prosperous age

Emperor Jiajing divided the wealth and silver of Yan's family into two, half of which was used as military pay, and the remaining half was used as internal treasury. Naturally, the emperor wanted it.

It's just that the land and real estate are left to the local officials to handle, which is a bit of sweetness for the local officials, after all, the big head has been taken away by him.

However, the major yamen in the court and the civil and military officials did not get the slightest benefit. Is this possible?

Huang Jin was a little frightened, not knowing how the government and the public would be shaken after this decree was spread.

At this time, Wei Guangde had already left Prince Yu's Mansion, and the carriage had arrived in front of the gate of Wei Mansion.

After the carriage stopped, Wei Guangde got out of the car, helped the crooked Wusha, and walked into his yard.

Previously, he and Zhang Juzheng had worked so hard to calm King Yu down, but Zhang Juzheng was bold enough to encourage King Yu to go back to the backyard to find a beauty to vent his anger, and he was not afraid that King Yu would die on the bed.

"Master, there is a letter from home."

Wei Guangde was about to go to the backyard when Zhang Ji, the housekeeper, came over and delivered a letter to him.

"When did you arrive?"

Wei Guangde took it casually and asked.

"The courier will arrive at noon."

Zhang Ji replied.

Wei Guangde took the letter back to the backyard first, visited his mother, his wife and children, changed his clothes, and then went to the study, tore open the envelope and took out the letter paper to read.

"Hiss, they have great appetites."

Wei Guangde couldn't help but exclaim.

He had read the copy of Cheng Shoujie’s memorabilia, and he naturally remembered that the memorandum mentioned that the Yan family had more than 2 mu of land, but in this family letter, Wei’s father told him that the Yan family’s land was at least [-] mu, and most of them were hidden fields. No tax paid.

There is no doubt that Cheng Shoujie and the others have divided these things privately.

The more than [-] mu reported is registered under the name of Yan's family and has been filed with the government.

All the Beijing officials knew about Yintian, but they all tacitly agreed and never made it clear.

Naturally, Cheng Shoujie dared to carve up the Yan family's hidden land with others, because he knew very well that if the truth was revealed, the officials in the capital would try to cover it up for him.

What's more, the officials in the capital city, perhaps some people also participated in this feast, just like himself.

Wei Guangde was not greedy, he was already satisfied with the land near Jiujiang, not to mention a few more houses and shops, and he understood the ins and outs of the Yan family's 200 million taels of silver.

It was different from what he expected at first, or Zhang Juzheng didn't understand the actual situation.

It is true that the Yan family confiscated more than 3 taels of gold, but only a few 10 taels of silver, and the extra million taels were all on the account.

The Yan family is not only a family of poems and books, but also has a large amount of land. It also has businesses in various places in the south of the Yangtze River. It not only collects various resources, but also participates in the trade, even including the sea trade that Luo Longwen is in charge of.

More than 100 million taels of silver is the money recorded in the accounts of various shops. Now Cheng Shoujie has been chasing the dirty money from various places, but it seems that the progress is not going well.

The froze up this time is also related to this matter.

For the local officials, it was a good thing that fell from the sky. When they verified the property of Yan's family, they confiscated the silver and the goods in the warehouse by the way.

However, after Cheng Shoujie issued the official document, he found various reasons to shirk the delay, just not wanting to hand over the seized money and goods.

Two million taels of silver seems to be just a flower in the mirror, like a moon in the water.

Wei Guangde had to lament that the current civil servants are really ruthless, and the emperor is not afraid of the butcher knife in his hand.

Holding his chin and thinking for a long time, Wei Guangde felt that he had figured out what was going on.

Naturally, Cheng Shoujie never thought of being an upright official, but after all, he has only been an official for a short time and spent most of his time in the capital, so he still underestimated the dangers of officialdom.

When the land was distributed, everyone probably said it was very good, but when it was time to pay the money, they were tempted again when faced with the white money.

However, Cheng Shoujie is more conservative. He is unwilling to touch the items in the Yan family's accounts, because the accounts will be sent to the capital in the end.

In fact, in the eyes of those people, Cheng Shoujie is just the last scapegoat.

As long as Cheng Shoujie can't insist on dividing the money, he will only push it on him if something happens in the future, and he will be completely cut off from this matter.

Cheng Shoujie should also have seen their sinister intentions, so he took the lead and reported the items on the account to the capital.

As for the end, whether the money can be recovered is one thing, but I have also picked myself clean.

"Cheng Shoujie is also a smart person."

Wei Guangde sighed again.

He can remember clearly the words in the memorandum, and the whole article does not mention the situation of these silver coins, which are in the shops of Yan's family in various places.

