Unexpectedly, in the back hall of the Yamen of Chilong Town, it is surprisingly neat, and it seems that Mayor Wu here is also a thoughtful and meticulous person. Pen ~ fun ~ Pavilion www.biquge.info saw that everything in the back hall was placed in an orderly manner, Xie Yixiang was not too sure of his actions, but seeing such a situation at this moment, his heart was overjoyed.

It was now the fourth watch, and there was silence in the middle of the night, not even the slightest noise of wind and insects. Under the faint light of the oil lamp in Xie Yixiang's hand, the place where the official documents were stored in the back hall was extremely eye-catching. But seeing the whole wall on the west side of the back hall, it is clearly a full-top wooden cabinet, covered with drawers the size of bricks of the city wall, as if the kind of drawers in the pharmacy where various medicinal materials are placed, densely stacked from the ground to the roof, and the two sections are also against the north and south walls respectively; In the closet, there are at least a thousand official documents waiting to be consulted.

However, this is difficult for Xie Yixiang, although she has not served in the criminal arrest room for a long time, she is the best at handling official documents. This is because Xie Yixiang, as the daughter of the general Xie Fengxuan, although she is serving in the torture room, the officials do not dare to let her put her in danger, so most of the work assigned to her is for her to deal with all kinds of documents. At present, although there are a lot of official documents stored in the back hall of Chilong Town, they are not as magnificent as those official documents piled up in the criminal arrest room in the capital, coupled with such an orderly arrangement, Xie Yixiang is naturally familiar with it, and in less than a meal, he is familiar with the small labels attached to all the drawers, and knows which drawers he may be able to find some clues.

According to the classification of these official documents in the back hall, the most important of them is first of all taxes. It should be known that no matter which dynasty or generation of the imperial court, every year will be based on the harvest of the previous year, and the local yamen will be given the tax quota to be paid in the next year. At the end of the year, if the local yamen can pay the taxes to the imperial court according to eighty percent of the prescribed quota, then it is considered qualified, and the relevant officials, large and small, will also pass the annual examination and pass the customs smoothly; otherwise, it will be a dereliction of duty on the part of the local officials, and they will be punished by the imperial court according to the law.

It can be seen that the importance of this tax can be said to be the most basic standard for the imperial court to evaluate officials in various places. And according to Xie Yixiang's experience in the criminal arrest room, in addition to the imperial court's assessment of officials in various places, this tax document can also show deeper doorways, such as verifying fire consumption is one of them.

Originally, according to the decree of the dynasty, the taxes paid by various localities must eventually be submitted to the government at all levels in the form of silver ingots, and the government at all levels will collect and pay to the imperial court. This involves the process of converting grain, silk, cloth, and other items into copper coins, which are then converted into broken silver, which is then melted into silver ingots. And each of these links, there will be loss, especially the last step of the process of "melting and casting broken silver into silver ingots", because of the limitations of smelting technology, the resulting loss is often called "fire consumption" in the world.

In the laws of the dynasty, this fire consumption is usually borne by the imperial court. That is to say, the local government originally had to pay a tax of one million taels of silver, because of the fire consumption caused by re-casting, and after the smelting, only 900,000 taels of silver were left for one million taels of silver, and the imperial court collected the nine hundred thousand taels of silver according to the account of one million taels, which was considered to be the complete payment of taxes in the place.

As a result, there was corruption among local officials. You must know that every money handled by officials is recorded in black and white, and if you want to do anything in it, you will inevitably use too many connections and buy too many people, which is not only very troublesome, but also extremely risky. Therefore, the formulation of fire consumption standards has become a great opportunity for local officials to do their jobs. For example, the original fire consumption of melting and casting was only one-twentieth, but as long as the fire consumption standard was raised to one-tenth, then for every twenty taels of silver smelted, the official could embezzle one tael from it; according to this calculation, if a certain place needed to re-smelt one million taels of silver in order to pay taxes, according to this revised standard of fire consumption, the local officials could privately swallow 50,000 taels of silver.

Therefore, theoretically, as long as the amount of local tax payable is compared with the actual amount of tax paid by the local area, so as to calculate the fire consumption lost, and then compare it with the general fire consumption standard of normal casting, we can know the depth of the local corruption atmosphere. The greater the fire consumption, the more taxes paid to the imperial court were embezzled by officials at all levels, and vice versa. Therefore, since the emperor issued a strict order that "embezzlement of sixty taels of silver can be killed", countless officials in various places have lost their heads because of auditing accounts, and they have died on this burning corruption.

At that moment, Xie Yixiang carefully checked the tax documents of Chilong Town in the past ten years, but the conclusion was incredible. Because according to the records on the official documents, in the past ten years since the establishment of this dynasty, the fire consumption in the annual tax of Chilong Town has been surprisingly strange - not that the fire consumption is surprisingly high, but that there is no fire consumption at all!

You must know that when smelting broken silver into standard silver ingots, whether it is technical defects or artificial loss, there will definitely be fire consumption in it. Even the most incorruptible local officials in the dynasty reported at least one-twentieth of the fire consumption on the tax receipts they submitted, and in the areas south of the Yangtze River, where corruption was rampant, they usually reported as much as one-ninth of the fire consumption on the pretext of backward smelting technology. However, on the tax official document of Chilong Town in front of him, the amount of tax paid every year is exactly the same as the amount of tax actually paid to the imperial court, that is, there is no loss of fire consumption at all, how can Xie Yixiang not be surprised?

Could it be because this Chilong Town is located in the west of Jingdezhen, the capital of the world's skills, so the melting and casting technology is the best in the world, so that the local silver can be cast without any loss? Xie Yixiang immediately denied this idea, the profit and loss of the sun and the moon is the natural principle, and the heaven and earth are still incomplete, not to mention the smelting skills in this world?

From this point of view, the reason why such an incredible record appeared in the tax official document of Chilong Town could only be one reason. That was the official in charge of taxation in Chilong Town, that is, the mayor of Wu, not only had he never embezzled a penny in the name of fire consumption, but even paid out of his own pocket and used his own private money to compensate for the loss of fire consumption for the imperial court.

If this is the case, then the mystery in this Red Dragon Town is even deeper. Xie Yixiang is well aware of the temper of the current emperor, and he has to personally review no matter how big or small the matter is, not to mention the top priority of local taxation? Imagine that in the official documents of taxes paid every year in various parts of the Central Plains, only the taxes paid by Chilong Town in Jiangxi Province have no fire consumption, and the entire Chilong Town will naturally stand out and stand out from the crowd because of this, with the emperor's shrewdness, how can he not see that there is a problem?

Xie Yixiang was thinking deeply along this line of thought at the moment, maybe even the current emperor had some unexplained connections with this Red Dragon Town, so he would allow such a strange fire to appear on the tax official documents of Red Dragon Town. She was thinking about it, when she suddenly felt a chill on the top of her head, as if a drop of water had fallen on her head, and hurriedly looked up, but saw that there was nothing above her head except for the carved mahogany roof, where was there any trace of dripping?

What is dripping on his head, if it is not water, but what is it? Xie Yixiang couldn't help but wipe his fingers on the cold place on the top of his head, and sure enough, there was a wet liquid. But I saw that the liquid on my fingertips was colorless and translucent, slightly viscous, and then put it between my nose and smelled it, and there was a faint fishy smell, I really don't know where the dirty thing dripped down.