In the Martyrs' Shrine, no one will be surprised by the previous generations and contemporary martyrs who have entered the shrine, and it is not a good thing to enter the traitor pit.

Gong Dingyu, Feng Quan, and Chen Mingxia were regarded as advanced models, and after being hanged alive, their bodies were burned to ashes, and then somewhere, they were made into kneeling statues, and in front of them was a huge stone tablet, the ancestors of heaven and earth.

Don't ask about dynasties, don't ask about monarchs and ministers, don't ask about right and wrong, only ask about the parents of heaven and earth, and the hearts of the people in the world.

If a person was born in a foreign land since he was a child, spoke a foreign language, and ate a foreign food, then in time he is of Chinese blood, but no one will feel how to attack China by pulling the flag.

And the most hateful thing is that those who have eaten the people's fat and ointment of the Chinese since childhood, rely on the wealth of family exploitation, and after taking the imperial examination, they are all kinds of benevolent and moral words to suppress others every day, but when it comes to the critical moment, these Confucian students are the fastest to turn into.

Of course, they also have the capital to take refuge in, and the so-called traitor has no way, that is, some poor ghosts.

And burning a person to ashes, making ashes into a kneeling statue, and erecting it in the meantime, is almost the most terrible punishment, which is a bruising of bones and ashes.

In the beginning, the Presbyterian Church only dug up the graves of some very early traitors and burned the ashes, and later, a large number of people who had been in contact with other races began to liquidate.

In later generations, the vassal states around China were basically stripped away, and once these vassal states were purged of their loyalty to China and replaced by those who led the way to power, it would be difficult to deal with them.

Later, Nepal, although it was a small country, but its loyalty to China can be said to have made countless other subject countries ashamed, even if it was destroyed by foreigners, and gradually embarked on the road of being bullied and destroyed by India, they still used their last strength to send a captured British artillery to the imperial capital, I hope that my Qing Dynasty can realize the horror of these red-haired people.

As you can imagine, I didn't listen.

The incident was historically simple, a record akin to a police operation, but beneath the surface of the water had far-reaching implications.

After this time, even the most crazy and self-satisfied scholars in the south will no longer do all kinds of writing a few strokes and doing some moral articles, and they will ascend to the sky in one step to become the first assistant, and then make a big profit.

But then what.

To fight against the imperial capital, you need soldiers and horses, food and grass, cannon fodder, money, and righteousness.

But the greatest righteousness, Zhu Cihong is in the imperial capital, living well.

And the other princes and kings, even if they have thoughts, after being coerced many times in a row, they have also begun to shrink their eggs.

Most crucially, the Presbyterian Church's economic offensive is initially showing problems.

And the most terrible thing in this is not those cheap T-shirts, nor those glass and small mirrors that pass through the three artifacts and the like, nonsense, you can't eat enough, and you still buy this?

For the ancient Chinese dynasties, the salt tax, the most important thing, was the salt tax, and then the most important agricultural tax.

The argument of the salt and iron theory is very simple, the state needs a person who does not need to invest too much in tax collection costs, only needs to control the salt wells of the salt field, and then controls the huge financial resources, and then controls the state finances.

To say salt, is an indispensable object for the people's life, want a healthy body, people have to ingest a certain amount of salt every day, historically, the Ming Dynasty only in the south of the Yangtze River provinces has more than 100 million people, the amount of salt required every year is undoubtedly huge,

The salt tax was first nationalized during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, and since then, the salt tax has accounted for a large part of the annual tax revenue of all dynasties, only ranking below the most important agricultural tax, and sometimes the salt tax can even account for one-third of the annual tax revenue of the imperial court.

In the early days of the Ming Dynasty, the tax revenue of salt also accounted for nearly one-third of the annual tax revenue of the Ming Dynasty, and even exceeded 10 million taels.

Salt comes from the sea and is inexhaustible, and selling salt is definitely a profitable business.

According to the calculation of one gram of salt per person per day (the minimum standard), the population of Daming is calculated at 100 million, and more than 80 million catties of salt are needed every year.

Interests make people crazy, and the huge interests of the salt industry naturally make the officials involved in it, such as Confucianism, nobles, and squires and heroes, collude with each other to resell illicit salt, and the disaster of illicit salt will cause the price of regular salt to be higher than that of illicit salt, and there are fewer and fewer businessmen who pay salt tax to buy regular salt, which is a vicious circle.

