The Yuan Dynasty was an era of dark, barbaric despotism in the minds of ordinary China, such as the "four-class system". In order to rule the territory, the rulers of the Yuan Dynasty divided the various ethnic groups in the country into four classes.
The first-class Mongols, who held the highest status, aimed to preserve the privileges of the Mongol nobility. The second-class Semu people, mainly referring to the Western Regions, were the first to be conquered by the Mongols, such as the Wu'er, Sogdians, etc., in addition, some of the earlier tribes around the Mongolian plateau also belonged to the Semu people. The Third Class Northern Han Chinese, who were loyal to the Jurchens at the fall of the Jin Dynasty, as well as the Han chinese in Yunnan and Sichuan, and the Goryeo people on the Korean Peninsula were also in this rank. The fourth-class Southerners, who were specially guided by the Song people, were the people of all ethnic groups in the former Southern Song Dynasty who were finally conquered by the Mongols, and they had the lowest social status, the poorest life, and were subjected to multiple oppression and discrimination. There is also the saying of the Nine Confucians and Ten Beggars that the status of the literati in the Yuan Dynasty was very low, and it was slightly better than that of beggars.
Legal bias. A semu person is worth 40 gold coins, but a nan person is only worth a donkey; the semu people only have to pay the money to kill the Han people, but the Han people have to pay for the death of the Semu people, and the Semu people beat the Han people, and the Han people can't fight back but can only report to the officials. There are also cases such as not allowing Han people to hold large gatherings, learn martial arts, and hold weapons, etc., the five Families of Han People share a chai knife, and the cultivated land in the north and central plains is occupied by the Mongols as grasslands.
Exercise the "right to the first night". There is no explicit record of such a thing in the laws of the Yuan Dynasty, but there is a matter of Han women being arbitrarily possessed by the Mongols, and Genghis Khan once said to his subordinates: "The greatest pleasure of a man is to subdue the crowd and defeat the enemy, to root them out, to take away all that he has, to force his wife with hair to weep bitterly, to ride his horse, and to take his beautiful wife and concubine to the bed." If the boss says this, his men will follow suit. This is some of the statements we know from the general text, as if this dynasty is the most inhumane dynasty in the world, comparable to the Silk, and it is simply unreasonable not to perish. However, the Yuan Dynasty was able to rule the Han people in the world for nearly a hundred years, it is not so simple, from historical materials and literary works, we see a different life of ordinary people in the Yuan Dynasty.
During the reign of Kublai Khan, the ancestor of the Yuan Dynasty, attention was paid to the selection of talents, the adoption of Han law, and the establishment of various political systems. Localities have established provinces and created a precedent for China's provincial system. He advised nongsang to build water conservancy and develop production. Strengthen the management of border areas, open up Sino-foreign transportation, and consolidate and develop multi-ethnic countries. During the reign of Emperor Yuanrenzong, Emperor Yuanrenzong carried out a number of reforms to promote Sinicization, the most important of which were four points: the restoration of the imperial examination, the compilation of legal codes, the publication of Chinese books, the restriction of the nobility, and the implementation of the basic policy of "ruling the country with Confucianism".
Lenient sentences and light penalties. At the beginning of his reign, Kublai Khan publicly declared to his subordinates: "Human life is the most important, and repentance will be reached. He also emphasized the leniency and prudential law as the guiding ideology of the Yuan Dynasty's criminal law: "Ruling the world, valuing human life, all those who are guilty will be ordered again and again, and the fruits will be followed by sin." He also said, "Heaven spare him, the earth spare him, I spare him." Although the actual punishment effect is not much different, it also reflects the idea of light punishment of the Yuan rulers. After unifying Jiangnan, he reduced the number of crimes during the Southern Song Dynasty to 135, and during Kublai Khan's 31-year reign, fewer than 2,000 people were sentenced to death.