The advantage of doing this is that you can get yourself out without offending other officials.

If Cheng Shoujie said in the memorial that the money was in the hands of the local government and had been confiscated, but he couldn't recover it, what would happen if the memorial was in the hands of Emperor Jiajing?
The emperor will never let go easily. For the sake of more than one million taels of silver, he will definitely raise his butcher knife and order the local government to hand over the silver.

And he didn't mention this matter in the memorandum, that is to save everyone's face, he used the word dragging formula.

If you procrastinate, you can carry it through in the end, that is your ability, if you can't resist it, just spit out the money yourself.

Although it was an offense, at least it was not cruel, giving them a chance to manipulate it.

There is no doubt that Wei Guangde does not think that the 200 million taels of silver can be counted to the treasury, and the 100 million taels that the imperial court can really get is considered a conscience of the officials below.

As for Emperor Jiajing, and the subsequent emperors when they asked about this matter, it was like squeezing toothpaste, just explain the truth bit by bit, and everyone's money was also handed in bit by bit.

Thinking of this, Wei Guangde suddenly realized that his father didn't seem to tell him the truth, and this letter seemed to be pointing at himself.

My family also took over several shops of the Yan family in Jiujiang, which must have silver and goods.

The situation of these shops was not mentioned in the previous letters of the old man.

I presumably saw that the development of the situation was a little out of control, and worried that I was still kept in the dark, so I told myself the truth about Jiangxi in this letter.

Thinking of this, Wei Guangde couldn't sit still, got up and walked back and forth in the study, rubbing his hands constantly.

Been smothered.

This is what Wei Guangde can think of at this time.

When I wrote a letter to my family, I only said that I wanted those fields that were not hung in the Yan family, and I only wanted the fields in Jiujiang Mansion, but in the end, Father Wei wanted all the Yan family's house and shop in Jiujiang, without any encouragement. How could dad know this.

That real Lin is really nothing.

Wei Guangde became murderous at this time, and then he sat back in his seat, laid out the paper and began to write a letter to his family. What he said was of course that after Wei took over all the property of Yan's family, he must not show mercy to Master Lin, and there would be future troubles.

The killing spirit is unconsciously revealed on the paper.

On the second day, news from the palace also spread that Emperor Jiajing's decree was sent to the cabinet, which immediately caused an uproar in the government and the public.

The yamen naturally continued to play, telling their own difficulties, only the Ministry of War benefited from it, and made a grand memorial to thank the emperor for the border soldiers.

And Xu Jie, Yan Na and other cabinet ministers were called into Xiyuan, and after they left the palace, they naturally dispersed to appease the officials.

This is Emperor Jiajing's test for the cabinet ministers. He will naturally get what he wants, and then the cabinet will deal with the next mess. If it is handled well, it will pass the test.

At the beginning, Yan Song used various methods to oppress the yamen at all levels, nothing more than fulfilling the orders of Emperor Jiajing, but now the executor has become Xu Jie.

Zhang Juzheng didn't seem to have gained much from the Yan family's fields. After all, most of the Yan family's assets were distributed in Jiangxi, Nanzhili and Zhejiang, where the fields, houses, and shops were all concentrated.

Zhang Juzheng was from Huguang, even if he had an idea, he would be out of his reach, not to mention that Wei Guangde found that Zhang Juzheng seemed to be a bit upright, so he might not take the initiative to participate in it.

Of course, there are certain things that Wei Guangde will not ask.

At the beginning when he tested himself, dug a hole for himself, and let him participate in dividing up the Yan family's property in Jiangxi, Wei Guangde had already had a estrangement with him.

The Yan family's money had been allocated by Emperor Jiajing, and the Beijing officials gradually lost interest in the money and no longer paid attention to it, seeing that there was no hope.

Such a change made Wei Guangde slightly relieved.

What he is most afraid of is actually the repeated appeals of the Beijing officials, who have always remembered this matter and entangled them.

It can only be said that Xu Jie's method still learned a little from Yan Song's true teachings, but he handled it very well this time.

For a few days, the capital city has been calm. Even if there are still people who can't forget it, they are all lowly officials who can't make any waves. On the contrary, Princess Jing entered Beijing and was placed in the suburbs of Beijing.

Immediately afterwards, Xu Jie, a scholar of the cabinet, made a request to return tens of thousands of hectares of land entrusted by King Jing to the people of Chu, which was praised by the ruling and opposition parties for a while.

For these tricks, Wei Guangde just shook his head, fooling people.

In the eyes of most people in later generations, since Zhu Yuanzhang began to grant land to his sons in the Ming Dynasty, they all snatched private land and turned it into royal property, which was actually a huge mistake.