According to the survey of the Council of Elders, in the last years of the Ming Dynasty, the salt tax could only be maintained at the level of more than 100,000 taels of silver, compared with the 7 million taels per year in the early years of the Ming Dynasty, it was less than one-tenth, and the population in the early years of the Ming Dynasty was certainly not as much as in the later period.

Don't look at the price of private salt without paying taxes and think that the price of private salt will be cheaper than official salt, it may be in the early stage, but once the regular salt merchants are forced to death by them, these people will increase the price arbitrarily because of the interests of the people, which is why the salt in some remote places has even risen to the terrifying point of ten taels of silver a catty.

The problem of the traverser is here, the people you sent to rectify the illegal salt are facing a huge interest group that is fattened with a total of millions of taels of silver every year, how much money do you poor ghost emperor have to maintain loyalty?

If the salt tax is to be rectified, it must be mainly based on the eradication of corrupt officials and salt merchants and other official and business groups along the coast, which will involve some of the gentry and power, and once it is linked to the interior, it will be completely finished.

The Elders' tactics to deal with this problem are simply frenzied.

A bag of salt unloaded from the port of Shanghai, refined salt from Tangshan and other coastal areas of Hebei, sold for only one yuan, and considering the cheap purchase price in the north and the exquisite plastic bag packaging, this salt war was in a kind of madness from the beginning.

Many salt merchants are not unprepared for killers to kill them, but when it comes to killing, the elders are too far ahead of them.

This can be said to have dealt a blow to the regimes in various parts of Nanming.

Nanming because of the mild climate, fertile land can be harvested two seasons a year, although more than half of the land is not high yield barren and thin land, there is no water conservancy project, but on average, the annual yield per mu is at least one and a half stones, 400 million mu is at least 600 million stone grain, the price of grain in the Ming Dynasty is an average of one stone of grain one or two silver, of course, this price is the price of the Taiping period, the current chaos in the world, many places have been killed, no harvest, resulting in a lot of grain in the south of the Yangtze River.

However, even if the cash is collected according to the price of grain in the Taiping period, it stands to reason that the tax revenue generated by 600 million stone of grain per year should be extremely considerable.

However, the Nanming government, which has lost its authority and threat, can it receive taxes?

The inability to collect taxes is the root cause of the demise of the Ming Dynasty and the root cause of the failure of the Nanming government to sustain itself.

In the fifth year of the Republic, the Nanjing government of the Southern Ming Dynasty only received less than three million taels of silver in total, which is very shocking considering that the area under their control was the richest area of all mankind before.

Because of the Ming Dynasty's tax exemption policy for some scholars, it is impossible to collect the agricultural tax in full no matter what, but why is the gap so big.

You know, the Ming Dynasty can only be called scholars if they have more than one meritorious person, and there are 20,000 people above the nominal control of the Nanming Dynasty, as for the clan, there were about 200,000 people in the early years of Chongzhen, after Li Zicheng, Zhang Xianzhong and other displaced people ravaged a lot, killed a lot, and almost all the rest fled to Jiangnan, and now the registered clan population is about 150,000.

These people simply don't care about them, and it's also a ruthless thing.

That is to say, there are only 170,000 scholars plus the clan, and according to general information, these 170,000 people almost control more than 80% of the land of the Ming Dynasty!

And that's exactly what happened.

Take the Fu King of that year as an example, he alone accounted for 50,000 hectares of high-grade fertile land in the Ming Dynasty, although there was a reason for the Wanli Emperor to mess around, other vassal kings were far less than the Fu King, but these hundreds of thousands of people in the Ming Dynasty, if you really want to count, also accounted for at least more than 4 million hectares of fertile land in the Ming Dynasty, and the 20,000 scholars who have the fame of raising people also accounted for more than 2 million hectares, adding up to nearly 7 million hectares, and the Ming Dynasty is 50 acres.

It's easy to imagine that less than one percent of the people actually own four-fifths of the fields.

