Text/Oblique Sun Drunken Beauty
During the Yongzheng period, large-scale investigation and handling of deficits and punishment of corruption, many relatives of the emperor and state and high-ranking and powerful ministers were implicated, and the homes of those who were raided had the greatest impact on future generations.
The Cao family mentioned here is also the prototype of the Cao family in "Dream of the Red Chamber". Why did the Cao family, which had always been under the care of the Kangxi Emperor, be raided in the fifth year of Yongzheng and eventually lead to the defeat of the family?
1
The origins between the Cao family and the Kangxi Emperor
When it comes to the relationship between the Cao family and the royal family, a key figure is Cao Yin. Cao Yin was a bodyguard at Kangxi's side and a Wupin official in charge of the emperor's honor guard.
In the eleventh year of Kangxi, when Cao Yin was fifteen years old, he participated in the Shuntianfu Township Examination and became a bodyguard by Kangxi's side. However, with this identity alone, the Cao family will not have the later brilliant development, so Cao Yin's mother Sun Shi is indispensable.
It turned out that Cao Yin's mother, Sun Shi, was Kangxi's nursing mother. After Kangxi was born, he took shelter outside the Xihua Gate of the Forbidden City, and caught up with his father, Princess Dong E, who was favored by the Shunzhi Emperor, into the palace, and Dong Efei bore a son to the Shunzhi Emperor, so the young Kangxi was quite snubbed.
When Kangxi's birth mother died when he was ten years old, and his father died when he was eight years old, Cao Yin's mother, Sun Shi, was not only a nursing mother, but also assumed the responsibility of raising Kangxi, so the nursing mother occupied an important place in his young soul. Later, Kangxi toured the south many times, and each time he gave a lot of rewards to the nursing mother, and said in front of everyone: This is the old man of my family.
02
The Kangxi Emperor tried his best to take care of it, and the status of the Cao family continued to rise
The real change in the fate of the Cao family occurred after Kangxi succeeded to the throne. The husband of the nursing mother Sun Shi, cao yin's father, served as Jiang Ning Manufacturing for more than 20 years.
Cao Yin was four years younger than Kangxi, and at the age of seven or eight he went to the capital to become Kangxi's companion. Therefore, in addition to his family lineage, Cao Yin also received the best court education. His relationship with Kangxi was not only that he grew up eating the same milk and was not a brother of his compatriots, but also had an extra layer of relationship with the same window.
Cao Yin's father, Cao Xi, died in Jiangning weaving. At that time, Kangxi was on his way to the south, and specially sent people to mourn, and then sent his eldest son Cao Yin to assist in Jiangning weaving affairs.
In the thirty-first year of the Kangxi Dynasty, Cao Yin was transferred from Suzhou Weaving to Jiangning Weaving, Suzhou Weaving was succeeded by Cao Yin's brother-in-law Li Xu, and Hangzhou Weaving was served by Sun Wencheng, a relative of his mother Sun. Since then, Jiangnan Three Weaving has been led by Cao Yin, the mother's family, and the uncle's family, and the status of the Cao family has also reached its peak.
Cao Yin served as Jiangning Manufacturing for 20 years, in addition to his own work, mainly for Kangxi to undertake three aspects of heavy responsibilities.
The first is to recruit Han scholars. Jiangnan is a collection of humanities and an economically developed economy. Although the number of people who had hopes for the revival of the ming dynasty when Cao Yin was appointed as the weaver of Jiangning was not much, how to strengthen emotional ties with more Han scholars, let them have a complete sense of belonging, and establish the political foundation of manchu-Han alliance was an important and urgent issue related to the long-term peace and stability of the Qing Dynasty.
Cao Yin helped Kangxi do a lot of things in Jiangnan to resolve the resentment of the scholars against the Qing Dynasty. For example, rehearsing "The Hall of Eternal Life" and engraving "Quan Tang Poems".
The second was to act as Kangxi's intelligence officer in the south. Cao Yin and Li Xu were the first people allowed by Kangxi to use the secret fold, and Kangxi allowed them to play the secret recital himself on the movements of Jiangnan Shifu. For example, during Kangxi's fifth southern tour, Chen Pengnian, the prefect of Jiangning, was impeached by the governor of Liangjiang, Ah Shan, and Kangxi wanted to kill Chen Pengnian in anger.
Cao Yin knew that Chen Pengnian had a very high reputation among the Han scholars in Jiangning and even Jiangnan, and once he killed him, it would become an important mistake for Kangxi to kill the Qing officials, so Cao Yin prostrated himself without a crown and splattered the blood to plead guilty for Chen Pengnian and saved Cheng Pengnian.
The third is to pick up the car. Kangxi six times down jiangnan, the first two times, Cao Yin has not yet served as Jiangning weaver, since the beginning of Kangxi thirty-eight, Kangxi every one or two years to go down to Jiangnan, the last four times down Jiangnan are all driven by Cao Yin.
Kangxi knew that Cao Yin had a large amount of silver to spend on himself, and it was impossible to do it with only one hundred taels of silver a year.
In addition to taking over the car, all the princes are the young masters of the Cao family, especially the envoy fees given to the crown prince, which makes the Cao family have a huge deficit. To this end, Kangxi gave him the fattest errand in the world, and appointed him as the Inspector of The Two Huai Salt Imperial History, hoping to make up for his huge expenditure.
In the forty-eighth year of Kangxi, the governor of Liangjiang, Gari, secretly reported to Kangxi, saying that Cao Yin, Li Xu, and Li Siqiu, the envoy of the Two Huai Salt Transporters, had lost 3 million taels of silver from the Two Huai Salt Class, and wanted to publicly impeach them, and the matter was suppressed by Kangxi. But the stakes were high, and Kangxi privately repeatedly warned Cao Yin and Li Xu that they must try to make up for the deficit.
