01
Taibu Temple was the central government agency of the Ming Dynasty responsible for horse administration and animal husbandry, under the leadership of the Military Department, with the rank of official congruence from Sanpin, and the leading official was Taibu Temple.
Because the Ming Dynasty implemented the two-capital system, so the Taibu Temple is also divided into Taibu Temple and Nanjing Taibu Temple, the name of the Taibu Temple in Beijing is called Taibu Temple, responsible for the management of mazheng in the Gyeonggi region, Henan, Shandong and other places; Nanjing Taibu Temple is responsible for the Mazheng in the southern directly subordinate area.
"(Taibu Temple) is in charge of the decree of herding horses, so as to listen to the military department. Shaoqing is one person to supervise the temple affairs, one person to supervise the camp horses, and one person to supervise the horses. The temple is divided into Jingwei, Kiuchi and the six counties of Shandong and Henan, and herds horses. ”
02
In ancient feudal dynasties, Ma Zheng belonged to the state affairs, and horses were even more important weapons of the military state, so Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang once said: "The weight of ma zhengguo." Xia Yan, the head of the cabinet during the Jiajing period, also said: "The great affairs of the country are in Rong, and the major affairs of Rong are in horses." ”
After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, with the reform of "conscription and silver discounting" and the development of silver monetization, the financial resources held by the Taibu Temple were also converted into silver income, and the horse administration system of the Taibu Temple gradually changed from physical management to monetary management. The original simple Horse administration organ also derived the function of financial management, which had the nature of a financial institution and had a huge impact on the national finance in the middle and late Ming Dynasty.
03
In order to understand the financial management function of the Taibu Temple, we must first start with the financial resources held by the Taibu Temple, as mentioned at the beginning, the Taibu Temple was the institution responsible for horse administration and animal husbandry in the Ming Dynasty, so the important financial resources mastered by the Taibu Temple are a large number of horse government resources such as horse households, grasslands, and horses.
Horse households refer to horse breeding households, which are compulsorily assigned by the Ming Government to the task of horse breeding, the so-called compilation is to indicate that the government will organize several families together in accordance with regulations to raise a horse or raise a horse according to the number of fields.
Those who are organized according to each household are exempted from their other servitude, and those who are organized according to the field are exempted from the tax and grain in the field, and the material basis for horse breeding in the interior is realized through the exemption of grain and exemption. According to statistics, during the Hongzhi period, the Taibu Temple had more than 680,000 horse breeders, and the fields exceeded 160,000 hectares.
04
The pasture was provided by the imperial court to the horse breeding households in various places, "each horse breeding place, there is a horse pasture", the Ming Dynasty grassland land is as much as 40,000 hectares, and the horses raised also have various different roles.
One is the stallion, don't think about it, the stallion here is really a stallion that is simply used to breed foals, not the adjective "stallion".
The second is the breeding foal, which is the offspring of the horse, and according to the imperial court regulations, one small pony is levied on each mare every two years.
The third is a spare horse, also known as a foster horse, which is a horse selected from the breeding foals and kept in the capital in case of conscription.
05
In the early Ming Dynasty, most of the economic management systems were physical, so the management of financial resources in Taibu Temple was embodied in the management of the above-mentioned physical materials, including horse households, horses, pastures, etc., of which horses were the core and key management objects.
After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, with the development of the system of conscription and silver monetization, the horse government system, which was essentially a servitude, also began to transform into silver through various channels.
Since the beginning of the second year of Chenghua has a stable silver income, two years later in the fourth year of Chenghua Taibu Temple built a special permanent surplus inventory of silver, at first the silver income is not much, only more than 30,000 two per year, to the Zhengde year it grew to 180,000 two, Jiajing year increased to more than 700,000 two, Longqing two years the highest income of seven hundred and eighty thousand two, and then although it has declined, but the annual income has also remained between four hundred thousand and six hundred thousand two.
This silver belongs to the resources of horse administration, and in principle, it is only allowed to be used to buy horses, so it is called "horse price silver".
06
With the implementation of the entrustment of silver, the management of horse government resources in Taibu Temple has also changed from managing horse households, horses, pastures and other physical objects to the management of currency, including the conversion of horse government resources, the collection of horse price silver, and so on.
By the Jiajing period, the annual silver stock managed by the Taibu Temple was already very impressive, the annual actual income was 600,000 to 700,000 taels, and the silver deposited in the Changying treasury was as much as 10 million taels in the Jiajing and Longqing periods, and as the main source of state financial taxation, the annual revenue of the Tai warehouse managed by the household department was about 4 million taels, but the silver deposited in the Tai Warehouse that was often in the warehouse was only two or three million taels, and it was too shabby compared with the Changying Library.
