Since the Ming Dynasty, "Shen Wansan" has almost become synonymous with rich people. In the "Words and Sayings of the Golden Plum Bottle" published during the Wanli Dynasty, Pan Jinlian once said: "Nanjing Shen Wansan, Beijing dead willow tree, the name of a person, the shadow of the tree."
During the Jiajing period, a son of a rich family paid a bribe of 23,000 taels of silver to Yan Song and bought an official position as the chief of the bureaucracy, and the court at that time called him "Shen Wansan Official". It can be seen from this that the great name of the monopoly Shen Wansan is famous all over the world, and women and children are well known.
Even today, the former residence of Shen Wansan in Taicang City, Jiangsu Province, still attracts countless tourists. The "Wansan Hoof" and "Wansan Cakes" sold here seem to tell every tourist the story of Shen Wansan, who is known as the richest man in the world.
"Wansan Hoof" is a famous dish invented by Shen Wansan. It is said that after he became rich, he often filled the seats, and whenever he feasted on guests, he always regarded braised hooves as a must-have dish.
The method is to cook the pig's trotters for several hours with a secret recipe, so that the color is rosy, fat but not greasy, crisp but not rotten. After Zhu Yuanzhang became emperor, because the surnames of "pig" and "Zhu" were close, he changed his name to "Wan San Hoof".
Shen Wansan's family history
Shen Wansan was the first pioneer of China's world trade.
In 1331, Shen Wansan, who was in his twenties, took advantage of the favorable conditions of his hometown Zhouzhuang to the west of the Grand Canal and the northeast to go to the sea by waterway, began his "business of seeking wealth", began his foreign trade activities, started business with Southeast Asian countries, and quickly became the first richest man with "huge capital and land in Wuxia".
Wu Han, an expert in Ming history, clearly pointed out in "Folk Overseas Trade in the Yuan Dynasty": "The reason why Shen Wansan became rich was because of overseas trade. ”
Wu Han
Shen Wansan's golden age of commerce was in the Yuan Dynasty. The rulers of the Yuan Dynasty pursued a policy of "emphasizing agriculture and commerce and light taxes" and implemented a more relaxed policy on overseas trade than those of the Tang and Song dynasties.
In this particular period, Shen Wansan had a unique vision, relying on a relaxed overseas trade policy, leading the fleet to and from all over Southeast Asia, transporting pottery from Jiangnan, porcelain from Jiangxi, tea from Zhejiang, medicinal herbs from the northwest, and local pickles from Zhouzhuang to overseas, and at the same time, buying back a large number of pearls, agate, ivory, and mahogany, earning a huge price difference and quickly becoming rich.
Shen Wansan was a pioneer of China's Maritime Silk Road. At its peak, he established huge commodity bases in Singapore and Malacca that radiated the world, exchanging Chinese ceramics, silk and other commodities for foreigners' jewelry and jade and precious medicinal materials, and the price difference could reach tens of times, or even hundreds of times, and quickly accumulated amazing wealth.
He engaged in international trade decades before Zheng He went to the West, and later Zheng He's route to the West almost overlapped with the route of Shen Wansan's overseas trade activities. It can be said that zheng he's success in going to the West is inseparable from Shen Wansan's pioneering credit.
In the sixteenth year of the Yuan Dynasty (1356), Zhang Shicheng attacked Suzhou and established the Municipal Shipping Division in Suzhou. Zhang Shicheng was born as a salt smuggler by the sea and had a certain understanding of the importance of overseas trade, so in the regime he established, overseas trade on the southeast coast was not interrupted, but was always carried out.
Zhang Shicheng's more than ten years according to Wu was Shen Wansan's second spring of business. Together with his two sons, he undertook the responsibility of overseas trade in the southeast region at that time. In the crevices of the division of the masses at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, Shen Wansan accumulated a huge wealth through overseas trade.
It is precisely because Zhang Shicheng is more supportive of businessmen in business, so the merchant group represented by Shen Wansan was relatively supportive of Zhang Shicheng's regime in the late Ming Dynasty, and most of them sided with Zhang Shicheng when Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhang Shicheng confronted each other.
