Those who decided to go across the ocean to become a vassal were Zhu Yihai, the king of Lu, and Zhu Yujian, the king of Nanyang.

Zhu Youjian hereby restores Zhu Yujian as the prince of the Tang Dynasty and makes him the lord of the Tang State.

And King Lu was also named the lord of Lu.

But in fact, no one knows how far the Tang King Zhu Yujian and the Lu King Zhu Yihai can go and whether they will succeed in becoming a vassal.

Even Zhu Youzhen himself didn't know.

Many civil officials thought that Zhu Youzhen, who was thousands of miles away from the Ming Dynasty, circled some territories to the vassal kings and nobles, just for the reason to cut off the vassal king's land.

But what no one knows is that Zhu Youzhen actually hopes in his heart that these vassal kings who dare to go out and break through can really create a Han regime on another continent.

Zhu Yujian, the king of Tang, Zhu Yihai, the king of Lu, and other vassal kings who chose to go out to take risks made Zhu Youzhen feel very pleased.

At a time when the West had begun to colonize the Americas and had monopolized most of the gold production in the Americas.

The fact that Zhu Yujian and other vassal kings went abroad also shows that from this moment on, Zhu Youzhen is not alone in working hard for the progress of the Ming Dynasty.

Most of the vassal kings still chose to stay in the capital, and even if they did not have fiefdoms, they were not willing to take the initiative to "exile".

Zhu Youzhen's Ming court recovered all the fiefdoms belonging to the vassal king, and unified them under the imperial village.

The Imperial Estate then distributed the land to the tenant farmers of these feudal kings, and the surplus was distributed to other landless or landless poor peasants.

The means of production are a collective term for people and land.

The gentry and vassal classes controlled most of the means of production of the Ming Dynasty, not only in terms of land control, but also in terms of population control.

The total population on the Yellow Book of the Ming Dynasty has always been more than 10 million households, or about 60 or 70 million, while the actual population is no less than 200 million, which shows that nearly three times the human resources are also monopolized by the landlord class.

And in this landlord class, the vassal kings naturally have to occupy an important part.

After all, the total size of the Ming Dynasty vassal group has reached one million, even if it has decreased by hundreds of thousands due to war since the end of the Ming Dynasty, it is not a small number.

Therefore, the hidden population such as tenant farmers and slaves controlled by these vassal groups is naturally not a small number.

Now that Zhu Youzhen has caused the vassal kings to lose their original land and cut their income, these vassal kings are naturally unable to support such a large population.

Therefore, after the vassal kings had no choice but to release these populations after they had no choice but to lose their original acres.

Of course, these vassal kings also wanted to take this opportunity to see what trouble they caused to the imperial court if they didn't care about how these low-level slaves and tenant farmers who used to live on the palace in the old days caused trouble.

However, Zhu Youzhen's direct distribution of land to these tenant farmers and slaves and the restoration of their status as yeoman farmers dashed the hopes of these vassal kings.

Divide the land of the vassal kings to the original tenant farmers and slaves, and the tenant farmers and slaves will naturally stop making trouble, and will even be grateful to the imperial court.

However, the reason why Zhu Youzhen allocated the land through the Huangzhuang instead of directly by the cabinet was that the name of the land belonged to him, the emperor, and that it was allocated to these people by himself, the emperor.

As a result, these tenant farmers and slaves were able to farm in order to survive by paying rent, or agricultural tax, to the imperial court.

From a certain point of view, in fact, it is actually Zhu Youzhen who intends to realize the public ownership of the land.

Zhu Youzhen actually didn't know whether the land was better for private or public ownership, but he knew that in either case, the disadvantaged common people would not have land in the end.

Rather than allowing the private property of the people to be annexed again in the future, it is better to directly attribute it to the emperor, so as to expressly prohibit these people from buying and selling the land, so that the Ming yeoman farmers can not be reduced.

But Zhu Youzhen worries that one day in the future, the ruling circles will deprive these ordinary people of their right to use these lands, or forcibly change the function of these cultivated lands from the production of agricultural products to the production of industrial raw materials because of the pursuit of other economic interests.

In that case, the agricultural output of the Ming Dynasty will decline, the economic foundation will be destroyed, and the economy of the entire Ming Dynasty will collapse.

Therefore, Zhu Youzhen thought that it might be necessary for him to set a red line for cultivated land, that is, stipulating that the fields used for agricultural production in the Ming Dynasty should not be less than how many mu, and even used this as an iron law to warn future generations to abide by it.

In this way, the basic agricultural foundation of the Ming Dynasty may be guaranteed.

But in any case, the chronic problem of the vassal group's drag on the Ming Dynasty was finally solved by Zhu Youzhen.

On the surface, this solution may not seem so difficult compared to the solution of the Manchu southward movement, but in fact it is because the problem began several years ago.

Because Li Zicheng and other thieves rebelled in a few years, countless vassal kings died or disappeared, and among the remaining vassal kings, except for those who rebelled and were ambushed, the rest of the rest were not strong in their sense of resistance, not to mention that Zhu Youzhen also let the torture of countless sinners warn these vassal kings.

Although most of the current vassal kings still remain in the capital, they still have to receive a monthly salary.

This is naturally insignificant, Zhu Youzhen is not a person who is willing to suffer, since these vassal kings are still in the capital and still receive Yulu, Zhu Youzhen will naturally not let them be too idle, and from time to time he will also send them to do some things to fight with the civil officials.

The question of the vassal king is essentially the same as the problem of the gentry class, which is just a political system that exploits the people at the bottom.

Zhu Youzhen's solution to the problem of vassal kings is equivalent to easing the issue of land annexation in the Ming Dynasty and easing the class contradictions, thus making the country more stable.

But for Zhu Youzhen, this may just be the beginning.

His actions against the vassal kings were only a small test, and he was still targeting the terrible group of the court, that is, the gentry class.

It is the hardest thing to do to get this privileged class, who truly control most of the empire's wealth, to pay taxes for the running of the empire.

Zhu Youzhen didn't like the emperors of the Manchu Qing Dynasty a lot, but he only liked the four elder brothers Yongzheng.

Because although this person is the worst hacked by the literati in the comparison between "One Emperor of the Ages" and "Ten Complete Martial Arts", he is actually the most willing Manchu chieftain.

It can be said that it is not good governance, nor is it a sharp weapon to attack the privileged strata of the official gentry.

But Zhu Youzhen knew that even if he was the emperor, he was afraid that it would be very difficult to force it and might have the worst consequences.

Even if the commercial tax is raised, people will be assassinated, not to mention that the officials and gentry will pay the grain in one piece.

These days, Zhu Youzhen has been thinking about how to use a more secure way to deal with these most privileged strata.

Perhaps it is a good way to cultivate an agent, and a minister of Wang Anshi and Zhang Ju will take the place of himself.

Because of this, Zhu Youzhen is selecting and testing such courtiers.

The first choice he chose was Gao Hongtu.

This time, many of the problems of the vassal king were handled by him personally, and in the next salt tax reform, he asked Gao Hongtu to personally take action, so as to see if Gao Hongtu had the ability to carry out a new policy of integrated grain payment for the officials and gentry after the salt tax reform.

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(End of chapter)