"Fan the people to rebel? Hehe......"

"King Qi is afraid that he is suffering from madness......"

"People are premature and wise, although the King of Qi does not have it, but it seems to be ...... right now"

On the 29th of the first month, when the new issue of "Daming Bao" was released, everyone in the government and the opposition, from the emperor's officials to the peddlers' pawns, was in the column of "people's livelihood", and Zhu Youzhen's bold speech in Fengzhou County was stunned.

Early in the morning, there were many ridicules in the Wenhua Hall that were not afraid of death.

In the face of these ridicules, Chengde and Yanshan officials who passed by frowned, but they didn't say anything after all.

In the final analysis, even people like them who have received a new type of education feel that His Royal Highness King Qi's words are a bit excessive.

There is also a section on loyalty and patriotism in the official school textbooks, which shows that Zhu Youzhen wanted to maintain the Ming Dynasty.

But what will the officials below think after he says this?

Indeed, from the perspective of honest officials, it is not impossible to let the people rebel and bring corrupt officials to justice, as long as the people are not used by people with intentions, from "telling the people's grievances" to "tearing the flag to rebel".

But the problem is that in the world of the Ming Dynasty, few officials dare to say that they are clean, and it can even be said that even the emperor himself does not dare to say that he is clean.

In this case, Zhu Youzhen, as the king of Qi in the Ming Dynasty and the largest landlord leader in this era, actually instigated his own "cattle and horse tenants" to rebel?

The emperor and the Beijing officials in the capital said that Zhu Youzhen's words were completely roasting the grassroots officials on the fire, which was even more life-threatening than Zhu Yuanzhang's "Great Message" back then.

If the people rebel after being wronged, then according to the situation of the grassroots officials, they must not be hung by the city gatehouse.

Therefore, when many officials came to the Wenhua Palace, the first thing they did today was to write an impeachment note and collectively impeach King Qi.

"Long live, the music is all here, it's all the ...... to impeach His Royal Highness King Qi and Daming Daily"

When the music was sent to the Qianqing Palace, Wei Zhongxian opened his mouth cautiously, for fear of angering the emperor.

It's just that what he didn't expect was that Zhu Youxiao didn't mean to be angry, but glanced at Song Shu and said:

"Save it for the winter fire."

Obviously, he didn't intend to see these notes, but he didn't do so to mean that he supported his brother's remarks.

In the final analysis, his first identity is the emperor, followed by Zhu Youzhen's brother.

The reason why he was not angry was because such remarks did not anger him at all.

Recently, he read his younger brother's "Treatise on the Fortunes of the Country" and "The Economic Treatise", coupled with his own experience as an emperor and the reference of historical books, he basically figured out his younger brother's policies.

The consolidation of the Ming imperial power is absolute, but this does not mean that Zhu Youzhen will exploit the people.

In fact, the conflict between the interests of the emperor and the common people is not great, but not as great as the conflict between the emperor and the ministers, and between the ministers and the people.

What are the needs of the emperor?

It is nothing more than to establish one's own prestige as an emperor and make the dynasty strong.

All of this is the word "continuation".

Zhu Youzhen saw it through, he believed that all dynasties could not survive forever, and the collapse of the Ming Dynasty was a matter of time.

With the size of the Ming Dynasty, if you want to collapse, you can often only start to collapse from the inside, and the internal collapse is often because of the uneven distribution of internal interests.

Whether it is the Han Dynasty of the Liu family, the Jin Dynasty of the Sima family, the Sui Dynasty of the Yang family, the Tang Dynasty of the Li family, or the Song Dynasty of the Zhao family, they often collapse first within themselves.

As long as the internal order collapses, then with the invasion of foreign enemies, regardless of whether the foreign enemy invades successfully or not, then this dynasty will basically come to the end of its life.

Xianbei of the Han Dynasty, Wuhu of the Jin Dynasty, Huifu, Tubo and Nanzhao of the Tang Dynasty, Liao, Jin and Yuan of the Song Dynasty, and Later Jin of the Ming Dynasty......

Some of these foreign enemies succeeded, some did not, but in any case, they consumed the great strength of the dynasty itself.

The difference in this point is whether the dynasty can drag down the foreign enemy in a short period of time and give the next dynasty time to develop.

