After listening to what Zhang Shenyan said, Emperor Chongzhen said lightly: "Ren Shu in the former official department, whether there are still comrades in the party, whether he is instructed by others, I already know in my heart. Pen ~ Fun ~ Pavilion www.biquge.info Soon, I will give Qing and others an answer. Regardless of these circumstances, it is a great violation of my will to attack the important ministers of the imperial court and criticize the decision to open the sea without evidence or evidence. Does Zhang Qing have any objections to this? ”

Seeing Zhang Shenyan kneeling on the ground silently, Emperor Chongzhen continued: "Today, we will only discuss the pros and cons of opening the sea and trade, and other matters will be discussed another day." ”

Zhang Shenyan was a Jinshi in the thirty-eighth year of Wanli, and he was also one of the ministers who was quite honest during the Chongzhen period at the end of the Ming Dynasty, and Emperor Chongzhen did not want to dispose of such courtiers because of a trivial matter.

Therefore, Emperor Chongzhen looked at Zhang Shenyan and said, "If Zhang Qing has nothing else to say, let's go straight down." ”

However, what he didn't expect was that Zhang Shenyan said: "The minister still has this music!" ”

Then Zhang Shenyan continued: "The ministers heard that the country is people-oriented, and the people are food-oriented. Therefore, all dynasties and dynasties are based on agriculture and mulberry.

"The southeast of my Ming Dynasty is the important place of the imperial court's wealth, and eighty percent of the grain and salary of the Beijing division and even the nine borders depend on the southeast grain supply.

"Now Your Majesty has opened the sea ban in the southeastern provinces to encourage trade, and the minister is worried that the trade in the southeastern provinces is booming, and the agriculture is declining, and over time, the people are profit-seeking, valuing business and abandoning agriculture, not to mention how the people are moral, just the southeast grain is greatly reduced, it is no longer something that the imperial court can bear! Please think deeply about it and act carefully! ”

As soon as Zhang Shenyan's words fell, several more officials came out, knelt down beside Zhang Shenyan, and said, "Li Youlan in the matter of the minister's household department, seconded it!" "Chen Like seconded Huo Huapeng in the matter!"

Next, Li Youlan kowtowed to the matter and said: "The ancestors set up various departments to give the matter, just to accuse the gains and losses of the government. It is the duty of the minister to comment on the government and make a statement for His Majesty. ”

After saying this, Li Youlan continued: "Since Longqing, the court has discussed the opening of Yuegang, but as far as the minister knows, the tax and silver that Yuegang pays to the household department every year is only 350,000 taels. Now the imperial court has opened five more ports, and in the opinion of the ministers, the income is only 200,000 taels.

However, after the opening of the trade, the inhabitants went to sea, or some of them were exiled to Fandao and did not return, half of them were sea bandits, and half of them were people from outside. These people were originally my Ming people, and they were owned by Haikou or Fanbang as soon as they went to sea.

"Over time, residents went to the sea to earn a living, the coastal land was barren, and the land tax and tax were lost.

"The imperial court made a small profit of 200,000 taels, which led to the loss of taxes on the coastal population of the Ming Dynasty, and the ministers did not take it. Your Majesty, please be clear! ”

After Li Youlan said this, she couldn't afford to kowtow.

At this time, Like kowtowed to Huo Huapeng in the matter and said: "Your Majesty, Huo Huapeng has a performance in the matter!" ”

After saying this, Huo Huapeng continued: "Since the opening of the sea in Longqing, the Taixi Zhuyi have traded with our country, and its Yi religion, called Catholics, has also spread in Nanzhi and southeastern provinces. Its so-called Catholic doctrine denigrates the filial piety of our ancestors, which is very different from our Chinese religion.

"The ministers heard that in my Ming Dynasty, there are missionaries, all build big temples, called the Catholic Church, and their people either use money, food, or medicine to lure the people into the church.

Even at the New Moon, men and women gather in the church, close their doors, and chant together, and they disperse at dusk. What he did was sneaky, and it violated my Chinese ethics.

"This is all due to trade with Taixi Zhuyi since the opening of the sea. Previously, the imperial court only opened the port for one month, and even so, the ministers were afraid that the imperial court would now open five more ports for trade, and the Taixi Zhuyi would flock here, and I am afraid that the Chinese people will be even more corrupted. ”

After saying these words, Huo Huapeng also kowtowed to the ground and stopped talking.

These people's statements are not completely unreasonable, at least a little better than what the current Emperor Chongzhen imagined.

Just before this great court meeting, Emperor Chongzhen also received the opinions of the Jiangnan officials he had been waiting for and were more concerned.

For example, Zheng Sanjun, who was the secretary of the Nanjing household department and was in charge of the ministry, Qian Shisheng, the waiter of the Nanjing Ministry of Rites, Zhang Yandeng, the right capital of the Nanjing Metropolitan Procuratorate, and Hui Shiyang, the new political envoy of Zhejiang, and others.

