Zhang Jiashi knows very well that if Zhu Yuanzhang and Liu Bang, the two founding emperors, are compared, in terms of people's livelihood, Zhu Yuanzhang will undoubtedly help the common people more.

But there is one point, which is also the comparison between Zhu Yuanzhang and Liu Bang, that is, Zhu Yuanzhang adopts an extremely strict system for the salaries of officials.

According to one theory, that is, the Ming Dynasty officials' salaries were very low, and many low-level officials could hardly make a living by relying on official salaries, while high-ranking officials could not rely on official salaries to maintain their luxurious lives. Therefore, most of the actual income of the magistrates comes from the interception of local taxes, while a lot of the income of the Beijing officials comes from the gifts of the magistrates. For example, a county official, Zhengqipin, earns 90 stone rice a year, that is, 6,372 kilograms of rice, and even if each person eats 180 kilograms of rice in one year, these rice are only enough for 35 people to eat for a year. What's even more terrifying is that 40% of the rice he can't get, and that part is openly exchanged by the emperor for other things, such as silk cloth, cotton cloth, and even some small things.

No wonder, during the Hongwu period, Luo Furen, a scholar of Hongwenguan, lived a very honest life, because he had no money to buy a house, so he could only live in a broken house in the suburbs, Zhu Yuanzhang once ran to his house to see, and saw a migrant worker outside the two broken tile houses carrying a bucket to paint the wall, so he asked, where is Luo Furen? Unexpectedly, this benevolent brother was shocked when he saw the emperor, knelt down and said: "The minister is Luo Furen!" This made Zhu Yuanzhang also feel embarrassed and surprised. It is conceivable that if all of them are in accordance with the official standards formulated by the Ming Dynasty, ten out of ten ministers will not have enough food and clothing. Therefore, most officials had to rely on the use of power for personal gain to mix up some money for food and drink.

The low salaries also led to a large extent the corruption of Ming officials in order to support their families......

It's just that Zhu Yuanzhang himself doesn't think it's his fault, and even doesn't hesitate to popularize the law among readers for the sake of anti-corruption:

In order to prevent corruption among officials at all levels, Zhu Yuanzhang set up the Imperial History Observatory (later changed to the Imperial Procuratorate) in the central organization, with officials such as the left and right imperial historians and the left and right deputy imperial historians, whose duties were to "correct the impeachment of the hundred divisions, identify the wrongs, and supervise the various provinces". There are also thirteen ways to supervise the imperial history, and its duty is to "investigate and correct the official evil of the internal and external departments, or to impeach in the face of the seal, or to impeach the seal".

In addition, Zhu Yuanzhang also formulated laws and decrees to severely crack down on corrupt officials and corrupt officials. Before becoming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang had ordered Li Shanchang, Liu Ji, Tao An and others to formulate the "Ming Decree" and promulgate it all over the world, with a total of 285 decrees. He also ordered the Confucian ministers to "directly interpret" the laws and decrees so that everyone could know about them.

In the fourth year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered: "From now on, if there are officials who commit stolen goods, do not lend." In the sixth year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered Liu Weiqian, the secretary of the Criminal Department, and others to revise the law and formulate and promulgate the "Daming Law", which had a total of 606 articles in this period.

However, after the promulgation of the "Da Ming Law", the effect was not obvious, and more and more offenders broke the law. Zhu Yuanzhang was very annoyed, he said: "I wanted to get rid of greed, but I wanted to kill and commit crimes." It was decided to use heavy regulations to curb corruption, "but to order the arrest of officials and people for transgressions", and personally compiled the "Ming Dahe".

Among them, there are a total of 10 items in this Ming Dynasty: one is "collecting households"; the second is "paying for security"; the third is "sending grain to the fields by trickery"; the fourth is "the people do not understand what they should do"; the fifth is "sprinkling the barren land and throwing away the wasteland"; the sixth is "relying on the law to commit treachery"; the seventh is "stealing the army by the air"; the eighth is "the assassin is on the run"; the ninth is "the official is dismissing and selling the prisoners"; and the tenth is "the sergeant and doctor Huan are not used by the king", and the crime is to copy the book.

After the book was completed, Zhu Yuanzhang took the "Ming Da Huo" as the study course of Guozijian and the content of the imperial examination, and in the township, it was taught to students by the school teacher. Prisoners in prison who are able to read the Ming Da Yu by heart will be punished by one degree.

