(a)
The Yuan Dynasty was one of the most free-thinking eras in ancient Chinese history since the Qin Dynasty.
Not only freedom of thought, but also freedom of other aspects. Freedom of business, freedom of travel, freedom of religious belief, all dynasties and dynasties have generally been strictly punished and punished, but in the Yuan Dynasty, they were basically liberalized, everything is casual, you can do whatever you want.
After the fall of the Southern Song Dynasty, there was a poet named Zheng Sixiao who aspired to be a remnant. Others were in Dayuan, cared about the Great Song Dynasty, and often wrote poems to miss the Song Dynasty, but as a result, nothing happened, and he lived peacefully to the age of 78. Compared with the remnants of the Ming Dynasty who lived tremblingly and cautiously in the Qing Dynasty, Zheng Sixiao lived a life of immortals. It is very ironic that Zheng Sixiao's books were never banned in the Yuan Dynasty, but they became banned in the Qing Dynasty.
There was also a poet named Liang Dong in the Yuan Dynasty. Once I went to Maoshan near Nanjing, I was about to drink high, so just like Song Jiang in "Water Margin", I wrote a poem on the wall. The content of the poem itself is actually nothing, but the Taoist priest in the temple had a festival with Liang Dong, so he reported him, saying that this kid blatantly wrote anti-poems.
The case was reported layer by layer, and in the end, the Ministry of Rites of Dadu came down with a verdict: "The poet sings emotionally, and cannot be slandered." If there is slander, it is not something that the heavenly court cannot tolerate. ”
This incident proves one point: there is no literary prison in the Great Yuan Dynasty.
There is also a loose song of the Yuan Dynasty, which we are all familiar with, this is "Mountain Slope Sheep · Tong Care for the Ancient": the peaks and mountains are like gathering, the waves are like anger, and the mountains and rivers are on the surface of Tongguan Road. Looking at the western capital, he hesitated, sad that the Qin and Han dynasties were in the office, and the palace was made of soil. Xing, the people suffer; Death, the people suffer.
The author of this poem is Zhang Yanghao. Who is Zhang Yanghao? He is not a poor scholar who is poor and destitute and full of complaints. He was a high-ranking official of the dynasty, and he once served as a scholar of the Ministry of Rites, and he was an official residence. When he wrote this song, he was the Taichung Cheng of Shaanxi, which is equivalent to the leader of today's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection in Shaanxi Province.
For such a high-ranking official, the poems written should be all about praising the excellent situation and praising the Great Yuan court. But he wrote about the state of society in a dark mess, and the words "Xing, the people suffer" is obviously a big problem, doesn't this mean that the rise of the Great Yuan Dynasty is also making the people suffer?
However, the rulers of the Yuan Dynasty apparently did not associate it with this. Zhang Yanghao can still continue to write his gray-tone poems, such as what else he has "Gong, it won't be long; The name is not long long. ", what "wins, all become dirt; Lost, all turned into dirt. "It's all the same tune. This did not delay Zhang Yanghao from becoming an official, he was still getting bigger and bigger, and after his death, he was also awarded the title of "Wenzhong Gong".
(b)
Speaking of Yuan songs, we can't fail to mention a very famous song in the last years of the Yuan Dynasty: "Drunken Taiping · the Great Yuan", the content of which is like this: The Great Yuan, the tyrannical dictatorship. The root cause of the trouble is to open the river and change the money, causing thousands of red scarves. The official law is abused, the criminal law is heavy, and the people are resentful. People eat people, money buys money, how have you ever seen it? Thieves are officials, officials are thieves, fools and sages, sad and pitiful!
The author of the song is unknown, but according to the record of Tao Zongyi, a scholar at the time: ""Drunken Taiping" is a small order, and I don't know who made it. From Beijing to Jiangnan, everyone can do it. ”
In other words, this loose song, which openly named and insulted the Great Yuan Dynasty, had already spread throughout the country at that time, and everyone knew it. The Yuan Dynasty did not take any measures to ban this song, but let it become popular, which is really amazing.
In addition, there is also the famous suite "Gaozu Returns Home" written by Sui Jingchen, which we are familiar with. In this suite of songs, the author exposed the true nature of Liu Bang, the ancestor of the Han Dynasty, who was originally a rural scoundrel, and made great ridicule of the feudal imperial power. Such works were also unimpeded in the Yuan Dynasty. On the contrary, in the Yuan Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang began to pay attention to the image of the emperor group, and issued an edict strictly prohibiting the image of the emperor in opera.
The pinnacle of literature and art in the Yuan Dynasty has to be said to be "Water Margin". "Water Margin" was actually written in the Yuan Dynasty, and you can't imagine that a book promoting rebellion could come out in the era of Zhu Yuanzhang.
Books like "Water Margin" can also be written and published in the Yuan Dynasty, which is very revealing. Some people may say that this book was also published during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The reality is: in the early Ming Dynasty, there was no shadow of the book "Water Margin" in the society, but later, in the Jiajing period, Zhu Houxi began to stay away from work for a long time, and no one took care of many things in the Ming court. Later, after Emperor Chongzhen, who was very "diligent", came to power, he soon banned and destroyed "Water Margin" again.
The reason why the Qing Dynasty allowed this book to be published was because the book was so widely circulated that it didn't make much sense to ban it, so it was simply let go.
(c)
Although the Yuan Dynasty was highly liberal, it quickly perished in less than a hundred years. Why?
In fact, the Yuan Dynasty was free not because the Mongolians were enlightened, but because they were lazy and overconfident in their own force.
Mongolia people are not like the later Jianzhou Jurchens, everyone generally does not like to learn, and does not pay attention to education like the Qing Dynasty. The Mongolia conquered the Central Plains with rare force, but they did not know how to manage such a huge country. Therefore, they had to contract out the heavy responsibility of managing the country and hand it over to those officials and powerful people among the Semu people and Han people. The Yuan Dynasty implemented a tax package system for a long time, and officials and powerful at all levels could do whatever they wanted in their own territories, as long as they could hand over the prescribed amount of taxes and ensure that hundreds of thousands of Mongolian nobles could eat, drink and have fun without worry, then it would be over, and the rest of the things could be done as you wanted.
Therefore, in the Yuan Dynasty, there was a serious phenomenon of tyrants and bullies running rampant in lawlessness, ordinary people were oppressed, and a few powerful people did whatever they wanted. This also made the social contradictions of the Yuan Dynasty increasingly acute, which eventually led to the outbreak of the great peasant uprising. Just as a folk song of the Yuan Dynasty said: The sky is high and the emperor is far away, and the people are few and there are many people. How about playing three times a day, and not doing the opposite?
The Yuan dynasty's ideological disregard was entirely the result of the Mongolia's overconfidence in their own force. Mongolia feel invincible and have no fear of rebellion. Therefore, the Mongolians simply did not bother to care about such trivial things as chanting anti-poems and complaining, and it was for this reason that the unprecedented freedom of thought of the Yuan Dynasty appeared.
Adam ·Smith, United Kingdom famous thinker, pointed out in "The Wealth of Nations" that only when a free economic system is combined with a peaceful environment and fair and strict laws can we ensure the continuous development and progress of the social economy.
The Yuan Dynasty was certainly free, but there was no just law to protect the interests of the people, and as a result, the whole society became a barbaric jungle, bullying the weak and bullying the small with the big abounded, and the result was inevitably the normal operation of the society was destroyed, and the whole country was out of balance. The rapid demise of the Yuan Dynasty was a matter of course.