Zhu Yuanzhang's heavy rule of greed: greedy ink 60 two will be beheaded! How much is the Ming Dynasty 60 two equivalents now? Zhu Yuanzhang was a hot hand to rule the officials, why couldn't corrupt officials be killed? The corrupt official's last words: Do not covet the whole family to starve to death! The "convict official" wearing a verdict is not a new thing, and Zhu Yuanzhang has done a good job!
Zhu Yuanzhang was the only "grassroots emperor" in Chinese history, and he was well aware of the suffering of the people at the bottom, so he was the heaviest and cruelest in punishing corrupt officials. Zhu Yuanzhang was born in a peasant family, from a poor family since childhood, in order to mix stuttering, he gave the landlord cattle, and also went to the temple to work as a monk, after his father's death, even no money, no land for burial, typical "one poor and two white".
The root cause of Zhu Yuanzhang's impoverishment was the corrupt rule at the end of the Yuan Dynasty. According to historical records, at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, "all the officials inside and outside were content to be meticulous, not to practice their ministry, but to eat fat and sweet, to live in accordance with the rules, and to live in the woes of the people, and to gain or lose political affairs. Officials are corrupt and corrupt... I don't know what shame is. ”
Zhu Yuanzhang, who was deeply suffering from the harm of corrupt officials, after taking possession of the world, he summed up the lessons of the demise of the Yuan Dynasty, and among them, the one he hated most was the corruption of this official. Zhu Yuanzhang warned his courtiers more than once: "The disadvantage of officials is nothing more than greed for ink." If you can't help being greedy, the people will not be able to live. ”
Zhu Yuanzhang never tolerated corruption, and directly sentenced officials who embezzled more than sixty taels of silver to death, and his holy decree read: "All officials who embezzle more than sixty taels of silver will be executed and will never be lenient." ”
So how much is the 60 taels of silver of the Ming Dynasty put in today? According to historical records: "Therefore, the household department fixed: one ingot of banknotes, one stone of folded rice, one stone of gold, one or two stones of gold, and one or two stones of silver. "One stone in the Ming Dynasty is about equal to 95 kilograms now, one or two silver is equal to two stones, one or two silver can buy 190 kilograms of rice, even if we count 200 kilograms, sixty two silver can buy 12,000 kilograms of rice."
Our current price of ordinary rice is about two yuan per kilogram, and we calculate it according to two yuan a kilogram, and 12,000 kilograms of rice costs 24,000 yuan. Therefore, the sixty-two pieces of silver in Zhu Yuanzhang's period were about equal to the current 24,000 yuan.
Therefore, as long as officials who embezzled more than 24,000 yuan in that year, they were shot and killed. During Zhu Yuanzhang's reign, which can be called the most incorruptible era of Daming, the corrupt officials and corrupt officials were greatly reduced, and all of this was inseparable from his thunderous means of punishing corrupt officials and corrupt officials.
Although Zhu Yuanzhang's killing intent was rumbling, the world's corrupt officials were like weeds everywhere, "burning endlessly, blowing and living again", and in the face of those corrupt officials who were not afraid of death, Zhu Yuanzhang's methods were becoming more and more cruel and more and more frightening. The emperor can be described as "doing everything to the extreme" in the method of punishing corrupt officials, and the method he adopted to punish corrupt officials can also be described as "no ancient person before, no one after him".
For example, "peeling the skin and pulling the grass" is a kind of torture in the Ming Dynasty law "The Great Curse". In addition, Zhu Yuanzhang also creatively invented the "tin snake tour", this punishment is extremely cruel, first burn the tin melted, and then broke the prisoner's mouth, forcibly poured the tin liquid down, instantly melted the prisoner's internal organs, let people die of pain.
As long as it is corruption, no matter who is involved, it will never be merciful, and once it is investigated to the end, even Emperor Zhu's own relatives and the princes and ministers who fight with Emperor Zhu will also be severely punished. By the nineteenth year of Hongwu," in the thirteen provinces of the country, few officials from the prefecture to the county could fulfill their duties, and most of them were killed. During Zhu Yuanzhang's reign of thirty-one years, as many as 150,000 corrupt officials were executed alone.
Zhu Yuanzhang's determination to punish corrupt officials and the strength of his convictions were rare in ancient times, and although they played a great deterrent effect on the corrupt and perverted the law at that time, it was difficult to prohibit them. Because there are so many criminals and there are not enough people in the DPRK, officials who have committed misdemeanors or felonies that have not yet reached the death penalty must wear shackles to work as directors and try cases. Therefore, it is not a new thing for "criminals" to sit in court and judge cases, and Zhu Yuanzhang has done a good job.
Zhu Yuanzhang's anti-corruption methods were harsh and cruel, which gradually improved the atmosphere in the official field, and in a certain period of time and to a certain extent, the rule of officials was purged. However, his practice has also been criticized by later people. He laid such a heavy hand and failed to curb corruption, which also had a lot to do with the ultra-low welfare treatment of officials formulated by Zhu Yuanzhang.
During the Ming Dynasty, the salaries of officials were unusually low, even less than some peasant households at that time. The county order of the Ming Dynasty was only 10,000 yuan a year, less than 900 yuan a month; even if it was a pin in the middle of the dynasty, it could only get 90,000 yuan a year, which was not as much as the monthly salary of a Song Dynasty pin officer.
The Ming Dynasty was not poor, where did the money go? It turned out that after Zhu Yuanzhang came to power, he divided his sons into all parts of the country, and did not allow the royal palace to allocate a large amount of silver from the state treasury every year to feed them. As more and more descendants multiplied, the national treasury was also difficult to afford, and their own children and grandchildren could not feed themselves, so where was the money left to improve the treatment of courtiers and local officials?
As an errand boy under Zhu Yuanzhang, he must have the dedication spirit of "eating grass and spitting up milk", not greedy and not occupied, otherwise, it is inevitable to become a ghost under the knife. Officials are also people, and they also have to support their own families, so although Zhu Yuanzhang's knife for killing people is sharpened, there are still many officials who take risks in order to make a living.
According to relevant literature, there was a corrupt official of the Ming Dynasty who cried incessantly on the execution ground before his execution, saying that he had to be greedy and that if he was not greedy, he would starve to death. Horizontal and vertical are all dead, instead of being a hungry ghost, it is better to be a full death ghost. Although this is only a wild history deduction, it also reflects the general mentality of some officials in the Ming Dynasty.