In ancient times, "naked official" was a good word, referring to not taking family members to become officials in other places, free from the entanglement of interest relations, so naked officials were mostly clean officials with two sleeves and a clean wind. Chen Yao, a Qing Dynasty official with the same name as Hai Rui in the "Three Great Qing Officials of Lingnan", is a typical "naked official".
Chen Yu has been an official outside for more than twenty years, but he is alone and has never brought his family with him. The son wanted to visit him, but he was thousands of miles apart, and the lack of road fees was difficult to make the trip, so he could not visit his father once. Chen Yao also did not extend the invitation to his staff, only one or two servants, and when they ate, they always ate melons, fruits and vegetables, and there was no meat.
This is simply not an official, but a monk's Qing cultivation, no wonder Kangxi said that he was an "ascetic old monk" and "from the ancient Qing official, there is no one who has surpassed the plan". Officials do not have much soup and no desires, and indeed few people can.
Considering that Chen Yao was a clean and honest official, it seemed that he could only be a naked official. Because the Qing Dynasty officials' Feng Lu was relatively low, the Qipin County officials' annual Feng Lu was 45 taels of silver, an average of 3.75 taels of silver per month. According to the price of goods at that time, a person's monthly food expenses cost one or two silver. When Chen Yao was in Gutianzhi County, if he was not greedy for ink, he could raise three and a half people, if he took his wife, children, servants, and old mothers... They are all carried around, basically can not afford to raise, more or less to get some extra money. Many officials are like this, simply in terms of salary income, they can't live such a quality life at all, but people live it, and the cattiness behind it is self-evident.
Therefore, for people who are not rich in family backgrounds, if they want to be clean officials, they can almost only be naked officials; if they don't want to be naked officials, they can almost not be clean officials. Many people will choose the latter so that they can live with their families, and few people can be "desperate" to the point of being a naked official for more than twenty years. Under the thin system, to be a clean official requires cutting off many desires, not only the desire for absolute money, but also the desire for absolute affection.
Once, Kangxi summoned Chen Yao and asked him if he was enough to use his official salary? He said: "I never felt that anything was not enough; other people's corruption, mainly because of the luxury of life, led to insufficient income. However, his official salary is enough, mainly because he has no family around, and he does not send much money to his family (otherwise his son would not even be entangled). A person has enough to eat, whether the whole family is hungry or not, so his official salary is not only enough, but also surplus. In the fifty-seventh year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1718), Chen Yu died during the reign of the Governor of Fujian and Zhejiang. Before his death, he made a will, and handed over to the state treasury the public funds he had stored during his term of office and the 13,400 silver he had personally raised.
According to the value of the silver, Chen's public and private savings were as high as 2.68 million yuan. This money, now an ordinary person with a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan, does not eat or drink to save 74 years. From this point of view, although Chen Yu lived like an "ascetic old monk", he was actually a rich man with a lot of money. "Naked official" Chen Yao is still like this, and it can be imagined how much money those officials who are not "naked" have.