Regarding the conscription of the Ming Dynasty, I recommend reading "Finance and Taxation in Ming China in the Sixteenth Century".

In recent years, the history of the Ming Dynasty has been very popular, and there have been many discussions about the fall of the Ming Dynasty. Reading this book, you can understand the practical problems that existed in the Ming Dynasty in China in the 16th century, the form of government organization, and the detailed historical materials of the various types of taxation such as land endowment, forced labor, salt, and variegation, so as to understand the financial operation of the entire empire in the Ming Dynasty, the generation, change and decline of various systems, and then analyze the financial background behind various events and the contingency and inevitability of their occurrence.

Political economist Joseph Schumpeter argues that "fiscal history is the most fundamental part of the history of a nation as a whole...... Fiscal history provides insight into the laws of social change, the driving force behind the development of the destiny of the state, and the ways in which the real conditions, especially the forms of organization, develop and disappear."

Mr. Huang Renyu is a well-known master of Ming history at home and abroad, studied under Professor Fairbank, and participated in the compilation of "History of Science and Technology in China". The book Finance and Taxation in Ming China in the Sixteenth Century was also funded by Professor Fairbank and his Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University. In fact, compared with Mr. Huang's "The Fifteenth Year of Wanli" and "The Great History of China", the content of this book is the field of Mr. Huang's real research. Through a large number of historical materials, he made a detailed analysis of China's finance and taxation in the Ming Dynasty in the 16th century, made a comprehensive historical perspective, and put forward many valuable views. This book is widely regarded as the most famous and important book on the history of finance and taxation in China in modern times.

After introducing the basic information and author of this book, I will explain the content of this book in detail for you. This book lists a lot of historical facts and detailed materials, and I have summarized the following three perspectives from them, hoping to help you understand the whole book:

First, the tax structure and tax administration of the Ming Dynasty from the collection of land endowments;

Second, from the perspective of the conscription system of the Ming Dynasty, the postman Li Zicheng was laid off;

Third, look at Zhang Juzheng's reform from the "one whip law".

Let me first tell you the first point, looking at the tax structure and tax management of the Ming Dynasty from the collection of land endowments. All tax systems are complex, but the Ming Dynasty's Tianfu system makes me feel that it is no less complex than the personal income tax in the United States or the current corporate income tax system in China.

In the Ming Dynasty, the land endowment was the most important financial revenue of the state. The collection of land in the Ming Dynasty followed the "Two Taxes Law" of the previous generation, and the objects of taxation were generally in kind. The summer tax is called "summer tax", which is mainly wheat, and the levy does not exceed the eighth month of the lunar calendar; The autumn levy is called "autumn grain", which is mainly rice, and the levy does not exceed February of the following year. Twice a year, the land is taxed twice. Most of the taxes included in the "summer tax" of the previous dynasty such as cotton, silk, and tea were inherited by the Ming Dynasty.

Generally speaking, the tax amount is calculated by multiplying the tax base by the tax rate (tax amount = tax base * tax rate), but because the tax in the Ming Dynasty was the grain standard, the unit of measurement of the grain should be added. Let me explain each of these three elements for you.

First of all, the most basic unit of measurement of tax grain is "stone", which is actually a unit of volume, which is about equal to 107.4 liters of grain, which is generally considered to be 120 catties, and the maximum weight that an adult man can carry on a long journey with a flat shoulder. One stone of wheat is considered to be equivalent to one stone of rice, and although the actual value of the former is much lower, this equivalent is for statistical convenience, so that no taxpayer can benefit from this price difference. Although with the discovery of the New World in the later period, a large amount of silver mined in the Americas flowed into China, and in some places 90% of the land was silver, the tax statistics were still based on the number of stone grains.

There is a professional term here called folding, that is, how much cotton, silk or silver can be folded into a stone of grain. In the early days, one stone of rice was first folded into a piece of cotton cloth, and then in the 16th century, the cotton cloth was folded into 0.3 taels of silver. At the same time, the discount rate is not fixed, some are adjusted according to a ratio that is compared with the market price for tens or even hundreds of years, and some are deliberately reduced as tax incentives. As a result, the actual burden of the "grain stone" at that time was very inconsistent, depending on whether the tax was paid in silver, grain, or any other article, as well as on the freight and the discount rate of the "grain stone". The heaviest "stone" on the taxpayer is 7 times higher than the "stone" with the lowest burden.

Secondly, let's take a look at the tax base, the unit of measurement of land in agricultural areas is mu, 5 feet is 1 step, and 240 square steps is 1 mu. A standard acre is about 666.66 square meters, which is equivalent to the size of two tennis courts. The standard acre is more of a concept than an actual financial unit. In southern China, one acre of farmland is estimated to produce 2 stone of rice per year. According to the data at that time, in the Yangtze River Delta, where the soil is the most fertile, one mu of land can produce 3 stone rice, and there are also records of 4 stone rice per mu, while in the arid northwest region, the yield per mu is only half a stone. Obviously, it was unfair to uniformly use the "standard mu" as the standard to collect tax grain, so the Ming Dynasty chose the "tax mu" instead of it. Generally speaking, land with normal or good yields is taxed at 1 tax acre for every 1 standard acre. For land with low yield, 1 and a half acres, 2 acres, 3 acres, or even 8 acres are used as 1 tax mu, and there is no unified standard for this conversion, all of which are set by the local government.

As for the land area of the whole country, it is widely rumored that the Ming Dynasty carried out two land surveys, the first time in the Hongwu period, and the other time during the reign of Zhang Juzheng, which carried out a nationwide land clearance and compiled it into a book. Because the boundaries of the land book drawn are like fish scales, it is named the fish scale atlas, and the corresponding population is called the yellow book. However, there is a large amount of evidence that this kind of statistics is only carried out in very few areas, and because it is a temporary conscription survey, without the participation of professionals, many people do not even know about the local land tax conversion per mu, and this kind of statistics has no practical significance. So in the end, no one knows how much farmland the Ming Dynasty owned.

The last is the tax rate, the Ming Dynasty has always believed in a low tax rate, the basic tax rate (positive) per tax mu is 0.03 stone rice, accounting for 1/60 of the crop harvest, but there will be a large amount of additional consumption, that is, the share of the increase in the pretext of making up for the loss in addition to the positive tax quota, as well as various special additional taxes. But even with all the consumption, Mr. Huang Renyu used ten examples from different periods and regions to prove it, and finally came to the conclusion that until the beginning of the 16th century, according to the local normal grain price estimate, the tax did not exceed 10% of the production. Because the system of the Ming Dynasty is very rigid, this fixed amount will not be easily modified after the designation, especially in the early Hongwu period of the Ming Dynasty, Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang or in order to rectify the rule of officials or to strengthen the centralization of power in the four major cases, the "empty seal case" and "Guo Huan case" are the problem of household tax collection, the consequence of tens of thousands of heads is that the entire Ming Dynasty has not carried out major reforms on taxation from the national level, and the taxes in various places are also based on the old system, basically there is not much change.

In addition, since the tax was collected on grain, there was a very troublesome transportation problem, and the rigid system of the Ming Dynasty dictated how much grain each county had to be transported into certain warehouses, which could not be offset by each other. For example, even in the late 16th century, when the main income was silver, Wanpingzhi County in Beijing, in the twentieth year of Wanli, in 1592, reported that he was required to deliver the tax grain to 27 different warehouses and departments designated by the central government, but the total amount involved was less than 2,000 taels of silver.