Zhu Yuanzhang also knew this: "Zhang Shicheng stole Jiangdong, and Wu Min still calls him King Zhang." This sentence can also be seen that the landlords in Jiangnan at that time had different attitudes towards Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhang Shicheng.
Zhu Yuanzhang
Currying favor with Zhu Yuanzhang failed
After Zhu Yuanzhang established the Ming Dynasty, in order to punish the wealthy merchants in Jiangnan who had supported Zhang Shicheng, he increased the taxes in the Jiangnan region. Shen Wansan then tried his best to reconcile with the new regime.
According to the "Epitaph of Shen Hanjie, the Virgin of Wuxing", "Wan Sangong took the lead in losing his tax stone to the family, and the platinum was repaid for two thousand and five degrees." The Lord said, 'Er is sincere and loyal, and I am rich in the world today, and there are many governments in this regard.' 'Good desires are not allowed, but they are at will, and there are six hundred and fifty men who build galleries, and those who wear armor and horses, and they are golden, and their sincerity is as good as this.' ”
Zhu Yuanzhang increased taxes in Jiangnan, and Shen Wansan not only did not resist, but quickly made a pledge of allegiance to the new emperor, asking his son Shen Mao to find Xu Huizu, Xu Da's son, to unblock relations, saying that he was willing to pay military food to the Ming army.
At that time, Zhu Yuanzhang's army was short of grain, and this batch of grain could be said to be sent charcoal in the snow, which made Zhu Yuanzhang very useful. Not only that, Shen Wansan also sent five thousand taels of platinum to Zhu Yuanzhang's vault.
At that time, the Ming Dynasty had just been established, and everything was in ruins to be rebuilt, and money was spent everywhere, so Zhu Yuanzhang gladly smiled and accepted. Then, he also paid tribute with dragon horns, five thousand platinum ingots, two hundred catties of gold, ten knights, and ten horses, and Zhu Yuanzhang accepted these tributes without moving.
Shen Wansan's hanging heart finally let go: it was also true that in the early days of the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, the Shen family did not receive a liquidation from Zhu Yuanzhang.
However, the good fortune of the Shen family did not last long. After the financial situation of the Ming Dynasty improved, Zhu Yuanzhang was deeply worried about the wealth of the Shen family and the enemy of the country, believing that this was not a blessing for the society, so he deliberately weakened it.
In September of the second year of Ming Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang began to build the nanjing city wall. Shen Wansan's opportunity to pat himself on the back came, so he made a surprising move, writing to Zhu Yuanzhang asking himself to "help build one-third of the capital city."
This move of his was approved by Zhu Yuanzhang. It is said that when the city wall was completed, Zhu Yuanzhang personally toasted Shen Wansan and said: "In ancient times, there was a white-clothed tianzi, known as 'Sufeng'. In today's view, it may be you! ”
After Shen Wansan listened, he couldn't help but flutter a little. But he may not have thought about whether Zhu Yuanzhang, the true son of heaven, would be able to tolerate himself as a "white-clothed heavenly son"?
When Shen Wansan was building the city wall in Nanjing, his brother Shen Gui once advised: "If it is not a blessing to eat gold and jade, the sandalwood golden bottle can also be rested; what is a hundred years long-term calculation, the crock pot contains wine and kapok fur." "
But where could Shen Wansan listen? He became more and more inflated, and finally actually made a request to Zhu Yuanzhang, and he paid for Zhu Yuanzhang's army!
This was a sweep of the dragon's whiskers, which completely angered Zhu Yuanzhang.
According to the Biography of Empress Xiaocigao of the Ming Dynasty, "Wu Xingfumin Shen Xiu, who helped build one of the three capitals, also asked the army to treat the army." The Emperor fury said: "Pifu Treats the Heavenly Son's Army, and the people are also in turmoil, and it is advisable to punish them." The latter said: "Whoever hears the law of the concubines is also a lawless person, not an ominous one." The people are rich and the enemy of the country, and the people are ominous. Ominous people, the heavens will be calamified, Your Majesty He Curse! 'Nai Shi Xiu, Shu Yunnan. ”
It is said that before Shen Wansan was demoted to Yunnan, Liu Bowen was secretly sent by Empress Ma to visit Shen Wansan. He brought the meaning of Empress Ma and asked Shen Wansan to realize part of his assets and go to the Yunnan-Guizhou area to develop and drive the local economic development.
