The third year of the Apocalypse, September, Tianjin Port. Nature

The fleet of five sailing ships of the Ming Army sailed slowly into the harbor under the watchful eyes of the people on the shore, and since no Western sailing ships had ever come to the port of Tianjin, the local people had never seen such strange-looking ships.

The Tianjin guard had already received the news and knew that there was a scholar of Zuo Chunfang Li in this strange sailor fleet, so he personally went to the dock to greet him.

This time, Li Hongyu followed Li Hongyu into Beijing, not only Yang Li'er and Chen Ting and others, but also the envoys sent by the Nanyang countries such as the White Barbarian King and the Fire Barbarian King to meet the Ming Dynasty.

In addition, Li Hongyu also brought some gifts from the South and the West to the Emperor of the Apocalypse and the concubines in the palace, this is the best time to give favors, and he is naturally not exempt from vulgarity.

On the way to the capital, Li Hongyu in the carriage frowned, and his expression was extremely serious, although he was not willing to face the chaotic situation in the capital, but he could not get rid of it.

At the same time, the situation outside the customs became increasingly severe, and the troops of the Houjin army had arrived in western Liaoning, but the battle between Xiong Tingbi and Wang Huazhen, the governor of Liaodong, was inextricably linked, so that the Liaodong government decree was divided into two families, making the local soldiers at a loss.

However, compared with the current situation in the capital, Li Hongyu didn't care about worrying about the battle situation outside the Guan, in fact, with his appearance, the battle situation outside the Guanguan has changed, in history, the Jin army defeated Xiong Tingbi and Wang Huazhen two years after the Apocalypse, but now the two are still leading the army to confront the Houjin army.

The reason why Li Hongyu attaches importance to the situation in the capital is because this year is very special, it is the year of the Ming Dynasty's Beijing inspection, that is, the assessment of officials in the capital.

Since the third year of the Apocalypse is the year of the lunar calendar, the Jingcha of this year is also called "Guihai Jingcha", which is the first Jingcha of the Apocalypse Dynasty.

Presiding over this Beijing inspection is the Donglin Party and the Ministry of Shangshu **Xing, of course, behind the **Xing is the cabinet auxiliary Ye Xianggao.

It is worth mentioning that as early as 30 years ago, ** Star publicly claimed that Jingcha was the opportunity for "gentlemen to suffer from evil and villains to repay grievances", which was a contest between gentlemen and villains.

Thirty years ago, that is, in the twenty-first year of Wanli, Li Hongyu was not yet born, and ** Xing became the official department of the Ministry of Gong Lang, and he was fortunate to participate in Jingcha for the first time.

In the twenty-first year of Wanli, Jingcha wantonly squeezed out and cracked down on the three parties of Qi, Chu and Zhejiang, which was regarded as a symbol of the rise of the Donglin Party, and since then the Donglin Party has officially become an important political force in the Ming Dynasty, and the party struggle in the Ming Dynasty has become more intense.

In fact, **Xing interprets Jingcha as a "gentleman" and a "villain" The dispute also represents the consistent style of the Donglin Party, and the evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of officials is not based on ability and morality, but on their political propositions.

In this way, the focus of Jingcha has changed from the assessment of political performance to the assessment of moral standards.

However, even this moral standard is not based on fairness and honesty, but is measured by the scientific ideas advocated by the Donglin Party, which believes that those who agree with it are gentlemen with high morals and those who oppose them are villains, which is actually the same party and disagrees.

Li Hongyu has already received the rumor, **Xing is now vigorously collecting evidence against the three parties of Qi, Chu and Zhejiang, and it seems that he has also put forward the theory of "four murders", and listed Qi Shijiao, Zhao Xingbang, Guan Yingzhen, and Wu Liangsi, the four party leaders of Qi, Chu and Zhejiang, as typical examples of evil.

This made Li Hongyu can't help but think of the list of traitors compiled by those anti-Donglin Party civil officials to the Donglin Party later, it seems that this is the source of the matter in the Donglin Party.

In Li Hongyu's view, the party struggle in the capital has reached this point, and the party struggle between the three parties of Qi, Chu, Zhejiang, and the Donglin Party has caused a deep rift within the civil official group, and this year's Jingcha is bound to make this rift expand sharply, and then make the two sides break up.

Li Hongyu knew very well that there were two root causes of the conflict between the three parties of Qi, Chu and Zhejiang and the Donglin Party, one was the attitude towards imperial power, and the other was the dispute over taxes.

If Li Hongyu is divided, although the officials of the three parties of Qi, Chu and Zhejiang also want to take more power from the emperor, they are moderates, or ****, while the Donglin Party is hawks.

After all, centralization of power is the foundation for ensuring the stability of the country, and if the taxes are insufficient, not only can they not use troops to fight, but even the normal operation of the government will be affected.

As a result, the contradictions between the three parties of Qi, Chu and Zhejiang and the Donglin Party could not be reconciled, although this was not good for the civilian clique, but it was undoubtedly good news for the Emperor of the Apocalypse, who was bound by the civilian clique and difficult to show his strength.

Although the Emperor of the Apocalypse is young, he has been carefully trained by the Wanli Emperor since he was a child, and has his own ideas about the government.

For example, the first thing the Emperor of the Apocalypse did after he ascended the throne was to punish Wang An, the eunuch who had made a "great contribution" in the palace transfer case.

If it weren't for Wang An's love for being Emperor Taichang's confidant, the Emperor of the Apocalypse would definitely kill Wang An to eliminate the hatred in his heart.

In fact, when the Ming army lost Shenyang and Liaoyang, the young Emperor of the Apocalypse had lost trust in the civilian clique in the Liaodong War.