Later, Cao Yin fell ill and died, with a deficit of 230,000 taels of treasury silver, and there were no assets to make up for the loss. Kangxi specially ordered Cao Yin's son Cao Yan to succeed him as Jiangning Weaver, and Cao Yan died of illness two years later.
Kangxi also personally presided over cao Yin's nephew Cao Fu to succeed Him as Jiangning Weaving, and at the same time ordered Suzhou Weaver Li Xu to take charge of the two Huai salts for one year, and used the silver obtained to make up for Cao Yin's deficit during his lifetime. By October of the 56th year of the Kangxi Dynasty, the deficit had been filled.
Kangxi also made important arrangements for the descendants of the Cao family, and before Cao Yin's death, Kangxi took the initiative and gave Cao Yin's eldest daughter Xu to the King of Pingjun, Nelsu, and the second daughter married a Mongolian prince as a concubine. Kangxi died and the Yongzheng Emperor took the throne, and the fate of the Cao family changed again.
03
The Yongzheng Emperor investigated the deficit, and the Cao family was raided and fogged
There are many opinions about the reasons why the Cao family was raided, if the Cao family was raided because of a deficit, why were they safe and sound during the first inventory in the second year of Yongzheng, but they had to wait until the end of the fifth year of Yongzheng? What's more, if it was raided because of the deficit, why was the property found not used to compensate for the deficit, but was rewarded to the individual Sui Hede?
Some people also say that it is because the Cao family is involved in the dispute between the court, but the eighth son of the emperor who competed with Yongzheng for Jiangshan, the ninth son of the emperor has died, and the Yongzheng throne has been secured, and there is no need for that!
As Cao Yin's brother-in-law, Li Xu was found to be in deficit in November of the first year of Yongzheng and was immediately raided.
After Li Xu was raided, the post of Weaving in Suzhou was held by Yongzheng's "brother-in-law" Hu Fengyi, whose wife was Nian Qianyao's younger sister, that is, the younger sister of Yongzheng Nian's noble concubine. Yongzheng handed over such a good errand to Hu Fengyi, definitely not because of the "lianyi", and a large part was to win over the most powerful Nian Tangyao at that time.
Li Xu was raided, which actually sounded the alarm bell for the Cao family. Sure enough, in the second round of investigation of Li Xu's deficit case, the Cao family also accepted the first inventory of Cao Fu after Yongzheng took the throne, but the specific amount of deficit should not be much, because Yongzheng allowed Cao Fu to pay it back in three years.
This incident also shows that the Cao family did not have more involvement with Kangxi's eighth son of the emperor, the ninth son of the emperor and other people who opposed Yongzheng, otherwise, Yongzheng could not have let the Cao family make up for the deficit for three years.
The first inventory still had a great impact on the Cao family. Yongzheng ordered Cao Fu to report something to Yun Xiang the Prince of Yi, which actually deprived the Cao family of the right to use the secret fold. At the same time, he warned Cao Fu that he would listen to the teachings of Prince Yi in everything and should not run around the door and think about it blindly.
Except for Prince Yi, he could no longer ask for anyone else and drag himself down. If intimidated, blackmail should also ask Prince Yi more. Yongzheng's practice is actually protecting the Cao family, and Yongzheng's treatment of the Cao family is a rare "leniency" among all the raids.
The incident that led to the final decline of the Cao family that was raided occurred on the fourth day of December in the fifth year of Yongzheng, when the Inspector of Shandong Province, Sai Leng'e, exposed the report, Hangzhou and other three weavings transported dragon clothes, through Changqing County and other places, Dosovma, Cheng Yi, Mule Price, etc., Selen Was the first to check Cao Fu's person.
It is said that this is only a case of punishment, but only ten days later, when the case was not yet closed, Jiang Ning Weaving was taken over by Sui Hede, and on the twenty-fourth day, he ordered the governor of Jiangnan, Fan Shixuan, to raid the Cao family property, and the important family immediately took it strictly. After counting, the Cao family has houses and family houses in 13 places and 483 rooms, 19 acres of land and 67 acres, a total of 114 family members, and 32,000 silver principal profits are owed outside. Cao Fu was paraded in shackles.
However, what is puzzling is that the Yongzheng Emperor did not compensate for the loss of the proceeds of the raid, but immediately rewarded the confiscated land, houses, population, etc. to Sui Hede, and it is obvious that the Cao family's raid was not because of the deficit. And Hangzhou weaving Sun Wencheng was also replaced in the name of "old age".
Sui Hede also secretly played the Jiangning weaving yamen on the left side of the Wanshou Nunnery, hiding a pair of gilded lions, which were five feet and six inches high in their own seats. It turned out that Yun Yu was cast in Jiangning in the fifty-fifth year of the Kangxi Dynasty, and because the casting was not good, he handed it over to Cao Fu and placed it in the temple, and he did not know what the original intention of casting was.
However, the date of the secret performance was July of the sixth year of Yongzheng, and Cao Fu was dismissed from his post and punished, and the Cao family was raided around the beginning of Yongzheng 6th year, that is, after it was raided.
According to the research of red scholars, 114 people from the Cao family returned to the capital, and there was the great literary scholar Cao Xueqin in the family mouth that accompanied them to the north. After the Cao family arrived in the capital, they became poorer and poorer, and Cao Xueqin lived in Huangye Village in the western suburbs, and his life was even poorer, and his immortal masterpiece "Stone Record", that is, "Dream of the Red Chamber", was written in the mountain villages in the western suburbs.