Compared with the Tang and Song dynasties, the criminal law of the Yuan Dynasty was much more relaxed, which was a great progress in the history of China's legal system, and there were only five kinds of criminal means: flogging, staff, discipleship, flow, and death, and the judicial organs were also particularly cautious in the specific implementation of these five criminal methods. The "History of the Yuan" evaluates this as "the Five Punishments of the Gaigus with Ink, Sword, Gong, Palace, and Dapu, and in later generations, in addition to corporal punishment, it is the number of five punishments of flogging, rod, disciple, stream, and death preparation." Yuan, because of this, more use of light canon, cover also benevolent. "American scholar Jack. Weserfeld also commented that "Kublai Khan comprehensively established a more stable criminal law system than the Song Dynasty, and it was also gentler and more humane than the Song Law." ”
In the spirit of humanitarianism, torture was vigorously prohibited by the central government of the Yuan Dynasty. The Second Punishment Department of the YuanDian Chapter has a special entry for "Prohibition of Cruel Torture", which stipulates: "The equipment of the prison has its own customization, and since the beginning of the year, the official government of the outer road, the cruel law abuses people." There are those who do not recruit, kneeling on the porcelain mang tiles, overwhelmed with pain, and people cannot bear it. Whether there is sin or not, why not ask for it! The rest of the extrajudicial tragedies are more than that. In the future, it seems that the misery of this questioning will be forbidden from the inside out. If there is a violation of the official, the punishment is repeated, as if the emperor's original intention to be punished, to cool the official's raging wind, the world is very fortunate. From these provisions, it can be seen that the Yuan rulers still have some "people-oriented" ideas.
Light and thin. In the first month of 1270, Kublai Khan established Shangshu Province to restore the province of Shangshu to the Hui people Ahma Pingzhang Shangshu Province. Ahma is good at managing money and has taken a variety of measures to increase the revenue of the national treasury. Ahma stipulated the total amount of commercial tax to be levied, 1/30 of the commercial tax, which became the prevailing system of the Yuan dynasty. In the 6th century AD, the European church took advantage of the Biblical statement that one-tenth of agricultural and sideline products "belonged to God" and began to collect taxes, and the church stipulated that it was the duty of every believer to pay "tithes", and the yuan dynasty tax was much lighter than the European medieval "tithe". Shen Defu of the Ming Dynasty considered the Yuan Dynasty's approach "inherently lawless" and also admitted: "The former Yuan took the people as the lightest."
"History of The Yuan" volume 16, to the twenty-eighth year of the Yuan Dynasty (1291) December Nongshen, Zhongshu Province's ministers said: Jiangnan in the Song Dynasty, cha Yu for more than seventy years, after the annexation of the Yuan Dynasty everything was not requisitioned. And this is not only the account of the beginning of the Yuan, but also the situation at the end of the Yuan. The famous historian Tan Qian of the late Ming Dynasty compared the number of levies in the Susong region of the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, and concluded: The Song Dynasty gave eight points, and the version of Cao Xiang urged it to be given. Suzhou millet two million, the yuan people reduced to only one million. At the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, Min Guang was a little alarmed, and immediately settled down, Wu and Zhejiang Yanran. The People of Su Song are tired of suffering from song gongtian, such as being relieved of their burdens, and if they have blessings but no curses, they will lightly give them a small gift, and they will actually draw a deep knot with solicitation.
"Since the Tang Dynasty, Jiangnan has been Yin Fu. In the Song Dynasty, the mu tax was a bucket; the Yuan had the world, so that the field tax was not more than three liters per mu, and Wu Min was happy. Between the Yuan Dynasty and the Yuan Dynasty, Wu Zhongfu was prosperous and prosperous in the world. Since the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, they have fallen into the former vassals of the Zhang clan and the land of local tycoons, and according to their private rent, they have been levied, and the acres have been up to Badou, and the people have been trapped. The people of Gai Wuzhong, Mo Leyu Yuan, Mo Trapped in Ming, non-governance has lifting and descending, and the field endowment is light and heavy. From these records, it can be seen that the taxes in the Yuan Dynasty were lighter than those in the Song and Ming dynasties, and the common people were "relieved of their burdens, and there were blessings but no curses." Ye Ziqi, a man of the late Yuan and early Ming Dynasties, recorded in "Grass and Muzi": "After the Yuan Dynasty was mixed with the ancestors of the world, the rulers of the world ruled for 60 to 70 years, light sentences were given thin endowments, soldiers were rarely used, the living were raised, the dead were buried, they traveled thousands of miles, they stayed at home, and the so-called prosperous world was sincere!" "Yuan Huimin has a bureau, a nursing home, a heavy prisoner has grain, and all are benevolent and political!"