The Han Dynasty boiled the Xianbei Tanshi Huai to death before the Yellow Turban Uprising, and the Tang Dynasty boiled the Hui, Tubo, and Nanzhao to death.

The Song Dynasty boiled Liao to death, but an internal uprising broke out, and the Jin State went south, and the Ming Dynasty faced even more difficult problems than the Song Dynasty.

The Ming Dynasty was an internal rebellion, an external rebellion, and the environment also had a great drought in the north and floods in the south.

The difference between these four dynasties plus the Jin dynasty is that the Song and Ming dynasties failed to survive several male lords of an external regime, but the Han and Tang dynasties did.

If Tanshi Huai hadn't died of illness at the age of forty-five, what would the Three Kingdoms of the late Han Dynasty face in the Yellow Turban Rebellion?

A north resistance to Ding zero, east retreat to Fuyu, west attack Wusun, completely occupy the Xiongnu homeland, once attacked the Wa Kingdom, east and west up to more than 14,000 li, north and south up to more than 7,000 li, many times attacked the Han Dynasty's "edge of the nine counties", refused the Han Huan Emperor "feudal king and affinity", control the string of 400,000 powerful Xianbei.

Such a powerful force, if it takes advantage of the Yellow Turban Rebellion to go south, then judging from the previous situation of the Han army's many disastrous defeats, even if the Wuhu Rebellion will not appear, then the Central Plains will remain chaotic for a long time.

Every dynasty will suffer from internal and external troubles at the end of the period, and only by resisting external troubles, solving internal troubles, and then integrating forces to deal with external troubles, can this dynasty continue.

However, at this point, even Han and Tang only achieved the first step, and to a large extent, they relied on a see-saw to form a foreign enemy.

The long-term external tug of war has also led to the expansion of internal worries, and the strength to solve internal worries in the future is not enough.

The Han Dynasty was unable to resolve its internal contradictions under the tug-of-war with Xianbei, and the Tang Dynasty was unable to resolve its internal contradictions with Hebei.

Daming is very strong at the moment, not only solving most of the foreign enemies, but also entering the first industrial revolution.

Relying on the tractor of the industrial revolution, it seems that the amount of arable land in the Ming Dynasty will increase endlessly in hundreds of years, but does this show that there is no internal contradiction in the Ming Dynasty?

The internal contradiction of the dynasties is the annexation of land, and the annexation of land is the uneven distribution of interests.

Although the Ming Dynasty will have more land after entering the industrial revolution, the problem is that the needs of interests will be different in different eras.

In feudal times, land was the means of production, and when land and food were abundant, people would pursue other things.

With the progress of the times, people themselves have become the means of production, and then money will replace land and become a contradiction of interests in the new era.

Therefore, in the new era, when the gap between the rich and the poor is too large, the Ming Dynasty will also encounter everything that has happened to all dynasties, that is, the uneven distribution of interests.

It is impossible to solve this problem, and Zhu Youxiao may not have time to live to the stage of uneven distribution of benefits, so Zhu Youxiao can only accept his fate.

As far as the territory laid down by Zhu Youzhen is concerned, with the tractor to use it, the Ming Dynasty will not encounter land annexation and too large a gap between the rich and the poor for at least 50 years.

As long as there is no external enemy and internal contradictions, it is difficult to fail with the size of the Ming Dynasty.

Since there is food to eat, it is naturally impossible for the people to rebel.

The people will not rebel, and there will be no internal contradictions.

Since there is no internal contradiction, Zhu Youxiao does not need to block his younger brother's remarks, because there is no soil for rebellion in the current Ming Dynasty.

Moreover, he did not have the ability to take back and destroy some of his brother's words.

Not to mention "Daming Daily", in the official textbooks alone, some of the textbooks compiled by Zhu Youzhen himself are very unfavorable to the rule of the Ming Dynasty.

Thinking of this, Zhu Youxiao thought of Zhu Ciran again, his own good son.

According to his character, I am afraid that after a hundred years, he will not destroy some of the words he respects his uncle.

Father and son can't do it, so this matter can only be left to their grandson.

"Alas......"

Zhu Youxiao sighed, lowered his head and continued to deal with the music.

It's just that while he was dealing with the sparseness, in Fang City, Yiwu County, Jinhua Prefecture, Zhejiang, Zhu Ciran, who was slightly fairer, was squatting on the side of the road with a bowl of morning tea on the street of Fang City.

