The ancient information exchange was no better than now, and Tianzi sat high in the imperial city, and many of the information he could know was that the minister had screened it first, and the Tianzi could only know, and because of this, many times there were major disasters in the place, and the Tianzi often had to wait until a period of time before the incident occurred. And many times, officials do not have enough coping policies, and they only want to suppress the accident at the first time, and the son of heaven cannot even know, and only the people suffer.
During the Southern Song Dynasty, Dong Jixing was well aware of the suffering of the people and compiled a book on systematic disaster relief, which contained 20 policies for early prevention and the first time after the disaster. Among them, there is the concept of yicang, which was produced after the Sui Dynasty, which was the warehouse of the imperial court to hoard grain, hoarding grain in advance for famine. In the 19th year of Hongwu of the Ming Dynasty, during the reign of Zhu Yuanzhang, there was an unfortunate drought in the Huainan region. When the news reached Zhu Yuanzhang's hands, he immediately asked for the opening of the yicang to rescue the refugees.
Speaking of Zhu Yuanzhang, his life is quite legendary. When he was young, his father was a long-term worker, and in order to support himself, he became a cattle herder in the landlord's family. Even in this way, they can't support themselves, and the landlord's family is often beaten and scolded, and the meals sent are clear soup and water, barely filling the stomach. He was 15 years old at the time of the great drought. The drought displaced countless people, there was no food in the field, there was nothing to eat, not to mention the locust plague after the drought, not to mention the lack of grass left for them.
Countless people have become inevitable, leaving their hometowns to beg for livelihood, and Zhu Yuanzhang's life is even more difficult, famine, locust plague, plague, heaven seems not to give people hope for survival. His family was torn apart, his parents died, leaving him and his second brother behind, not even a penny for his family to be buried. Zhu Yuanzhang buried his family and was forced to become a monk, thinking that the monk still had some food. But there was no extra food in the temple, so he could only devote himself to the army and follow the rebels to stutter.
After Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the opening of warehouses and free relief for the people, he was a little unable to trust these officials. After all, corruption and crime are not uncommon in any dynasty, and the system of exploitation at all levels can really be distributed to the naked eye in the hands of the people. He planned to go to war in person, but no one could believe it, and he went to micro-service private visits in beggar clothes. Because of his experience as a young man, he played a beggar and begged along the road without arousing suspicion, and he went to the disaster area and witnessed the situation in the disaster area. In the place where the drought in Huainan was most severe, he found that the granary was not open, and there were still so many people who starved to death.
All this confirmed his idea, and he angrily returned to the capital to directly investigate the truth. In the process of investigation, he found that the officials and officials protected each other, exploited layer by layer, and gave grain and silver to the upper levels at the bottom, and many people mixed a foot, and finally the people still got any improvement. Among the corrupt officials, there were even five ministers he personally enfeoffed. What Zhu Yuanzhang hated most was corruption, and as a result, they were so bold. Zhu Yuanzhang directly sent someone to arrest the five of them and behead them.
During Zhu Yuanzhang's reign, the biggest corruption case, Guo Heng, was that the corrupt officials headed by him embezzled 2,400 stones of grain, for which Zhu Yuanzhang directly uprooted the entire corrupt institution, and for a while the corpses of the government and the wilderness were everywhere, and the entire Ming Dynasty that was killed almost had no officials. He was also the most severe emperor in history for corruption.