Because Zhu Yuanzhang vigorously promoted popular law education, "at one time, there were more than 190,000 teachers and students in the world who came to the court." Soon, Zhu Yuanzhang expanded the "Ming Dahe" into three parts, "the legislative affairs are severe, and the corrupt officials are especially punished."

In the twenty-second year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the Criminal Department to revise the law again, with a total of 460 articles.

......

Zhu Yuanzhang's punishment for corruption is also very cruel:

During his reign, Zhu Yuanzhang personally handled many corruption cases and killed countless corrupt officials. Among them, the most appalling are the empty seal case and the Guo Huan case.

The empty seal case occurred in the fifteenth year of Hongwu.

The Ming Dynasty stipulated that at the end of each year, the household department should audit the income and expenditure account books of each prefecture, prefecture and county, and the local government sent officials to the household department every year to report the financial revenue and expenditure, and only after the household department reviewed and approved that it was correct, it was allowed to be reimbursed. Because many places are far away from the capital, in order to reduce the trouble of going back and forth, the officials in charge of reporting the income and expenditure in various places are accustomed to bring blank booklets stamped with the official seal in advance to the household department, and correct them if they are rejected.

This method of "signing and printing first, and then writing" was originally a common practice in the early Ming Dynasty, and some household officials colluded with the local government to use these blank documents that had been stamped with official seals to fill in false expenditure data, taking advantage of the opportunity to embezzle money and grain, and enrich their own pockets. In the fifteenth year of Hongwu, after Zhu Yuanzhang discovered this situation, he "thought it was a deception" and immediately ordered an investigation. All the officials in charge of the seals of the local government were executed, the adjutant was beaten with a hundred sticks to fill the frontier of the army, and all those who signed their names were arrested and imprisoned. Hundreds of people were executed in this case, and countless others were imprisoned and imprisoned on the frontier.

Guo Huan's case occurred in the eighteenth year of Hongwu. Guo Huan is a household servant, and he colluded with Li Yu and Zhao Quande, officials of the Beiping Chengxuan Political Envoy Department, and officials of the Procuratorial Envoy Department to form a corruption gang and steal more than 700 stone of official grain.

After the case in the eighteenth year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang "tortured the confession of the Imperial Law Division" and found that Guo Huan and others had embezzled a large amount of treasury materials in addition to embezzling public grain, equivalent to 24 million stone of grain. Through further investigation, some officials of the Sixth Ministry and many local officials were also implicated, and Zhu Yuanzhang executed all the main culprits, implicating tens of thousands of people in prison.

Zhu Yuanzhang was eager to kill all the corrupt officials in the world, he said: "If this evil is not reformed, if you want to become a good government, you will not be able to get it." "As long as it is corruption, no matter how high the official of the person involved is, Zhu Yuanzhang will not be merciful when dealing with it.

In the sixteenth year of Hongwu, Shangshu Kaiji of the Criminal Department accepted a bribe from the family of a death row prisoner, and Langzhong Qiu Yan exonerated him from the death penalty. He also extorted money and goods from other prisoners, and led to the tragedy of suicide for all 20 members of his family. His illegal behavior was denounced by a prison officer, and Kaiji, the ****** of the Criminal Department, and Wang Shuzheng, the head of the Criminal Department, arrested the prison officer and killed him.

This matter was discovered by the superintendent Yu Shi Tao Yuan Zhong and reported to Zhu Yuanzhang, who was furious and executed Kaiji, ******, Qiu Yan and others.

Even if he was a founding hero, if there was any illegal behavior, Zhu Yuanzhang would severely punish him. Yongjiahou Zhu Liangzu was brave and good at fighting, and made many military exploits. But this person does not learn and has no skills, and when he was ordered to go out of Guangdong, "he did a lot of lawlessness". In the thirteenth year of Hongwu, Panyu Zhixian Daotong arrested a local tyrant, and other tyrants bribed Zhu Liangzu and begged him to release the arrested tyrant. Zhu Liangzu invited Daotong to a banquet and asked Daotong to release the local tyrant. Dao Tong said sharply: "Minister, why should I be enslaved by the villain!"

Zhu Liangzu said that he couldn't move the same way, and he actually released the local tyrant himself.

Zhu Liangzu also accepted the rich people and Luo's daughters as concubines, and the Luo brothers were traitorous and were arrested by Daotong, and Zhu Liangzu released them again. Daotong was indignant, and the performance exposed Zhu Liangzu's illegal behavior, but his performance did not reach the capital, and Zhu Liangzu's impeachment of his rude boss came first, Zhu Yuanzhang did not know the inside story, and sent a messenger to kill Daotong.