He squatted and watched the pedestrians on the street, and the quaint streets of Yiwu became the backdrop.

Traditional morning tea is still set up on this long street with a sense of age, and many people sit in the shop to drink tea, but Zhu Ciran can only squat on the side of the road with Liu Shun because he can't grab a place.

"Boss! Another bowl of tea and two pastries! ”

After drinking the tea in his hand, Zhu Ciran turned his head and shouted towards the store.

"It's coming, it's coming!"

The owner of the shop responded loudly, but the whole person was busy making tea and pastries.

Seeing this, Zhu Ciran could only shout, "I'll do it myself", and then got up and walked into the store.

This morning tea shop is said to have been open for more than 400 years, and its ancestors were Han Chinese who fled south when the Northern Song Dynasty fell.

Although Zhu Ciran didn't know whether the news was true or not, judging from the "rusty" powder walls in the store and the walls of the shadows caused by the firewood, all this seemed to be a long time ago.

After taking morning tea and a plate of pastries, Zhu Ciran took a chair that had just gotten up as a guest, he wiped it with a cloth, and then carried the chair back to the door and squatted.

After setting the chair away, he placed a plate of pastries in his hand on the chair and continued to eat while looking around.

On the streets, the rows of houses are not known when they were built, and to this day, the horse-head walls on the roof have been smoothed out and a little less ostentatious.

On the opposite side of Zhu Ciran, through the constantly moving pedestrians, he saw an old man walking out of a wonton shop with breakfast, sitting on the street at the door with a chair, and eating breakfast simply and quietly.

Now it is the time of Chen, and the time of Chen is also the most lively time of Yiwu Market.

Looking down the street, the shops on both sides of the old street are full of people, and the shops and streets are already full of people.

The sound of tea tasting, birdsong, iron, and coal-burning stoves sounded endlessly, and there was a unique taste in the ears.

Although Yiwu is a small county, Zhejiang is a large province with many merchants, so there are many tourists and businessmen who pass through Yiwu.

Many merchants often come to the city before dawn to trade with goods, discussing whose goods are better and who has made money today, in short, the "information" exchanged every day is on the dinner table in the morning.

Because of their chatting behavior, sometimes there are not enough tables in some shops.

Faced with this situation, some shopkeepers removed a few old wooden door panels and laid them out, pulled up a few benches, and opened another table.

Even if the environment is like this, no one dislikes it.

For example, where Zhu Ciran is located, those old tea customers drink morning tea and make tea houses every day, and the environment is not too simple.

Others, such as Zhu Ciran, simply sit on a row of stone piers under the eaves and drink tea leisurely.

The teahouses here don't have specific names, just a "teahouse" cloth sail as a signboard, but they all have their own loyal fans.

In the face of old teahouses, old tea customers often choose one or two as favorites, and then like to bring their own cups and add their own water to make tea.

In the steamy water of the tea, Liu Shun disliked the pastries being too sweet, so he went to other shops to buy a pair of fried dough sticks and some other spicy snacks.

Even so, the head of the teahouse didn't say anything to them, but kindly asked if they wanted to add more tea.

Zhu Ciran has long been accustomed to such an attitude, and it seems that many merchants and vendors in Zhejiang like to do regular business and cultivate their own regular customers.

Such an attitude makes the market less utilitarian and more serene and leisurely.

is also because of the affinity of the shopkeeper, so here, Zhu Ciran can listen to the national affairs in the mouths of the tea guests, listen to them talk about the interesting things in the township, and take care of the small things in the homeland.

"You say that King Qi is also powerful, and he dares to ask us mud-legged people to rebel."

"Huh...... I don't believe that there will be rebellion, who can go without food these days. ”

"But the newspaper said that there is not enough food in the north, and we don't have enough in Zhejiang."

"That's all exaggeration, the government just likes to scare people."

"That group of northern barbarians has divided so much land, as long as they rent out a dozen acres of land at home and do odd jobs every year, I don't believe that a dozen taels of silver is not enough to eat."

"That's right...... It is estimated that it was written by the imperial court to scare it. ”

"Hahaha......"

In the teahouse, several men in silk were ridiculing what Zhu Youzhen said in the "Daming Daily".

In this regard, Zhu Ciran and Liu Shun, who were squatting at the door, did not look at them at all, nor did they make any moves.