Liu Bowen also gave Shen Wansan a poem: "A thousand waters in Jiangnan, a thousand mountains in Yunnan and Guizhou; five hundred years later, Yungui Sai Jiangnan", as his parting words to Shen Wansan.
Therefore, Shen Wansan gathered more than 20,000 pieces of silver and more than 100 jin of gold bars in a very short period of time, packed them into sixteen large boxes, and secretly left Nanjing under the protection of the guards sent by Liu Bowen, and transported these sixteen boxes of treasure to Pingyue, Guizhou, and hid them in the cave behind the Qu'e Temple not far from the Pingyue Division.
The guards then became monks in the temple of Quinoa to guard the treasures.
Southwest Frontier "Secondary Entrepreneurship"
In the autumn of the sixth year of Hongwu, Shen Wansan left Nanjing with his fourth son Shen Chunhong, the fifth son Shen Xiangbao, and other family members. Before leaving, Empress Ma and Xu Da also sent Mu Ying and Xu Huizu to represent themselves to send Shen Wansan off.
At that time, from Nanjing to the Yunnan-Guizhou area, it was generally first from Nanjing to take a boat along the Yangtze River upstream, through Wuchang Province into Dongting Lake, and then from Dongting Lake to the Yuan river, to the Chong'an River Dulangudu ashore and then change to land, along the Xiangqian Yidao into the Yungui area.
At that time, there were still many Liang kings in the Yunnan-Guizhou region who were still under the control of the Yuan Dynasty, and they did not submit to the Ming Dynasty, so Shen Wansan could not go directly to Yunnan, but had been active in Anshun, Qianxi, and Wumeng in Guizhou.
For a long time, Shen Wansan lived in the "Mountain Third Street" southwest of Fuquan Ancient City. He also gave himself the nickname "Mountain Three DaoRen".
Shen Wansan built the "Shen Mansion" here, which is a wooden shingle house covering an area of five or six acres and a two-compartment courtyard with a hall and a hall. After Shen Wansan's death, his descendants continued to live here for more than two hundred years, until the end of the Ming Dynasty.
At this time, although Shen Wansan was a civilian, his commercial trade network was still there, and the market information, channels and special contacts were still there.
During this time in Guizhou, he used the smuggled property and with his excellent wisdom and brains to start a "second venture" on the Ancient Tea Horse Road in Dianqian, leaving a strong mark in the history of commercial development in the southwest region.
Not far from the Shen Mansion on Shansan Street, there is a green tea seed tree. One day, the tea tree blossomed and the fragrance was refreshing, Shen Wansan smelled the flowers and walked into a farmhouse, saw that the family was using tea seeds to squeeze oil, so he had an idea: to collect and transport tea seed oil to Jiangnan to sell.
He found the local toast and mobilized the families to collect tea oil, and he was responsible for underwriting. Under his operation, "Pingyue Tea Oil" is deeply loved by the people of Jiangnan, and the local tea farmers have increased their income a lot in a year.
In order to commemorate Shen Wansan, people call the hillside where he planted tea seeds "Shen Jiapo".
Shen Wansan also helped farmers plant tung trees, taught locals to plant sumac trees, cut raw lacquer, and established "tung oil processing plants" in The Ancient Post Road and Liangjiang river through Yunnan to produce tung oil and distribute them to coastal areas. In Pingyue, the "Qu'e Silver Horn" was also opened, which is also the earliest silver number in the history of Guizhou.
He also opened lead mines, copper mines, and iron ore mines in the mountains of Western Guizhou and Wumeng, refined cinnabar, and developed "Umeng raw lacquer".
Shen Wansan found that the local area was full of clouds and fog all year round, and the rain was abundant, and he had been doing business all his life, and he keenly realized that this was a very suitable place for growing tea.