The opinions of these people are all against the opening of the sea.

Among them, Zhang Yandeng, the right capital of the Nanjing Metropolitan Procuratorate, once served as the governor of Zhejiang in history, and he still had some understanding of the situation along the coast of Fujian and Zhejiang, but he still opposed the opening of the sea.

In addition to saying that the sea ban is the ancestral training of the emperor, he also put forward a reason, that is, the coastal areas of Fujian and Zhejiang were originally rampant places of piracy, and since the Jiajing period, many coastal merchants and people were accomplices of pirates, and they were merchants on the shore, and pirates when they went to sea.

Therefore, Zhang Yandeng's point of view is that not only can the sea not be opened, but also must reorganize armaments along the coasts of Fujian, Zhejiang, and Guangdong, and continue to enforce the sea ban, believing that once the merchants and people are allowed to go to the sea, it will be tantamount to using business to support the enemy and use wealth to make enemies, and will strengthen the forces of the sea bandits that have been almost wiped out.

I have to say that Zhang Yandeng's statement tells some of the facts, and there is also a certain amount of truth.

But now this Emperor Chongzhen from later generations knows the future development direction of human society, and the country may be peaceful and stable in the short term, but after more than a hundred years, it will be marginalized by the outside world and left far behind by the modern world.

Compared with the objection reasons put forward by Zhang Yandeng, the objection reasons put forward by Zheng Sanjun, who is also the secretary of the household department in Nanjing and the head of the ministry, are much more objective.

Zheng Sanjun, the head of the household department in Nanjing, was born in the twenty-eighth year of Wanli, and in the original history, in two more years, he would be recruited into Beijing by Emperor Chongzhen, first to be the head of the household department of the Beijing court, and then to be the secretary of the department.

In general, this person can be regarded as a very prestigious minister in the history of the late Ming Dynasty.

If you talk about character, official morality, and cultural cultivation, this Zheng Sanjun is indeed very powerful, and it is worthy of Emperor Chongzhen's reuse, but it is a pity that he also has those stinky problems of other Donglin Party members, and after arriving in Beijing as the head of the household department, in addition to repeatedly suggesting to Emperor Chongzhen that he should reduce taxes and taxes and reduce the burden of money and grain in the southeastern provinces, he was not able to put forward a little effective idea of opening up financial resources.

This time, what he said in the recital to Emperor Chongzhen was similar to what Zhang Shenyan said.

In his compromise, he said that the opening of these treaty ports along the southeast coast will lead to the situation in the southeast coast where the emphasis will continue to be attached to commercial trade and neglect grain production. What he meant was that the southeast was a land of great money and grain for the imperial court, but the arable land was limited, and the result of heavy merchantism would inevitably lead to contempt and neglect of agriculture, and once there was a shortage of grain in the southeast, then the amount of grain shipped to the north would also decrease, and in the long run, it would lead to famine in the north.

Objectively speaking, this Zheng Sanjun is indeed worthy of being a person from the Hubu Shangshu, and he still sees these problems very thoroughly.

When the food security of the Ming Dynasty reached the end of the Ming Dynasty, it was indeed too dependent on Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Huguang and other places, and the north at that time was difficult to be self-sufficient in grain production because of natural disasters and man-made disasters for many years.

But in this regard, Emperor Chongzhen has his own solution, so he is not worried at all.

The most important thing is that these situations mentioned by Zheng Sanjun and Zhang Shenyan and their worries still became a reality even in the late Ming Dynasty and Chongzhen years, when the sea was not opened.

Because the great development of the commercial economy and trade in the southeast was a historical trend that was unavoidable and unstoppable at the end of the Ming Dynasty, and it could not be stopped by blocking, unless it was done after the Manchu Qing Dynasty entered the customs, the giant businessmen and rich men in the Yangtze River Delta in the south of the Yangtze River Delta were killed and robbed clean, otherwise the development trend of commercial trade could not be stopped at all.

Therefore, for Emperor Chongzhen, instead of doing nothing and waiting for the same result, it is better to simply open the sea for trade and put it to death and live later.

As for the views of Qian Shisheng and Hui Shiyang, they are very similar to those above the Beijing Imperial Court, Hui Shiyang is opposed to the policy of attaching equal importance to agriculture and commerce or emphasizing commerce, believing that the Kaihaitong Chamber of Commerce encourages commercial development, which has always led to the government abandoning the basics and ignoring agriculture.

Qian Shisheng's view is similar to Huo Huapeng's, believing that the arrival of Taixi Zhuyi maritime merchants in Daming will destroy the self-sufficient business environment of Daming, and even corrupt the Ming Dynasty's system of human ethics, customs and etiquette.

However, he did not intend to deal with these objections to the court in Beijing, but he dismissed them all from their posts and condemned them for their opposition to the officials in Nanjing and Jiangsu and Zhejiang.