Later, when I saw Daotong's recital, I understood the real situation. He felt that Daotong's position was low, and if he dared to expose the minister's lawlessness, he must be a backbone minister, so he sent a messenger to pardon Daotong. But when the envoys arrived in Panyu, Daotong had already been killed.

Zhu Yuanzhang was very dissatisfied with Zhu Liangzu's false accusation of Taoism, and was extremely angry, so he immediately summoned Zhu Liangzu and his son Zhu Xian into Beijing and beat Zhu Liang's grandfather and son to death with a leather whip.

While punishing corrupt officials with heavy punishments, Zhu Yuanzhang also vigorously commended anti-corruption heroes and rewarded whistleblowers. In the ninth year of Hongwu, Fujian participated in the politics of Wei Jian and Qu Zhuang "flogged the traitors to death", and Zhu Yuanzhang gave the seal book a commendation.

In July of the 19th year of Hongwu, Wang Guan, the prefect of Suzhou, "governed the traitors to death", and Zhu Yuanzhang sent a messenger to comfort him. Chen Shouliu and three others in Changshu County tied up the corrupt official Gu Ying to Beijing to perform in front of him, and Zhu Yuanzhang immediately rewarded him and warned the local officials not to retaliate against Chen Shouliu and others.

Zhu Yuanzhang, in view of the fact that the government of officials at the end of the Yuan Dynasty was indulgent and the people's livelihood was withering, he did not hesitate to punish corrupt officials with heavy punishments. Although certain results have been achieved, many innocent people have been implicated or even killed because the punishment is too indiscriminate and the evidence is not heavy.

In the case of empty seals, there were actually quite a few people who died in vain, and not everyone in the government's seal was corrupt and perverted the law, and it was understandable that "signing the seal first and then writing" was a common practice in the early Ming Dynasty. As Zheng Shili said: "The provincial government is six or seven thousand miles away, and it is three or four thousand miles away." The book is completed and then sealed, and it is necessary to go back and forth to the year.

Therefore, printing first and then writing, this expedient matter, has been a long time, how deep is the sin. Moreover, the national legislation must first make it clear to the world, and then those who commit the law will also commit the crime. Since the founding of the country, I have not heard of the law of empty seals, and there are divisions that inherit each other, and I don't know its crimes. ”

Jining prefect Fang Keqin is a famous incorruptible official in the early Ming Dynasty, he lives frugally, "a cloth robe is not easy for ten years, and the day is no longer meat", for the rule of morality, the political achievements are very outstanding, Hongwu eight years was received by Zhu Yuanzhang. Later, he was falsely imprisoned, and when he was about to be released from prison, he was arrested and imprisoned again because he was implicated, and died in prison. Zheng Shili's brother, Zheng Shiyuan, was a local official, but he was not the one who held the seal, and as a result, he was also punished with canes and sent to Jiangpu.

In Guo Huan's case, there were even more people who died in vain, and because they were tortured to extract confessions, Guo Huan and others also described some officials who had no contact with them as being members of the same party, and Zhu Yuanzhang killed them all regardless of whether there was evidence or not, causing many families to be ruined.

In the "Ming Dynasty" compiled by Zhu Yuanzhang himself, "the listed Ling Chi Xiao showed that there were thousands of people who were punished without worry, and there were tens of thousands of people who abandoned the city", and all kinds of torture tricks were everywhere. He also set up the crime of "scholars are not used by the king", which can be described as unprecedented. The uncle and nephew of the Confucian scholar Xia Boqi cut off his fingers, and Yao Run and Wang Mo, who were from Suzhou, refused to be hired by the government, and as a result, they were all killed and their homes were raided. Zhu Yuanzhang's blind killing behavior has gone far beyond the scope of anti-corruption, and it is no wonder that later generations regard him as a tyrant.

......

The Great Edict was a special criminal law during the reign of Zhu Yuanzhang in the early Ming Dynasty.

In order to deal with crimes severely, especially crimes committed by officials, Zhu Yuanzhang summed up the cases he personally tried and combined them with the remarks he made on the cases to form a special criminal law that admonished his subjects all over the world to strictly abide by. In Chinese history, the Great Edict is one of the most widely used laws, and basically every family must have a copy.

