To ask which emperor in Chinese history was the most brutal, some people said that it was Gao Yang of Northern Qi, and some people said that it was the first emperor. But nowadays more and more people think that it is Zhu Yuanzhang, the emperor of the Ming Dynasty. If nothing else, he killed more than 100,000 founding heroes and their families against him, and the degree of brutality can be imagined.
However, what caused this situation was that Zhu Yuanzhang was too inferior and unconfident, coupled with the oppression he had suffered too much since childhood, which eventually led to his brutal personality.
But in terms of treating the people, Zhu Yuanzhang was also a gentle and humble emperor. He was afraid that the officials would deceive and embezzle money and cause harm to the people, so he thought of a clever trick, that is, to add a word to the coin when minting the money. So let's take a look at it today and see what words have been added so that the corrupt officials have nowhere to hide.
Determination to fight corruption
Zhu Yuanzhang hated official corruption, so he created the famous "Guo Heng Case" in the eighteenth year of Hongwu.
Guo Heng was a household attendant in the early Ming Dynasty. As we all know, the household department is the country's money bag and controls the money register of a country, so Zhu Yuanzhang pays special attention to the household department.
Once, someone reported that there was corruption among the officials of the Household Department, so he first ordered someone to check the account books of the Household Department, but there was no problem in checking them.
However, Zhu Yuanzhang did not give up, he believed in his bones that officials were all treacherous, and since someone had reported it, there must be something wrong with it. So he ordered Jinyiwei to investigate secretly.
This investigation could not be found, and it was found that Guo Heng, the attendant of the household department, used his power for personal gain and embezzled a huge amount of silver.
Of course, a simple household attendant can't do anything, there is actually a whole chain of corruption, which can be said to be collective corruption.
In the face of this major corruption case, where can Zhu Yuanzhang spare them, even if the department is paralyzed and no one is available, he will kill these corrupt people, even their families.
After this case occurred, in order to prevent the occurrence of such cases, Zhu Yuanzhang promulgated the "Great Curse". It stipulates that officials who embezzle 60 taels are capital offenses for whatever reason.
However, Zhu Yuanzhang was still very curious, how these people were corrupt, why even some professionals could not find out the problem from the books?
Subsequently, Zhu Yuanzhang sent people to study carefully and finally found the secret of this.
It turned out that the previous account books had always used numbers such as "one, two, and three" to count, so that corrupt officials could modify them at will when they were embezzled. For example, if the household department clearly buys an umbrella, but the corrupt officials add one horizontal to the top and bottom, it becomes three umbrellas, then they can embezzle the money of the two umbrellas.
It should be explained here that the number "one, two, three", which first appeared on the oracle bone, was the original unit used to count in the ancient dynasties.
Now that the problem was found, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered someone to query some alternative texts.
After consultation, the words such as "one" in the "Book of Rites and Tables" and the "two" that indicate apostasy and betrayal in the "Zhou Li Nai Jiu Zheng" officially became a counting unit because it was homophonous with the previous counting unit and the writing was complicated.
That is to say, these capitalized numbers that we use today did not mean numbers at first, but were specially added after Zhu Yuanzhang investigated and dealt with major corruption cases in order to prevent type situations.
After the end of the "Guo Heng case", Zhu Yuanzhang thought that he was finished, and no one could embezzle from the pockets of the household department in the future.
But what Zhu Yuanzhang did not expect was that new problems appeared again.
Secrets in the Treasure Source Bureau
It turned out that in the early Ming Dynasty, due to the initial determination of the world, the rights of the central government had not yet been fully recovered, and many things were still done locally, such as minting money.
Some corrupt officials have a bad idea in minting money, and when they mint money, they deliberately add iron to copper coins. And this situation is difficult to find, and even if it is found, it is difficult to trace the root cause, after all, the Ming Dynasty's Baoyuan Bureau is distributed throughout the country.
Indeed, this situation, not to mention China, is a difficult problem in the world.
In order to solve this matter, Zhu Yuanzhang pondered hard and finally came up with a clever trick, that is, to order the Baoyuan Bureau in various places to add a word to the copper coin when minting copper coins, and this word is to add the abbreviation of each province.
For example, the copper coin minted by the Hubei Baoyuan Bureau should add a "鄂" character, and the Henan one should add "豫" and so on.
Zhu Yuanzhang's clever trick seems simple, but it is very effective, so that corrupt officials have nothing to hide and no longer dare to adulterate copper coins.
Founding Fathers
Having said that, zhu Yuanzhang certainly had thunderous means, but from his starting point, we could see the degree of hatred he had for corrupt officials and corrupt officials. However, he also knows that greed is human nature, and killing alone cannot be completely solved, and only from the reform of the system, so that these people have nowhere to start, is the best policy.
Zhu Yuanzhang said this to Zhu Yunjiao in his later years, saying that killing was something he, the founding prince, could do, and that the prince of shoucheng should also focus on establishing benevolence and making good use of wisdom.
Reference: History of the Ming Dynasty