Zhu Ciran really didn't bother to pay attention to them, but Liu Shun was used to this kind of ignorant person for a long time.

As long as Zhu Ciran didn't speak, he didn't bother to repair this group of short-sighted and arrogant villagers.

"Master, you said that this Yiwu has been crying for decades, and he keeps saying that there is no one, so what are these guys doing?"

Liu Shun glanced at the group of villagers who were comparatively and buying silk to wear, and Zhu Ciran also took a look.

"Since the 38th year of Jiajing, the dynasty has recruited more than 20 soldiers in Yiwu, a total of more than 60,000 people, and Yiwu during the Wanli period is indeed a scarcity of men."

"However, since the beginning of Yiwu officials, Yiwu has been recuperating for more than 30 years, and it is common for the population to be restored."

"If you look closely, you can see that the population of Yiwu is indeed smaller than that of other Zhejiang counties."

Zhu Ciran explained the problem of Yiwu's population, and at the same time finished eating what he had at hand.

He got up and patted the scraps of the pastry on his hand, and then walked down the street.

For Zhu Ciran, he likes to hang out among the people not because he is bored, nor because he thinks it is fun, but because he enjoys the fireworks in the world that cannot be enjoyed in the court.

Strangers like him sometimes want to eliminate the sense of alienation from an unfamiliar place, and sometimes all they need is a small shop, a kind smile, or a verbal chat with the local people.

Listen to the shortcomings of the people's parents in the alleys, taste the ups and downs of the world in the teahouses and restaurants, and taste the rise and fall of the millennium in the gourmet pastries......

All of this made his trip to the south more charming, and the information obtained from it also made him feel that the trip was worthwhile.

】

As a county seat, Yiwu also has a profound historical and cultural heritage, for example, the morning tea he drank just now originated from the dock culture of Yiwu for nearly a thousand years.

Since the Qin Dynasty, Yiwu has become a port town relying on the Yiwu River.

Compared with the street market, the streets with waterways in Yiwu City are lined with shops and filled with a variety of goods.

The waterways come and go, rowing towards the Yiwu River, where businessmen gather.

Zhu Ciran stood on a small bridge, and saw the boatmen coming and going on the bridge, and also witnessed the old man making scales, and the craftsman who was sitting at the door weaving bamboo utensils......

For these people, he stepped forward to inquire and chat one by one, but compared with the people in the northwest and southwest, the Yiwu dialect and official dialect made Zhu Ciran have a headache.

He couldn't get some of the things he cared about through normal communication, so he could only find some thirteen or fourteen-year-old teenagers to understand what he wanted to know.

Fortunately, what he wanted to know was nothing more than the people's clothing, food, housing and transportation, as well as the governance of the local government.

The latter may be a little embarrassed by this group of teenagers who are one or two years younger than Zhu Ciran, but for the former, they know everything and say everything.

Zhu Ciran quickly got what he wanted, and took this opportunity to get out of Yiwu County, and found more than a dozen brocade guards guarding his bicycle in a teahouse in a market town outside the city.

"Let's go."

With Zhu Ciran's greeting, the Jinyi guards got on the horses and got on the cars, and their journey will continue to begin, and Zhu Ciran also spent almost a month to understand the situation in Chuzhou and Jinhua.

First of all, there is the issue of population, the paper population of the two provinces is 890,000 and 860,000 respectively, but after so many days of Zhu Ciran's movement, he can conclude that the population of the two provinces is no less than 3 million.

In addition, in terms of land situation, the land that can be reclaimed as cultivated land in the two prefectures has long been reclaimed, and most of it is growing cash crops, and less than half of the total number of fields are planted with grain.

If there are only more than 10 million people in Zhejiang, it will definitely not be able to do this level, so Zhu Ciran is even more sure of the guess that Zhejiang's population is about 30 million.

In addition, from an economic point of view, Zhejiang's wealth is far beyond Zhu Ciran's imagination, and this kind of wealth is not the wealth of the people, but the wealth of the local gentry and the gap between the local rich and the poor.

Zhejiang has a total of more than 43 million mu of cultivated land in Daming's "Fish Scale Atlas", but the actual situation is probably 478 million mu.

Although there is so much land, most of it is used by the people of Zhejiang to grow mulberry trees and cotton.

These mulberry trees were used to raise silkworms, while silk and cotton were sold by the squires to cloth farms in various places.