Moreover, the imperial examination will involve the content of the "Ming Dahe". Later in Zhu Yuanzhang's reign, he believed that the country's governance had been effective, so he incorporated many of the contents of the edict into other statutes, and abolished the extrajudicial torture used.

After Zhu Yuanzhang's death, the edict basically had no legal effect, but its impact was: at the end of the Ming Dynasty, if someone still kept the edict, then the punishment could be reduced by one degree when committing the following crimes.

The punishment is heavier than that of the "Da Ming Law", and its effect is above the law, and the Da Hu uses a lot of extrajudicial torture, such as cutting off hands, castration into slavery, etc., which is equivalent to a big regression in the penal system.

Compared with the laws of the Ming Dynasty and the laws and regulations of the feudal dynasties of previous dynasties, the "Great Message" has the following characteristics:

Cite various cases of using torture to punish officials, and openly affirm the necessity and rationality of extrajudicial punishment. The "Great Edict" lists thousands of cases of clan punishment, Ling Chi, and beheading, and more than 10,000 cases of beheading and abandonment of the city, among which there are dozens of types of torture, including clan punishment, Ling Chi, beheading, beheading, capital crimes, tattoos on the ink face, picking tendons to remove fingers, picking tendons to remove knees, severed hands, cutting off toes, cutting off feet, flail orders, often called flail orders, flail travels, heavy punishments, confiscation into the army, castration into slavery, and so on.

For the same crime, the "Great Edict" is much more serious than the Ming Law, and many of them should only be punished with flogging and canes according to the Ming Law, but the "Great Edict" is increased to the death penalty.

There are many crimes that are not found in the Ming Law Firm, such as "forbidden to travel and eat", "citizens are not allowed to be officials", "officials are strictly forbidden to go to the countryside", "the people take harm to the people", "the sergeant is not used by the king", etc.

Emphasis is placed on the rule of officials. Generally speaking, the spearhead of the "Great Edict" is aimed at all officials and the people, but the focus is on punishing corrupt officials and corrupt officials, and more than 80 percent of its entries belong to officials.

From the eighteenth year of Hongwu, he personally "collected the transgressions of the officials and the people, and the article was a great edict" and promulgated it all over the world. The name of "Da Huo" comes from the "Book of Shang", which is a reprimand to his subjects when he recounted the remnants of the Zhou Dynasty's expedition to the east. The word "big message" means "Chen Dadao to the world".

The purpose of Zhu Yuanzhang's promulgation of the "Great Edict" was to follow the example of Zhou Gong to warn his subjects with "the affairs of the world" and always take it as a warning, and also to prevent and suppress the people's resistance with strict orders.

Liu Ji once advised Zhu Yuanzhang not to be too severe, he said: "After the frost and snow, there will be a spring, and now the national prestige has been established, and it is advisable to be lenient." When Ye Boju, the instructor of Pingyao County, wrote the edict, he also said that Zhu Yuanzhang had handled three things too much, one was that the division was too extravagant, the second was that the punishment was too complicated, and the third was that he was too anxious to seek treatment. It's a pity that Zhu Yuanzhang didn't accept their opinions.

In the 30th year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang was already a 70-year-old man, and he revised the law for the last time and promulgated the "Daming Law". The main purpose of this revision of the law is to attach some items of the "Ming Great Decree" to the "Great Ming Law", "all the prohibited rules of the list are removed", and the heavy code is changed to "light code".

Zhu Yuanzhang also came to the noon gate to explain to the ministers the purpose of revising the law: "I imitate the ancient for the rule, the Ming etiquette is to guide the people, the law is to eliminate the stubborn, and the publication is the order." It has been done for a long time, and the offenders are still numerous, so they pretend to make the "Great Message" to show the people, so that they can know the way to avoid evil...... The law is in the department, and the people are not aware of it, so the criminal officer is ordered to attach it to the articles of the law. ”

According to the history books, the reason why Zhu Yuanzhang personally compiled the "Ming Dahe" is "out of temporary expediency, not the original intention".

In his later years, he promulgated the "Great Ming Law", mainly for the sake of his successor, Zhu Yunwen, the grandson of the emperor. He also told Zhu Yunwen the reason for ruling the country with heavy regulations: "If I rule the troubled times, the punishment must be severe; ”

This sentence shows that Zhu Yuanzhang believes that he has achieved "phased" results in punishing corrupt officials through decades of efforts, and that his successor will face a "peaceful life", and there is no need to continue to implement harsh punishment and harsh laws like him.

(End of chapter)