For this reason, the Emperor of the Apocalypse asked Wei Zhongxian to send eunuchs to Shanhaiguan to collect intelligence, and restored the eunuch supervision system that was abolished by Fu Xia Yan during the Jiajing period, and abolished the civil official supervision system.

This is tantamount to bypassing the civilian clique and establishing a system of controlling the army through eunuchs, heralding the re-emergence of eunuchs and pushing Wei Zhongxian onto the stage of history.

In the face of this series of measures of the Emperor of the Apocalypse, the civil official group naturally had to vigorously oppose it, and did not want to be suppressed by the young Emperor of the Apocalypse.

For this reason, the civil officials chose a good method, that is, to make full use of their advantages as literati, and began to fabricate rumors unfavorable to the Emperor of the Apocalypse, slandering the Emperor of the Apocalypse for indulging in carpenter work every day and ignoring the government, so that the government was controlled by Wei Zhongxian, a eunuch.

Not only that, but it is also said that Wei Zhongxian colluded with the Hakka family, the nurse mother of the Emperor of the Apocalypse, to secretly make the pregnant concubines in the harem have abortions, so as to prevent the Emperor of the Apocalypse from having offspring, and then send the pregnant woman outside the palace to the palace to give birth to the prince to seize the Ming Dynasty, and even suspected that the Emperor of the Apocalypse had an ambiguous relationship with the Hakka family.

What's more, he even said that Wei Zhongxian was not castrated, and wanted to be the emperor himself, etc., which was unbelievable in Li Hongyu's opinion.

Li Hongyu actually fully understood the hardships of the Emperor of the Apocalypse to use the eunuchs to supervise the army, and when the Emperor of the Apocalypse ascended the throne, Houjin was still blocked outside the side wall, but in only two years, the Ming army retreated to Liaoxi, and the troops pointed directly at Shanhaiguan.

This made the Emperor of the Apocalypse no longer believe that the civil official group could defeat the Houjin, and it was a matter of the Ming Dynasty's Jiangshan Sheji, so he naturally had to use the internal servants around him, otherwise the danger outside the gate would directly threaten the safety of the capital.

Judging from the information that Li Hongyu has, Wei Zhongxian did not live up to the trust of the Emperor of the Apocalypse, and the tax reform of the Ming Dynasty in the third year of the Apocalypse was completed by him and the cabinet auxiliary Ye Xiang, which had two main purposes, reducing the field tax and increasing miscellaneous income.

This tax reform, under the maintenance of the Wanli Dynasty's tax system of nine percent per mu, reduced or exempted the people in poor areas from taxes by nearly two million taels, thereby reducing the burden on the people.

As a result of this tax cut, there was a shortfall of 1.64 million taels in the Ming Dynasty's budget, so there was an increase in miscellaneous revenues.

According to historical records, the miscellaneous income in the three years of the Apocalypse totaled 1.81 million taels, while the first year of the Apocalypse was only a pitiful 116,000 taels.

It is worth mentioning that the subject of taxation of miscellaneous items is not ordinary people, but the vested interests of the Ming Dynasty.

For example, "preferential exemption from grain", "supervising military salaries and patrolling public expenses" and "groom waiting" are taxes on the privileged class, about 750,000 taels, while "real estate tax deeds" and "pawn shop discretion" are taxes on assets, about 400,000 taels.

The above two items alone are an annual increase in taxes of more than 1.1 million taels to the national treasury, and the other commercial taxes such as salt taxes and tariffs have also increased by about 4.5 million taels, which is enough to fill the fiscal gap caused by the tax cuts.

According to historical data, the actual miscellaneous income in the first year of the Apocalypse was 116,000 taels, 689,000 taels in the second year of the Apocalypse, 101,000 taels in the third year of the Apocalypse, and 500,000 taels in the fourth year of the Apocalypse.

From the fifth year of the Apocalypse to the seventh year of the Apocalypse, the miscellaneous income has remained at 1.2 million taels.

The reason why the miscellaneous items dropped to 500,000 taels in the fourth year of the Apocalypse, and the weather rose to 1.2 million taels in five years, naturally has a lot to do with the Donglin Party.

Although Jingcha was held in the third year of the Apocalypse, the result was that it came out in the fourth year of the Apocalypse, and the three parties of Qi, Chu and Zhejiang were "corpses all over the field" in history, and the power of the Donglin Party reached a peak, and it naturally resisted the expropriation of miscellaneous items.

The so-called boom and bust, and then the Donglin Party was hit hard by the Emperor of the Apocalypse, and the miscellaneous levy was restored to the previous level.

In fact, for the Ming Dynasty, which has a vast territory and a large population, the miscellaneous collection of more than one million taels is actually not much, and it is not a large number of exorbitant taxes in the population of the Donglin Party.

This is also the reason why the Donglin Party hated Wei Zhongxian, Wei Zhongxian found a million taels of silver for the imperial court in miscellaneous items alone, and reduced the burden on the people.

As for Ye Xianggao, since he was the leader of the Donglin Party, it was naturally impossible for the Donglin Party to attack him, so they unanimously aimed the spearhead at Wei Zhongxian, and said that Wei Zhongxian was a slut who was greedy for power, which was very unbearable.

The reason why Ye Xianggao agreed with this tax reform was because he was a moderate in the Donglin Party, which was why Ye Xianggao was able to retreat from the capital after the "Six Gentlemen of Donglin" incident in the fourth year of the Apocalypse, and the Emperor of the Apocalypse was also courteous to him.

In Li Hongyu's view, the situation in the capital is now a mess, and he can't figure it out, so he can only resign himself to fate.

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