Take a small town as an example, an ordinary poor family with only ten acres of fertile land at home, but one day there is a descendant in this family who suddenly competes for anger and obtains the fame of lifting people, according to the law of the Ming Dynasty, this lifting person until he dies, the land under his name is not subject to paying taxes, and immediately many relatives, friends or neighbors, in order to avoid paying taxes, voluntarily sell their fields to this person at a low price, and sign a lease contract with this person, become a tenant under the name of this person, and are exempt from paying taxes. Even if it is only in name, only a small amount of nominal money needs to be paid to this person every year, of course, this nominal money must be lower than the field tax formulated by the Ming Dynasty.

The same is true for the clans, because they do not have to pay taxes, they have a large amount of surplus silver every year, and almost all of this money is used to annex land.

In a small town, there were originally 10,000 acres of tax-paying fertile land, but it is very likely that because a child of a clan who raised people or divided a family with a register in the government came over, the tax-paying fertile land in this town will be sharply reduced by half or even half in a short period of time, and such a merger will become more and more serious over time, and it is normal for one percent of people to own most of the land.

In fact, most of the so-called squires are composed of these people, and they rely on the tax exemption policy of the imperial court and the selfishness of many ordinary people to annex land at a very convenient time.

Scholars are just that, in the end, most of them are in official positions, doing things for the imperial court, but those clans, but they are real parasites, due to identity reasons, they can't engage in business, can't take the imperial examination, can't be craftsmen, and even do their own farming will be ridiculed by other clans, they don't have any skills, they are almost raised as pigs by the imperial court, and they only live on the rice issued by the imperial court and the land rent tax under the name of the fief every month.

Not only the Ming Dynasty, every dynasty will encounter such a problem, this is a historical problem, these squires occupy too many resources, even the emperors of all dynasties did not dare to offend them casually, and the whole body was moved, and if one was not done well, it would shake the foundation of the imperial court's rule, plus those clans were relatives of the same blood of the old Zhu family, not looking at the face of the monk and looking at the face of the Buddha, even the most difficult time in the Chongzhen period, Emperor Chongzhen did not dare to make up his mind in this regard.

The real problem is that the land is rented, and many landlords can even receive more than half of the land harvest, which is a murderous ratio considering the hard work and upfront investment of the tenants.

But this is the best investment channel they can get in this era.

This leads to the landlord to buy the land, the land can produce huge value, which often makes the landlords more crazy to annex the land, which is also a vicious circle, the annexation of the land, the people are poor, no one consumes, the business environment further deteriorates, so the capital pours into the land, the land is annexed.

Especially in the past few years, a large number of northern fugitives went south, although most of them were poor, and they were immediately used as a meal by the gentry in the south of the Yangtze River, selecting coolies to play with women, and the more chaotic the country was, the more miserable the people, the more happy and satisfied these gentry were.

And those who have money have also begun to buy land on a large scale, colluding with the government to buy it by force, just like in the north, and are ready to learn to play like the north in Jiangnan.

Jiangnan, which has not had a large-scale war for hundreds of years, is naturally more stable than the north.

But here comes the problem.

More than 1,000 large ships were used for shipping from Tianjin to Shanghai, and after countless tugboats slowly occupied the flow of logistics owners, the property of many rich landlords was directly killed there.

After three consecutive years of insufficient profits, the grain business was hit by the North, and they could not make ends meet, and the sudden aggressiveness of the North towards the South was also difficult for them to bear.

For their worldview, the bandits crossed the border into the city, the soldiers crossed the border into the village, and the barbarians entered the country and fled south, but now, the best choice has become to form a village to protect themselves, although they can't make money, but at least they can be self-sufficient in food, but for the Nanming government, it will further lose the ability to collect taxes.

If you want to collect taxes, you have to control personnel, but now, with Li Dingguo's war, it is normal to not be able to collect taxes.

Especially after the news that the imperial capital began to purge the Confucian scholars who had surrendered a few years ago, it broke the idea of many generations of imperial examination families, although there were also a few clever ones who began to study the things of the civil service examination, but for most people's world view, the thinking concept of several lifetimes cannot be changed.

Those who joined the army in 1949 may not be fools, but they can only make such judgments and choices under the constraints of their worldview for many years.

The news of the Great Purge in the fifth year of the Republic was intertwined with the news that the imperial capital sent troops to Nanyang on a large scale, but it directly caused the turmoil in several provinces south of the Yangtze River.

The reason is actually very simple, human nature.

(End of chapter)