So he contacted several large local households and established the "Cloud Mist Tea Garden". With land and labor from large local households, Shen Wansan himself is responsible for tea management, processing technology and sales.
After the tea produced in this tea garden was processed, the quality of the tea was comparable to that of famous teas such as Longjing, and a few years later it was listed as a "tribute tea" dedicated to the tribute court, and the income of the local people also doubled.
Shen Wansan has great respect for the local ethnic minorities and sincerely makes friends with them, and there are still many good stories about the unity, friendship and mutual assistance between Shen Wansan and the Miao and Buyi compatriots in many parts of Guizhou.
It was the arrival of Shen Wansan that made the specialties of Guizhou in the southwest have a real large-scale exchange with the outside world, and the Anshun area also began to take off at this time, becoming an important city with "commercial prosperity and a lot in the province".
The development of commerce has also brought advanced farming technology to Anshun and the surrounding areas, and also brought a variety of handicrafts, such as handmade textile industry, blacksmith forging industry, tea growing tea industry, caramel industry, wood carving industry, bamboo industry, etc.
Shen Wansan also brought the advanced consciousness of attaching equal importance to agriculture and commerce, bringing advanced business concepts to the local area, but also bringing many business-related concepts.
In order to commemorate Shen Wansan, who made meritorious achievements in Guizhou, Fuquan Mountain in Fuquan City, Guizhou Province, built a spectacular "Wansan Mausoleum" for Shen Wansan to be admired by future generations.
In the fourteenth year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered Fu Youde, Lan Yu, and Mu Ying to lead an army to march south, and the entire army of The King of Liang was destroyed, and after the whole territory of Yunnan was pacified, Shen Wansan entered Kunming with his wife and children. Since then, there have been few records of him. Some people believe that within a few years of arriving in Yunnan, Shen Wansan died.
Where are the descendants of the Shen family now?
Although Shen Wansan was demoted to the frontier, Zhu Yuanzhang was still uneasy about him and always wanted to get rid of him quickly. Especially after Empress Ma's death, no one ever interceded for Shen Wansan anymore, and the bad luck of the Shen family inevitably came.
Shen Wansan has a son-in-law named Gu Xuewen, who has long had an affair with a woman surnamed Liang. Chen Mou, the father-in-law of the Liang clan, was very angry, and in the spring of the 26th year of Hongwu falsely accused Gu Xuewen, saying that he was related to the Rebellion of the Duke of Liang, Lan Yu, "Through Lan Plotting Rebellion." ”
Zhu Yuanzhang took the opportunity to arrest Gu Xuewen, and all three sons of his father, his brother, and his wife's Shen family were imprisoned, and hundreds of relatives and friends of the Shen family were connected, nearly a thousand people were killed, and Shen Wansan's relatives who remained in Jiangnan were almost wiped out, and the Shen Wansan family was devastated from then on.
Why did Zhu Yuanzhang have to exterminate the Shen family? Mainly because Zhu Yuanzhang was born into poverty and lived a frugal life, he soberly realized that arrogance and lavishness can destroy the country and harm himself, so he advocated frugality and simplicity, and practiced it himself.
However, the Shen family's extravagant life is obviously contrary to Ming Taizu's intention to advocate frugality, contrary to the simple social atmosphere advocated by Zhu Yuanzhang, and has caused an extremely bad impact on society. Therefore, it is reasonable for the Shen family to be liquidated.
The Shen family itself has a few members who behave inappropriately, which is also an important reason for their disaster. Shen Wansan's son-in-law, Lu Zhonghe, after Shen Wansan was assigned, he should have taken traces to avoid disasters, but he was still very public, repairing "pavilions and ponds, shining sangzi." The construction of the ball willow, the drinking horse second bridge, the construction of the tent gallery, there are north and south two roads", and finally "in the language of the Taizu Dynasty, its sons were destroyed".
Shen Wansan's grandson, Shen Wendu, commanded Ji Gang of the Imperial Household and robbed the people of their wealth and did a lot of harm to the people. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Shen family is broken.
