The Great Ming Robbery
author:
There is a pear on the tree
In 1644, Li Zicheng conquered Beijing, ending more than two hundred years of Ming dynasty rule, and the last master of the dynasty, the Chongzhen Emperor, left the Forbidden City lonely and died with the stormy empire in coal mountains.
Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang established a complete political and economic system for the Ming Empire, which operated for hundreds of years, but in the last 17 years of the empire,
The Ming government's operating system collapsed on a large scale, and war after war, famine, natural disaster, and financial bankruptcy repeatedly tormented the dying dynasty.
The Ming Dynasty has gone through 16 emperors and 276 years of guozuo, and it has had the glory of Zheng He's voyage to the West, the darkness of the disaster of the party, and the sunset of the three major marches of the Wanli Calendar.
Even the Chongzhen Emperor, the emperor of the fallen country, had a great career during his reign.
But the Empire is like a terminally ill patient, constantly losing blood, exhausting all kinds of medical techniques but unable to return to heaven, and eventually dying of exhaustion.
Moving the timeline of Chongzhen's suicide forward by 20 years, although there were minor conflicts within the Ming Dynasty, it was generally stable.
But in just a few decades, what kind of crisis caused the Ming Dynasty to perish?
First, the low tax capacity leads to the depletion of financial resources
The maintenance of the feudal dynasty needed to rely on taxes to ensure that the operation of the feudal dynasty was guaranteed, and the agricultural tax station was the vast majority.
At the beginning of the founding of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang,
Given the proliferation of paper money at the end of the yuan, which led to hyperinflation, therefore
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, various taxes were mainly in kind.
The cultivators paid the grain directly, the silk households paid the cloth, and even the officials at all levels were replaced by grain, satin, spices and other physical goods.
This simple and straightforward approach to taxation was very effective in the early days, but in the middle and late stages,
Western due
Advances in navigation technology began to trade frequently with the East, and silver poured into China in large quantities.
And there will be a lot of losses in the operation of the physical object, after the reform of Zhang Juzheng in the middle and late Ming Dynasty,
Silver two instead
Physical goods become the main body of taxation.
▲ At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Jiangnan region had the germ of capitalism
Abundant silver enabled the industry and commerce in the Jiangnan region to develop greatly, but the tax system created by Zhu Yuanzhang did not have this part at all.
Commercial tax, mining tax is a lot of income, naturally will be introduced
The struggle between the forces of all sides.
Beginning with Jiajing, Emperors such as Wanli and Tianqi sent tax eunuchs to the Jiangnan region to ensure adequate income. However, the ministers from the south, the gentry, resolutely resisted until a fierce struggle between the Donglin Party and the Castration Party was formed.
After Chongzhen came to power, he liquidated the castration party, withdrew the tax eunuchs stationed in the Jiangnan region, and abolished the commercial tax.
mine
Taxes and other fiscal revenues, the imperial power in the south has appeared in a vacuum.
▲ The tyranny of the expropriation led to a rapid increase in the scope and intensity of the peasant war
however
Chongzhen faced enormous military pressure from Later Jin in the northeast for a long time
As a result, military spending has increased dramatically, and the imperial court has been unable to reach the balance of payments. Therefore, taxes had to be levied on the northern provinces.
The landlords and gentry passed on the taxes to the farmers,
And the cultivators in order to pay taxes, they
The land was sold cheaply for silver, but in the end it was attached to the landlord and gentry. This leads to more and more wasteland and less and less tax revenue.
What's more, the people were overwhelmed and rose up one after another.
The drastic reduction in tax revenues affected first the border troops in a secondary position in the defensive zone
。 For example, Ningxia, Shaanxi, and Gansu once belonged to the Ming and Jiubian defense systems, and the soldiers could get relatively adequate food.
However, with the decline of northern power, the imperial court did not pay these military towns for decades.
The border troops who had been cut off from income joined the peasant army one after another, and the threat was far greater than that of the rioting peasants.