The main reason for this is the propaganda for many years. Everyone regarded the land system in the past as the landlord having supreme rights, and seemed to be able to completely control a piece of land and the tenants parasitic on this land.

The land system of the Ming Dynasty actually originated from the Song and Yuan Dynasties, with only slight modifications, but most of them did not change much.

Land is mainly divided into two categories: official land and private land, and there are many subdivisions, but they are mainly classified into these two categories.

The fiefdoms granted by the emperor of the Ming Dynasty to the vassals did not actually involve civilian land. After all, the Ming Dynasty protected private property, but the actual grant was official land.

The land conferred by the princes of the Ming Dynasty ranged from a few thousand hectares in the early Ming Dynasty to tens of thousands of hectares or even more in the middle and late Ming Dynasty. In fact, there was no major change in the ownership and use rights of the land.

In any case, it is impossible for the prince to farm, so the fields still need to be taken care of by farmers, and farmers can only get so much.

The prince owns a huge amount of land, which is actually divided into many categories, but there are mainly two categories, one is the fief, and the other is the estate of the prince's mansion.

The fiefdom is the right to collect land rent given by the emperor to his son. In the past, the output taxes of these fields were collected by the imperial court, but now they are transferred to the prince's mansion.

The Wangfu Zhuangtian is the land owned by the Wangfu. It can be understood as a kind of "civilian land". The Wangfu has all the rights. These fields are the official land bestowed by the emperor, and the second is the land obtained through various means after being canonized.

For example, for the land rent in the prince's fiefdom, the prince can force the people to sell their land to the prince's mansion by raising taxes, or directly ask the emperor for the land on the grounds that there is a large amount of wasteland in a certain place, and then Hire people to open up wasteland.

It's just that most of the land has already been reclaimed by people, and the royal family and relatives use this as an excuse to snatch the ownership of this land.

Of course, there is indeed a problem with these lands, that is, they have not been recorded in the government field records, and can actually be understood as "hidden fields".

Therefore, the land acquired by King Jing, in addition to the fief right to be returned to the court, also has many original official lands to be returned.

But for the people of Chu, it doesn't really have much impact at all, because the talents that should be handed in cannot be reduced, it's just that the owner has changed.

In the past, it was handed over to Prince Jing's Mansion, but now it is returned to the government. Xu Jie's talk about returning the land to the people is actually a joke.

By this time, the number of official fields in the Ming Dynasty had actually been decreasing.

The rewards of the emperors of the past dynasties had been reduced by more than half by the time of the Jiajing Dynasty.

During the Yongle period, nearly [-]% of the land tax in the Ming Dynasty came from official land, but in the Jiajing Dynasty, it was less than [-]%, and the shortfall was awarded to the emperor's relatives, and even the emperor's own Huangzhuang.

Therefore, later generations said that in the Ming Dynasty, the biggest landlord was the royal family, which is still based on evidence.

From the land tax alone, it can be seen that the land rewarded by the emperor to his son accounted for [-]% of the paper data, and more land was obtained by the royal palace in private.

The tax and service system of the Ming Dynasty stipulated that gentry were exempted preferentially, but in fact they could only be exempted from service. However, the service law of the Ming Dynasty was based on the people's service and the land to govern the service.

Both farmland and Dingkou can be used as the object of conscription, and "worry-free grain" can be obtained from "worry-free land", so it is true to practice tax evasion in the name of exemption from military service.

Due to the lax legal system, the officials and the gentry collude with each other, and they themselves ignore the court regulations, so that their private property is not taxed.

The root cause of this is actually because they envy the royal relatives and honorable Yongyetian's privilege of not paying taxes, so they also try to package their own fields as tax-free fields.

As a result, the number of taxable lands decreased, and the remaining land could only continue to increase taxes until the land owners could not afford it at all and chose to sell the land to escape.

The basis of taxation in the Ming Dynasty was land and population. The so-called "where there is land, there is rent, and where there is land, there is service". Since all taxes are collected based on land, there is no need to pay heavy taxes if the land is sold.

Therefore, many farmers sold their land to tax-free families, put it under the powerful family, and rented the land back for farming.

Although the rent is also high, it is still acceptable compared to the increasingly heavy taxes.

This method of avoiding the most important and taking the lightest is the way of survival that ancient Chinese farmers had to do as a last resort.

Naturally, only the Wangfu family can sell the land within the fiefdom of the Wangfu. Who else would dare to take it over?
Therefore, the prices of these lands sold to the Wangfu were often kept extremely low, allowing them to annex the land wantonly, and the Zhu family thus became the big landlords in the north.

Wei Guangde didn't care about whether there would be tricks behind the returned fields of Prince Jing's Mansion, but he knew that Zhang Juzheng seemed very happy.