The reason why they don't sell to the royal store is because once something enters the royal store, then the 10% tax is automatically deducted.

In order to avoid the 10% tax, the gentry sold silk and cotton to cloth estates.

As a result, there was a shortage of cotton and silk in the market, so the emperor could only raise the purchase price, while the cloth village sold the silk and cotton to the emperor at a high price.

It may not sound like much money, but if you look at the specifics, it's clear at a glance.

According to Zhu Ciran's understanding, the squires sold silk and cotton to the cloth village at the price of three taels per load of silk and two taels per load of cotton, and the cloth village sold it to the emperor at the price of three taels of silk and two taels of cotton.

In this way, even if you have to pay 10% of the tax, the cloth village can still earn 100 wen per load of cotton and silk.

This extra 100 wen became the cost of the imperial store, and the imperial store had no way to take the gentry.

Since the fields of these gentry were all modified in the "Atlas of Fish Scales" as inferior grain fields, after receiving a profit of several dozen taels, they only had to pay a symbolic amount of one or two taels of grain and silver.

This is just a few small squires, if it is a large squire who owns hundreds of thousands of acres of land, then its annual tax avoidance can reach thousands or tens of thousands of taels.

These large and small squires combined, Da Ming had to collect at least one or two million taels less on them every year.

If these two million taels are collected, they can be hundreds of thousands of dollars for teaching, or tens of thousands of veterans' pensions, or the capital for building railways......

But the problem is that although this silver exists, the court cannot collect it.

This situation is infuriating, and this is only the tip of the iceberg that Zhu Ciran can see.

Where he could not see, where he could not understand, there were many ways for the squires to evade taxes.

In addition to avoiding taxes, they also violated the law by obtaining a large amount of cement through connections, or directly asking officials to level the roads in front of their homes when they built the village roads.

Of course, it's more than that.

At a cheap price, some people use it to build houses, some people use it to build ancestral halls, and some people use it to pave village roads.

Zhu Ciran has seen this situation more than once.

You must know that Jinhua and Chuzhou are still counties in the middle and lower reaches of the eleven prefectures in Zhejiang, and it is conceivable what Hangzhou, Ningbo, Shaoxing, Jiaxing, Huzhou and other prefectures will look like in the upper reaches.

Of course, in addition to the above, the more important thing is the land annexation in Zhejiang.

The people of Zhejiang have been working, not because they like it, but because they have no land to cultivate.

The number of military tuntians in Zhejiang is just that, which is simply insignificant compared to the huge population.

Over the years, land annexation has monopolized nearly seventy percent of the land in Zhejiang's market, and ninety percent of the people can only control thirty percent of Zhejiang's land.

In order to survive, they could only become tenants of the gentry.

Those who could not become tenants had to go to the cities to work, because when the land was annexed to a certain extent, many of the gentry who were not satisfied with it would get involved in commerce.

They monopolized the cloth villages, teahouses, wharves, and mines in the south of the Yangtze River, and countless people who had no land could only work for them and earn that meager profit.

Such a situation has formed a closed loop, which is very tricky to deal with.

Therefore, Zhu Ciran understood why his uncle let him go to the three provinces of Shanxi first, then the three southwestern provinces, then Liangguang, Fujian, and finally Jiangnan.

From poor to rich, from easy to difficult......

It may be easy to govern Shanxi, but if you want to govern Jiangnan, which is full of gentry, you need to weigh whether you are qualified enough.

Once the Jiangnan squires are cornered, then they will jump over the wall in a hurry.

If only in terms of popular uprisings, their influence is not great, and the six battalions of soldiers and horses in the Eastern Army Governor's Mansion in Zhejiang alone can suppress all the popular uprisings.

The problem is that they not only have appeal and influence among the people, but also have their own spokesmen in temples and even in the military.

If you want to clean them up, you have to think about cleaning up the inside first.

As soon as he thought of this, Zhu Ciran couldn't help but doubt himself.

He looked up at the country road in front of him, and although the bicycle under his feet kept walking, he seemed to be standing still compared to the road.

Should he be like his uncle, a man who dealt with the squire, or a man who compromised with the gentry in order to maintain the stability of the Ming Dynasty?

Faced with this choice, his brows furrowed, and at the same time, he couldn't help but think of Zhu Youzhen's words in this morning's "Daming Daily".

"What should I do......"