In May 2000, the film crew of the Jiangsu Provincial Radio and Television Station "Tracing the Remnants of Nanjing in the Ming Dynasty and the Back of Shen Wansan" began to interview Shen Wansan's descendants.
They consulted a large number of historical materials, traveled through most of China, and finally found Shen Wansan's descendants at Tianlongtun Fort in Pingba County, Anshun.
Tianlongtun is located in Pingba County, western Guizhou Province, deep in the karst landform mountains, with two mountain ranges, Tiantai Mountain and Longyan Mountain, 72 kilometers away from Guiyang City. Located at the throat of the westward march into Yunnan, there is a distinct Han ethnic group, the Tunbao people.
In Tianlongtun Fort, there are Han Chinese people wearing large plackets and wide sleeves and blue robes everywhere. For more than 600 years since the Ming Dynasty, they still retain the living customs and cultural customs of the Ming Dynasty, and tenaciously adhere to the culture of their ancestors in a corner of Qianjing.
Their pronunciation, clothing, residential buildings and entertainment methods are very different from those of the surrounding villages, and this unique Han cultural phenomenon is called "Tunbao culture".
The Han chinese in Tianlongtun fort have four major surnames, one of which is shen, who claims that his ancestors came from "Wuxingtang" in Wuxing Village, Zhejiang.
This hall is also the ancestral hall of Shen Wansan. Shen Keru, the fourteenth generation of the Shen family, told reporters that the ancestor of the Shen clan in Tianlong Tunbao was named Shen Yuanxiu, and there was a folk song left in the family: "Shen Family Shen Dafu, Zhang Laibao of the Zhang Family."
The Shen family genealogy of the fort details the article "Zhongrong's Ancestors Entering Dian" and the whereabouts of the eleven generations of the Shen family, their wives and children, and their meritorious deeds, which is a strong evidence for the study of the Shen Wansan family.
In the Shen family tree, it is recorded: "Shen Wansan, famous rich, character Zhongrong, Chunzheng Yue leap jia Shensheng, Huzhou Nanxun Shenzhuang Yangren, young with his father moved to Changzhou Zhouzhuang Dongcai Village, later moved to Tianfu ... At the beginning of Ming Hongwu's reign, he was convicted of his wealth and was ordered to kill Dian Qian. Hongwu died at the age of 1288 on the 8th month of the 26th lunar calendar and was buried in Fuquan Mountain, Pingyue, Guizhou. ”
Shen Jiaqing' family, who is now working in Guiyang, still has a book detailing how Shen Wansan's second son, Shen Mao, wrote how to reach Guizhou from Nanjing via Jiangxi, Sichuan, and Guizhou.
This evidence has also been affirmed by historians. On September 23, 2007, the Guizhou Provincial Commission of Culture and History held the "Shen Wansan Seminar" and the "Ancestor Worship Conference to Commemorate the 700th Anniversary of Shen Wansan's Birth" in Pingba Tianlong, which is equivalent to announcing to the world that the Shen clan of Tianlongtun Fort in Pingba County is a descendant of Shen Wansan.
On October 10, 2014, Chen Miner, then governor of Guizhou Province, said in a speech at the first Guizhou Merchant Development Conference: "Historically, although Guizhou was blocked by mountains and inconvenient transportation, the rise of Guizhou merchants has a long history, dating back to the early Ming Dynasty. 600 years ago, Shen Wansan, a giant rich man in Jiangnan, came to Guizhou to perform the legend of commerce and trade on the Ancient Road of Dianqian, which was a scene of equal emphasis on commerce and agriculture on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau. ”
Shen Wan accumulated a huge amount of wealth in the cracks of the social turmoil at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, and after the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, he tried his best to curry favor with the Ming Dynasty in order to preserve his wealth, but with the implementation of the Ming court's policy of emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce and suppressing the rich, the disaster of the Shen family was already doomed.
The tragedy of the Shen Wansan family is a difficult character of the political struggle in the early Ming Dynasty, and it is also a microcosm of the social changes in the late Yuan and early Ming dynasties.