Punishment, in the long river of history, no matter which emperor reigned in the era, is a frightening existence. Just as the so-called no rules are not square, the purpose of the existence of punishment is to protect the rules of the state, to take the discipline of people's actions seriously, and to use legal punishment to impose a subjective consciousness of good on the people. In the long history of China's feudal dynasties, the types of punishment can be described as endless.
In order to better centralize power and consolidate the emperor's rule, punishment has become a means of maintaining imperial power, and at the same time, it is also an extremely effective way to extract confessions in the face of enemies and sinners. Whether it is the Ming Jun or the Dark Jun, punishment will never be lacking, but there are very few emperors who really make people convinced of the criminal law and crimes they are given. But Emperor Taizong of Tang and Li Shimin were a very great emperor who did this with dignity and integrity.
The Tang Dynasty was a very prosperous era in the history of China's feudal dynasties, with many wise monarchs who worked hard to govern the country. Tang Taizong Li Shimin was the greatest emperor of the Tang Dynasty, and his life was full of great achievements, and he frequently produced good policies for governing the country and the people were happy. Li Shimin was a man with a very generous heart, and he was very close to the talent from the time he had not yet ascended the throne.
After ascending the throne, he even adopted the advice of the wise and the wise, absorbed the suggestions of various think tanks to govern the country, and improved many imperfect and disharmonious systems in the country. Li Shimin has always insisted on a sympathetic heart in governing the country, and the late Sui and early Tang dynasties were the years of weakness after the war. Frequent wars not only drastically reduced the population of the people, but also destroyed the country's economic development, and the cost of war was very serious.
Li Shimin was very distressed by this, so he followed the advice of the imperial court, knew people well, used people without doubt, and did not blame those who had all the past, but only to gather the strength of the people to restore the national situation and restore the people to a healthy and prosperous world. Beginning in 627 AD, under Li Shimin's extremely magnanimous statecraft, the country's economy developed rapidly, while being open-minded and giving great respect to the literati, and the country was thriving.
Until 649 AD, the era name was Zhenguan, which was the famous "Rule of Zhenguan" in history. The laws of the Tang Dynasty were very strict and disciplined, and under the rule of Li Shimin, during the Zhenguan years, the world was a picture of a peaceful and prosperous world. The people live and work in peace and contentment, the neighbors are harmonious, the people know and trust each other, they do not close their homes at night, they do not pick up their belongings, and every household is safe and self-satisfied, and their clothes are warm and sufficient. During this period, the crime rate in society showed a faulty decline, and society was once extremely stable.
In the fourth year of Zhenguan (630), according to the statistics of the imperial court, only 29 people in the country were sentenced to death, which can be described as Guotai Min'an. During Li Shimin's reign, a very strict procedural process was formulated for the determination of criminal punishments, and all death row inmates in the country needed to be collected and reported to the imperial court by the local government, and then the imperial court gave Li Shimin a look and confirmation, and finally executed. In order to prevent the existence of grievances, Li Shimin often went down to the prison himself to visit these death row inmates.
In the sixth year of Zhenguan (632 AD), the number of death row prisoners rose to more than three hundred. This time, Li Shimin personally went to the cell of the death row prisoners, gave them a warm greeting, and asked them whether they had been wronged. Seeing that the Nine-Five-Year Emperor had personally come regardless of the difference in identity, the death row inmates were immediately grateful, confessed all their sins and expressed their satisfaction.
Li Shimin was very pleased with this, and he seemed to see from this small detail that he had created a very healthy society. As a result, Li Shimin keenly discovered the prisoners' homesickness from the words he had just talked about, and he made a very atmospheric decision to let the prisoners go home and come back for execution in the next autumn, which can be described as making a group of death row inmates grateful.
In the Tang Dynasty, asking for beheading after autumn was an unwritten rule, which implicitly coincided with the Confucian Dong Zhongshu's "Spring and Autumn Prosperity" in the idea that "celebration is spring, reward is summer, punishment is autumn, punishment is winter", and all death row inmates will be imprisoned until autumn and then go to execution. To release more than three hundred prisoners on death row, this move will certainly cause the dissatisfaction of many ministers.
But Li Shimin did not care, he believed that this kind of misstep and imprisonment, wanting to go home to see the last side of his relatives, was worth giving the opportunity to satisfy, and the ministers could not help it, so they had to obey the orders. Although this seems absurd, it also shows Li Shimin's magnanimity and imperial courage. Just when the courtiers thought that all the prisoners had fled, in the autumn of the following year, more than three hundred prisoners on death row, one by one, rushed back to the capital to receive their sentences.
The look in their eyes at Li Shimin was only pure touch and admiration, and there was no regret of losing the opportunity to escape. When Li Shimin saw this, he laughed and said to the courtiers around him, Look, this is the prosperity of our Tang Dynasty! So unexpectedly, more than three hundred death row inmates were exempted from the death penalty, and after accepting other punishments, they were released, giving them a chance to become people again.
Li Shimin is definitely not a benevolent person in the evaluation of history, but he is definitely a person who loves the people very much. His compassion and magnanimity to the people have made the society truly under a river and a clear sea, and there is no vain person under the fame, so how can such a generation of emperors not be loved by the people?