Implement the imperial examination. Emperor Yuanrenzong advocated ruling the country with Confucianism, and re-proposed that "to seek the best and take the best, what is the law is supreme." "In the second year of Emperor Qing (1313), the Yuan court issued an edict to the world with the imperial examination, which was held every three years, and was divided into three examinations: the township examination, the meeting test, and the temple examination. A total of 9 imperial examinations were held in the Yuan Dynasty, and more than 1,200 people (including those who were selected in the guozi supervisors' examination) were selected, accounting for 4% of the total number of civil officials at that time. Proportionally equivalent to one-tenth of the Tang and Song dynasties, Liu Bowen also went to Dadu to take the entrance examination at the end of the Yuan Dynasty. In addition, scholars can also enter the career path by sending money and receiving millet. Although the Mongols hold important positions in the whole country, but the world is so big, the Mongols are small after all, or to the Han people to assist, a large number of historical materials prove that the number of Han officials in Jiangnan and even the central government to hold important positions far more than the Mongols.
Culture flourishes. Yuanqu, or Yuanqu opera, is an opera art that prevailed in the Yuan Dynasty, which is a combination of scattered music and miscellaneous opera. Yuanqu is called together with Tang poetry and Song ci. Following the Tang poems and Song poems, the Yuanqu, which became a literary flourish, has its own unique charm: on the one hand, the Yuanqu inherits the beauty and elegance of the poems; on the other hand, the works in the Yuanqu that describe love and expose the shortcomings of the times are also more spicy and bold than the poems of previous generations. These are enough to make Yuanqu always maintain its artistic charm. In the literary historical record of the Yuanqu made by the people of the Yuan Dynasty, the people of the Yuan Dynasty are often compared to "Yao Min", such as Chen Cao'an Youyun: "Yao Min Kan, Zhu Chen Marriage, Chaimen Leaning Tower Gourd Frame." Boiling pond frogs, noisy forest crows, cattle and sheep under the sound of the flute, hut bamboo hedge three or two. People, more land species; Official, poor tax widow. In Chen's pen, such a pastoral pleasure even Yaomin should be surprised, which shows the wealth of the peasant family in the Yuan Dynasty.
Another example is Zhang Yanghao's description of the rural customs at that time in a song: "See the Xiechuan chicken dog Le Shengping, around the house Mulberry Ma Cui smoke life." "Directly taking Yao Min as the name of the scattered tune, it can be seen that the scene of the great rule of the world at that time was deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. Du Renjie wrote in the playing child: "The wind and rain are smooth and the people are happy, they are not as happy as the Zhuang family, the mulberry silkworm grain is very good, and the lawsuit is not very bad." "Even in the chaos of the Yuan Dynasty, there were still many places in Jiangnan, and the standard of living was still very high, such as Kunshan Gu Ying, with strong financial resources and astute talent, presided over the Yilin event--- Yushan Yaji for twenty years. Among them, there are more than 200 literati who travel to and from the Yushan Pavilion, and there are more than 3,000 poems in existence, which is the last glory in the cultural history of the Yuan Dynasty. Unfortunately, after Yuan Ming changed hands, Gu Ying was confiscated by the raiders and distributed to Fengyang and died, and the Yushan wind and currents disappeared.
