because it is written on Qingteng paper with a Zhu pen, so it is called Qingzi. The better the green words are written, the more they are considered to reflect the sincerity of the prayer.
The Jiajing Emperor indeed praised Gu Dingchen greatly, not only praising his "loyalty and love", but also asking the ministers to express their sincerity to the heavens together with the emperor.
Since then, imperial court officials have rushed to present qingshi to the Jiajing Emperor in order to win the emperor's attention.
Therefore, the history books put the big hat of "exchanging green words for official initiators" on Gu Dingchen's head.
The word chen is known by the green word, and the dingchen advocates it.
- Ming Shi Vol. 193 Liechuan 81
Shen Defu of the Ming Dynasty, in the "Compilation of Wanliye", also blamed Gu Dingchen for the later Jiajing Emperor's increasingly enthusiastic misdeeds of doing Jai.
Since gu shu, the fast has flourished day by day, and everything has been xuan for more than thirty years, and the rise has begun and ended.
- "Wan Li Ye Won, Volume 29"
At that time, the purpose of the Jiajing Emperor to do the fasting was to "ask for a son". In the eyes of the courtiers, this is a major national affair. As a ceremonial attendant, Gu Dingchen improved the prayer and ritual procedures related to the imperial heir, which was also his job.
As for the later Xia Yan, Yan Song, Xu Jie, and others who competed to write green words to please Jiajing, it cannot be said that they were brought bad by Gu Dingchen.
Where there is demand, there will be supply.
If it wasn't for the Jiajing Emperor urging them to do it in the back, Xia Yan Yan Song would have eaten enough to study and write what Rausch's green words?
In August of the seventeenth year of Jiajing (1538), Gu Dingchen entered the cabinet as a shangshu of the official Rebbe and a scholar of Wenyuange University.
At that time, Li Shi was the first assistant, but in political affairs, most of the second assistant was Xia Yan who was taking the idea. Moreover, the dictatorial Xia Yan did not allow Gu Dingchen to express his opinions on political affairs and suppressed him at every turn.
When Li Shi was the first assistant, Zheng Duo said it to himself. Gu Dingchen entered, and he was old and wanted to have something to do. Displeased with his words, Dingchen did not dare to argue with him.
- Ming Shi Vol. 196 Liechuan 84
Although Gu Dingchen was suppressed by Xia Yan and had no sense of existence, at this time, the reform of conscription he advocated finally had a certain effect in Jiangnan.
In June of the eighteenth year of Jiajing (1539), Ouyang Duo, the Inspector of Heaven, reported that according to the advice of Gu Dingchen that year, more than 4,400 hectares of wasteland were inspected, and the tax was expected to collect more than 110,000 stones of rice. At the same time, they also found grain fields that had been deceived and underreported, and collected more than 60,000 stones of grain in taxes.
Ouyang Duoshang requested that the 60,000 stones be used to deceive the underreported grain to make up for the taxes payable on the wasteland, and the remaining deficiencies were recommended to be exempted.
Therefore, at the request of the Heavenly Inspector Ouyang Duo, he inspected more than 4,000 hectares of barren land, calculated the rent of 110,000 stones, and supplemented it with more than 60,000 stones of hidden field grain, and the rest were exempted.
Although Gu Dingchen did not have the courage and power of Zhang Juzheng and could carry out reforms in a big way throughout the country, he always reduced a lot of burdens for the people in his hometown.
It was also because Gu Dingchen, the people of his hometown in Kunshan, were also spared from being looted by the Wokou.
During the Jiajing period, the Wokou were rampant, harassing and invading the southeast coastal area. As a Kunshan native, Gu Dingchen considered that kunshan city at that time only had a simple earthen wall and could not play a role in defending against foreign enemies, so he built a strong brick and stone city wall in Kunshan to protect the peace of the people.
Sure enough, when the Wukou invaded Suzhou Kunshan and other counties, those places that were not protected by the city walls were seriously looted, and only Kunshan City, the defenders relied on the strong city walls as a barrier, were able to successfully resist the Wukou.
After Gu Dingchen's death, the local people of Kunshan, in order to thank Gu Dingchen, requested that an ancestral hall be built for him to worship him.
There was no city in the early Kunchu, and Dingchen began to discuss and build it. When the slaves entered the southeast of Kou, the counties and counties were slaughtered, while Kunshan alone defended the city, and many of them were all in charge. The townspeople should meditate on it and ask the shrine to show their reverence.
- Records of emperor Ming Dynasty, vol. 451
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > concluding remarks</h1>
Compared with those cabinet ministers with angular personalities, Gu Dingchen is indeed not outstanding, after all, two years after he entered the cabinet, he died of illness at the age of 67 in October of the nineteenth year of Jiajing (1540).
Before his death, he also left a legacy, advising the Jiajing Emperor to "love the people and protect the holy bow."
History is sometimes so unfair, and the history books only remember Gu Dingchen's qingzi "Bu Xuan Zi", but they do not remember the "Chen Yu Jian Jie (chǎn) Accumulation of Defects to the Jiajing Emperor" written by him to expose the shortcomings of Jiangnan's enlistment to the Jiajing Emperor, nor do they remember the "Reconstruction of the City Wall" written by him to persuade the Jiajing Emperor to build a city wall for the coastal prefectures and counties.
Fortunately, "Five Hundred Sages of Canglang Pavilion" gave Gu Dingchen a fair evaluation:
"Ze was southeast, Gong Cun Sangzi, saved the time liangxiang, the name Bingqing history"
(Note: This article is original by [Headline @ Love SlimMing Fish], plagiarism is prohibited, and violators will be investigated!) ）