Of the nearly five hundred emperors in Chinese history, only Liu Bang and Zhu Yuanzhang can be regarded as truly grassroots. However, Liu Bang is a small village chief, and Zhu Yuanzhang is a beggar, and his life experience can be regarded as a brilliant legend. It is precisely because Zhu Yuanzhang was born into a grassroots family in a turbulent and chaotic world, so he has seen the ugly faces of many corrupt officials and corrupt officials in the Yuan Dynasty since he was a child.
When he was a teenager, his parents died of the plague, and because he had no money to bury his parents, he hoped that the township landlord Liu De would see that his parents had worked for his family for half a lifetime and allowed him to find a place to bury his parents. However, Liu De could not even make such a small request, and it can be said that he was the turning point that forced Zhu Yuanzhang to a dead end. Therefore, after Zhu Yuanzhang became emperor, his fierce means of controlling corruption can be described as unique in ancient China.
So how cruel was Zhu Yuanzhang to corrupt officials, so that people gave him the nickname of "Zhu Pickpocket"?
Zhu Yuanzhang, because of his tragic experience in his early years, was well aware of the sufferings of the people, so he hated corrupt officials the most in his life, so as soon as he became emperor, he warned the bureaucrats that whoever embezzled 60 taels of silver would not be spared! How much is 60 taels of silver worth, in fact, today it is only 10,000 pieces of purchasing power, which shows Zhu Yuanzhang's determination to fight corruption.
Zhu Yuanzhang avoided officials from being the wind, so he directly peeled off the skin of the corrupt officials' corpses, put grass stacks in them, and made a scarecrow and placed them in the gate to always alert the incumbent officials. There is an old saying in China that "punishment cannot be a doctor", but this law did not take effect in front of Zhu Yuanzhang, a ruthless man, and the first corrupt official to be made into a scarecrow was the son of Zhu Liangzu, the founding general who made great contributions to Zhu Yuanzhang.
After the Ming Dynasty settled down, Zhu Liangzu was made a marquis and guarded Guangzhou. However, there was a very upright county order in the local area, named Daotong, who was a clean and honest official, and because he was not afraid of power, he offended the local squires and Zhu Liangzu, who was in cahoots with them.
Zhu Liangzu, who prided himself on being a founding hero, deceived the imperial court into issuing orders and let Zhu Yuanzhang mistakenly kill Daotong. Zhu Yuanzhang, who learned the truth, regretted it and was very angry, and when he detained Zhu Liangzu and his son Zhu Xian together in the palace, he did not say that when the dynasty beat Zhu Liangzu alive with a whip, he remembered that he had merit and left him a whole body. Zhu Xian was not so lucky, he was killed by Zhu Yuanzhang, and he was the first to make a scarecrow out of human skin.
However, even so, Zhu Yuanzhang was not sure that the bureaucrats did not take corruption seriously, so he directly made a decision that had never been done before, as long as there were corrupt officials, the people could directly escort him to Beijing, and the officials along the way needed a green light. Although this is a bit unrealistic, it also shows that Zhu Yuanzhang cares about the people.
Although Zhu Yuanzhang formulated a harsh criminal law to curb corruption, but corrupt officials still continue to emerge in front of him, which made Zhu Yuanzhang think that his criminal law has no new ideas, so he came up with many perverted tortures, although inhuman, but I have to say that it is indeed very creative, of which the more famous ones are "pumping intestines", "brushing" (sprinkling boiling water on people, and then brushing people's skin with iron brushes), castration, digging knees, hanging people with iron hooks to dry their work, etc., all sound quite terrible, let alone corrupt officials.
However, these are not the most cruel, I don't know if you know the "Ling Chi execution" often said in the TV series, perhaps some people do not understand, this is not only a capital punishment for the punished, but also a test for the punisher.
This criminal law refers to cutting off the flesh of the human body piece by piece, and also ensuring that corrupt officials cannot die of pain in addition to suffering. In addition, if the emperor wants to cut how many knives and flesh, the punisher must do how many knives, if the punished person dies of pain, then the punisher will be punished. According to historical records, the highest record is that someone was cut more than 3,000 knives and did not die, which is really tragic!
However, even though the criminal law has been very perverted and cruel, corrupt officials still send heads one after another, which makes Zhu Yuanzhang, who does not understand the economy, very puzzled.
In fact, when Zhu Yuanzhang ordered them to live, he only considered letting corrupt officials and his family live enough, but did not consider that they also had to pay salaries to their subordinates, and at the same time there were amateur activities of visiting relatives and friends, which inevitably brought people to social exchanges, coupled with market inflation, if officials were not greedy, then they could only wait for starvation. Therefore, during Zhu Yuanzhang's reign, many Qing officials were killed by mistake, so that the officials had to explain the aftermath to their families the day before the Shang Dynasty, and then the family cried and sent them to the Shang Dynasty, which had to be said to be a strange scene during the Hongwu years.
When Zhu Yuanzhang was in power, he killed more than 100,000 "corrupt officials" in total, and it is said that if he killed so diligently, what should he do if he did not have enough government affairs manpower? Zhu Yuanzhang directly asked these officials to handle the case on their behalf, and then they would kill their heads later. So don't be surprised if you see that during the Hongwu years there were officials who were still handling cases in the morning and were killed in the afternoon, because this was a common sight at the time.
Although Zhu Yuanzhang did work diligently for the people and let the people live and work in peace and contentment, he was always limited by the times and considered problems from the perspective of defending his own country. Although his exploits are commendable, it has to be said that he was indeed inhumane, ignoring the livelihood of officials and making officials unhappy. Of course, his efforts to combat corruption did make a great contribution to the martial arts of Chu Diwen in the future.