After Zhu Yuanzhang established himself as a state, in order to guard against the goals of the Northern Yuan and the Fanping Imperial Family, he enfeoffed his sons as kings and gave them great political and military power, trying to rely on the power of the clan to achieve effective rule over the whole country.
However, with the passage of time, the wings of the kingdom gradually became fuller, posing a threat to the imperial court, so after Emperor Jianwen came to power, he carried out a fierce slash of the domain, but it also caused a violent backlash, so zhu Di, the king of Huyan, successfully ascended the throne through a battle of Jingnan.
However, Zhu Di, who had succeeded to the throne as the king of the domain, soon took over Emperor Jianwen's plan to cut the domain, with the core of gradually depriving the king of the military power of the domain to carry out high-intensity slashing, and then through the strict restrictions on the king of the domain, such as Zhu Zhanji of Emperor Xuanzong and Zhu Houzhao of Emperor Mingwu.
As a result, the clan members of each clan became a group of mediocre and incompetent people waiting to be fed, and they became a huge parasitic group that did not play the stage even if they were talented and capable, but could only sit and enjoy the Qilu.
Not only that, but this group of parasites also constantly used the majesty and power of their clan to annex land and get involved in commerce, which affected the circulation of the commodity economy, and all this undoubtedly greatly increased the financial burden of the middle and late Ming Dynasty.
According to the regulations established at the beginning of the founding of the country, all the members of the ming dynasty, including but not limited to princes, county kings, generals, lieutenants, princesses, county lords, etc., needed the imperial court to pay money to support them.
At first, the number of clan members was very small, so the imperial court felt quite relaxed in bearing their burdens, as long as they did not make trouble, everything would be served for free. However, in such a comfortable environment, the reproduction rate of clan members was very fast, and the financial pressure on the country caused by this also soared rapidly, eventually crushing the entire Ming Dynasty.
According to historical statistics, during the Hongwu period, the number of men and women below the prince and the county king was only 58; in the Yongle year, it had increased to 127; by the Zhengde period more than a hundred years later, it had reached a staggering 2,700; by the Jiajing period, the total clan population had exceeded 10,000; during the Longqing period, it had reached 28,924; during the Wanli period, the existing clan population had exceeded 100,000; until the end of Chongzhen's life, At one point, I came to the 221667.
Why the population of the Ming Dynasty clan multiplied so quickly had a lot to do with the restrictive policies adopted by the various emperors of the Ming Dynasty.
For example, it is forbidden for two clan kings to meet each other privately; these clan kings are forbidden to engage in the business of the four peoples, and they are imprisoned in a city. The direct consequence of this is that these idle members of the clan can only spend all their time eating, drinking and having fun.
At that time, the Ming Dynasty stipulated that the more people in a clan member's family, the more they could receive, so they tried to marry as many wives and concubines as possible, frantically have more children, and even adopted children with different surnames in large numbers. And because the heirs who are born out of the concubine can receive much more than the concubines, there is a large number of concubines. How could the population of the clan be small in this way?
At the same time, the Lu rice fixed to the members of the clan every year in the Ming Dynasty was also very generous, but according to the original regulations, only in terms of Lu rice, the prince could receive 50,000 stones, and the king of the county was 6,000 stones. The sons of the king of the county, who are more than fifteen years old, each of them must allocate sixty acres of land; a princess who has been crowned can get a zhuangtian, and can receive almost 15 million stones of grain and 2,000 yuan of money every year.
Later, Zhu Yuanzhang felt that Feng Lu had given too much, so he reduced the lu rice of the prince and the king of the county from 50,000 stones and 6,000 stones to 10,000 stones and 2,000 stones respectively, but added a new provision that the eldest son of the king of the county was given half of the year to the king of the county.
According to the original regulations, when the son of the king of the county reaches the age of fifteen, he can get the sixty hectares of farmland allocated by the imperial court, and as the eternal inheritance of his descendants, that is to say, no matter whether the descendants of the son of the son of the king of the county are more or less, they can only pay from these sixty hectares of farmland.
However, this amount of lu rice was stipulated, and the descendants of the sons of the king of the county, that is, the descendants of the town state, could receive 200 to 1,000 stones of lu rice per person per year, so that the lu rice they could receive far exceeded the total amount of grain produced in the sixty hectares of land.
As a result, with the passage of time, the population of the clan swelled rapidly, and the burden of the imperial court on them was more and more, which was serious enough to affect the operation of the economy.
Moreover, Zhu Yuanzhang also wrote his regulation on the reduction of the amount of his clan into the "Imperial Ming Ancestral Training", which became a permanent system, and the future emperors could not change it if they wanted to.
By the time of the middle and late Ming Dynasty, this group of clan people who were waiting to be fed had once eaten the financial revenue of the imperial court into a deficit, and the amount of Lu rice they needed to supply had exceeded the total income of the national farmland.
For example, in the forty-second year of the Wanli Calendar, the population of the clan was a total of 103,200 people, and according to the regulations, the lu rice needed by the imperial court was 30753600 stone, and at that time, the total income of the annual field endowment, 28369247 stone, had already shown a deficit of about 8.4%;
In the fourth year of the Apocalypse, there were 133128 people in the clan population, and according to the regulations, the lu rice needed by the imperial court was 39672144 stone, and at that time, the total income of the field endowment in a year was 25793645 stone, and the deficit had changed from about 8.4% to about 43%.
Therefore, in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, there were often cases of arrears of Lu rice, and these clan people who had enjoyed a good life could not get Lu rice, did not dare to be angry with the imperial court, and could only be angry with the poor people at the bottom! They annexed and seized their land to maintain their favorable living conditions.
The peasants were annexed and lost the land on which they depended, and they could only fight back, which led to a large-scale peasant uprising, which eventually crushed the entire Ming Dynasty.
Therefore, this statement will appear in later generations, how did the Ming Dynasty become poor? It was this large group of clan members who sucked blood and sucked the poor!