At this point, the amount of silver stored in the Changying Warehouse managed by the Taibu Temple has been four or five times that of the Taibu Tai Warehouse, which shows that the financial scale of the Taibu Temple has been quite large, and it has long been no longer a simple Ma Zheng Yamen, but has gradually evolved into a financial institution with the function of governing money and grain.
07
So why can the Taibu Temple have such a huge silver income? Where did his revenue come from? This is what we called the transformation of physical resources.
In the horse administration of the Taibu Temple, horses are the most important, and the silverification of horse administration resources also begins with horses.
Shiren recorded that "in the fifteenth year of Yongle, the case of horse breeding in the south was fixed." Jiangbei raises one horse every five dings, and Jiangnan ten dings raise one horse. Where stallions die and breed less than a few, compensation should be paid, and each group in the event of a famine is paid one-third of the money, even if it is admitted to the government. The beginning of this folding. ”
From here, we can see that the original horse silver folding was a government relief measure for the affected horse households, not a customized one.
08
The large number of horses was changed, starting from the spare horses of the Taibu Temple in Nanjing, because many horses in Jiangnan Horse Farm were short and physically poor, and raising these horses became a burden.
Therefore, in the early years of Chenghua, some people proposed that "(Nanzhili horses) are too short to be conscripted, and in the future Jiangnan should be relieved of horses, which are not enough to cover the number, each horse is levied silver twelve, the class is released for storage, at any time officially bought, foster for cao." ”
For the Jiangnan horse households, it is time-consuming, laborious and expensive to send horses to the capital, it is not as convenient as folding silver; for the imperial court, the horses are enough, too much will increase the financial burden, it is better to fold a part of the silver, and then use silver to buy horses when war horses are needed, the implementation of this system has made the horse farms affiliated to the Nanzhi Taibu Temple have asked to convert the horses into silver according to this example, so the process of folding silver on horses has gradually accelerated.
09
After that, the horses owed to the imperial court in various places were demanded to be replaced with silver, until in the seventh year of Jiajing, the 7,500 spare horses of the Nanjing Taibu Temple were all converted into silver, and each of the 7,500 spare horses was converted into silver, and each of the 7,500 spare horses was converted into silver, and each of the 7,500 horses was folded into silver, and the discount rate was as high as 88%.
In addition, although the stallion and the breeding foal are regarded as the foundation of horse politics in view of the ancestral system, they should not be moved lightly, but they still cannot withstand the dismal reality of the national treasury having no money, and these horses are also sold one by one for silver income.
Although horses were sold out by the state, the horse households did not disappear, and still had the privilege of exemption from military service and endowment, so the Ming government began to levy "grass silver" from the horse households as a supplement to the horse government resources.
Forage silver is a type of fiscal revenue generated with the sale of stallions. In the government's view, the biggest cost of horse owners when raising stallions is "hay", the annual cost of forage to raise a stallion is about two or two, and after the stallion disappears, the horse owners still need to provide servitude taxes to the state, otherwise they will become a privileged group of people who are completely exempt from military service and tax exemption, so the horses that were previously provided are now paid forage silver.
"If the stallion is gone, the horse should be harvested, and if each horse still folds the hay and two silvers, then every year it will receive two silver taels."
10
Although the problem of horse households has been solved, but the problem of pasture still exists, are these specially divided pastures for horse breeding abandoned and have no use value? Of course not!
The gradual abandonment of the pasture makes the pasture land encroached upon and reclaimed by the powerful landlords, and the imperial court has no choice, so it tacitly acknowledges the existence of this situation, but the imperial court is not rigid, he issued regulations to the powerful who encroached on the pasture land, reclamation of pasture is OK, but this is the land of the official family, so you need to pay the rent, so the land of the pasture is gradually folded into silver to form a fixed pasture rent.
11
In addition to the above three points, Ma Zheng's silver income also has a pile silver system.
This system began in the Chenghua years, pile pengyin is the joint name of pile head silver and peng silver, pile head silver refers to the war horses of the local army if there is an unnatural death or loss and theft, then the local officials and troops need to pay a sum of silver to the imperial court; peng yin refers to the silver that the friends buy and supplement, and the local officials and troops need to pay an insurance premium to the Taibu Temple on a regular basis.
This fee is managed by the Taibu Temple, and if there is a loss or unnatural death of a war horse in the army, the owner of the horse can apply to the Taibu Temple for a subsidy to buy a horse. Both are compensation and insurance premiums, but both are generated by the officers and soldiers of the horse team, and both are used to subsidize war horses for horse owners who die unnaturally and lose their horses, so they are collectively known as the pile-and-money system.
12
The above four points are the main silver income of the Taibu Temple, after Jiajing, the Taibu Temple has overwhelmed the Hubu Tai Warehouse to become the warehouse with the first amount of silver, and a large amount of silver income has also made the Taibu Temple enter the national financial system with its strong economic strength, which has had a huge impact on the financial system in the middle and late Ming Dynasty.