Marco Polo once mentioned in his travelogues his perception of the city dwellers of the Yuan Dynasty: "They ran their own industry and commerce with complete fairness and loyalty. They live in harmony with each other, and men and women who live on the same street are as close as family because of their neighborly relationship. The Pope's emissary, Ordolik, in his Journey to the East of The Odolic, gave the most exclamating lament to the Yuan dynasty society: "The fact that so many people of different races can live peacefully under the sole authority of the world is a miracle in my opinion. ”
Li Kaixian, a Ming Dynasty man, said in the "Xiye Spring Tour Word Order" that the real reason for the well-off life of the Yuan people was broken: "Yuan does not shu edge, taxes are light and clothing is sufficient, and clothing and food are sufficient and singing." Even Zhu Yuanzhang, who opposed the Yuan's seizure of power, had to admit after putting on the dragon robe: "If the parents of the giver were born at the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, when the law was unknown, the foolish and stubborn feared Wei Huaide, the strong did not bully the weak, the multitude was not violent, and in the people, the father, the son, the husband, and the woman, each of them lived in peace, and the benefits were great." "The Yuan Lord of China, who will die for a hundred years, his first monarch is simple and thick, his political affairs are simple, he rests with the people, and he is called Well-off."
The soldiers forget. Even after the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, the literati and scholars still remembered the Yuan Dynasty, and there were still many literati who remembered the Yuan Dynasty, the most significant of which was Zhang Chang, the Shangshu of the Household Department of the Yuan Dynasty, who became an official of the Ming Dynasty after being captured by Zhu Yuanzhang, but this old brother had always been in Cao Ying's heart in Han, secretly colluding with the Yuan Dynasty, and after the matter was revealed, Zhang Chang actually wrote a few big characters without shame: "In Jiangnan, the mind is in the north."
The Mongol general Wang Baobao also had a talent named Cai Ziying, who was loyal to the Yuan Dynasty, and Cai Ziying was also taken prisoner in the battle, but as a result, he resolutely refused to surrender, crying at Zhu Yuanzhang, crying day and night, anyway, he missed the old lord, Zhu Yuanzhang had no choice but to let him go. Of course, you can explain that both of them were brainwashed by the Yuan Dynasty, after all, they were vested interests compared with other oppressed compatriots, so they became loyal accomplices of the Mongols. In addition to the officials, the daoist monks who practiced and the hermits in the wilderness also seemed to have remembered the Yuan Dynasty. The most typical is the famous Taoist priest Zhang Sanfeng in the late Yuan and early Ming Dynasties, who wrote Zhang Sanfeng as an anti-Yuan righteous soldier in Mr. Jin Yong's novel "The Book of the Dragon Slaughtering in the Heavens", but now the Two poetry works recognized by the Taoist circles have appeared in the "Remnants of the Great Yuan", such as "Selling Flowers": "Under the rootless tree, it is true and common, and the six paths contain the spirit and the common light."
There will be a sound of weiyin before and after, and there will be no coming and going. In the seventeenth year of Ming Hongwu, at the age of JiaziZhonghe Festival, Zhang Sanfeng, the widow of the Great Yuan, recorded himself in the Caolu of the Pillar Peak of Wu Day. It is recorded in the "Self-Titled Edict of the Seal": "The Book of the Great Yuan's Widow Old Sanfeng Daoist. "It has been seventeen years since Hongwu, Daming has been fixing the world for nearly twenty years, Zhang Sanfeng still thinks of himself as a Yuan Dynasty person, what kind of anti-Yuan righteous soldier is this, it is clear that he is a Shunmin of the Yuan Dynasty!"
For the scholars, the Yuan Dynasty and the Southern Song Dynasty were no different, and even to some extent, they lived happier and freer than the Southern Song Dynasty. Liu Bowen, an important strategist of Zhu Zhongba, recalled: "Scholars and masters enjoy wealth and fame in peace, and literati and scholars render peace, sing and dance to rise to peace, and do their best to extravagant things." The doctors had a great time! It's beautiful and happy! Well, in fact, this is why these scholars miss the Yuan Dynasty.