▲ "Opened the city gate to welcome the king, and the king came without paying grain" The Ming Dynasty's rule in the north was gradually disintegrating
The serious imbalance between revenue and expenditure forced the Ming government to take"
The east wall was demolished to make up for the west wall
"The measures have eliminated the pawns nationwide. Unfortunately, Li Zicheng, the leader of the peasant army at the end of the Ming Dynasty, was one of them.
Losing his job to support himself, Li Zicheng joined the peasant army.
From the general to the king, he became the gravedigger of the Ming Dynasty step by step.
Second, the military pressure caused by the rise of houjin
In the 11th year of the Wanli Calendar, Nurhaci's father was mistakenly killed by the Ming army, and the thirteen pairs of armor were the only property that Nurhaci could inherit. The young man was secretly determined to avenge his father.
▲ Qing Taizu Nurhaci established a powerful Eight Banner Army for the Qing Dynasty
However, the son of a broken chieftain cannot be compared with the great tomorrow son sitting in the four seas. Out of pity for Nurhaci,
Nurhaci adopted a tacit attitude towards the annexation of nearby tribes.
The changes in the external environment have brought great surprises to Nurhaci,
The Ming Dynasty experienced the three major conquests of the Wanli Dynasty, and the economy suffered great damage, which made the Ming government's foreign policy more cautious
。 Nurhaci seized the opportunity to conquer the east and west, controlling large areas of land and population in the Liaodong region.
▲ In the Battle of Salhu, although the Ming army had many generals, it was too scattered, and was broken by Nurhaci
Realizing the danger, Wanli recruited more than 100,000 troops to surround and suppress Nurhaci, but suffered a huge defeat, known as the Battle of Salhu.
The strength of the two sides reversed outside the Guanwai, and the Ming Dynasty was on the defensive.
When Chongzhen ascended the throne, the Ming army could only retreat to the area around western Liaoning and hold on to Houjin.
Chongzhen, anxious to end the war with Hou Jin, appointed Yuan Chonghuan as the governor of Jiliao, hoping that he would be in the liao for five years, but at this time
The strength of the Later Jin Army was far superior to that of the Ming Army
。 Chongzhen's excessive expectations for Yuan Chonghuan were the inducement for Yuan Chonghuan's death in the future.
▲The combat capability of the Ming Army was far lower than that of the Eight Banner Army
The Later Jin military establishment was not as complex as the Ming Dynasty, but it was simple and effective, dividing the subordinates into eight banners, and each of the eight banners set up flag owners to cooperate with each other.
Liaodong's materials are barren, and the continuous war is the best time for the Eight Banners to gain benefits. On the contrary, it was difficult for the Ming army to coordinate with each other when fighting, and eventually formed large and small military groups.
Later Jin in Liaodong kept consuming the already stretched financial resources and resources of the Ming Dynasty, and millions of silver were attached to the bottomless pit that was forever filled with dissatisfaction, fattening Wu Sangui, Zuo Liangyu and the like.
But it has squeezed out thousands of Qianshou Li people.
Third, the concentrated outbreak of accumulated maladies in the past century
More than a hundred years after the founding of the Ming Dynasty, the population grew rapidly, while the gap between the rich and the poor widened, and the situation of land annexation became increasingly serious.
Whether it is the officialdom, the army, or society, large and small interest groups have been generated.
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, military tuns were generally set up, and military households fought in wartime and farmed like peasants in their spare time, which greatly reduced the financial burden of the imperial court.
With the end of the large-scale war, the important position of the military tun gradually declined, and the officers of the guard house embezzled the land of a large number of military households, resulting in the military households being cut off from their livelihood and fleeing in batches, and even the three battalions at the foot of Tianzi were left with only tens of thousands of old, weak, sick and disabled.
So much so that by the Chongzhen period, the most basic combat ability was lost.
Compared with the military decadence, the political conservatism of the Ming Dynasty was more fatal, which deprived the Ming Dynasty of the vitality and courage to change. Zhang Juzheng, the first assistant of the Wanli period, made a brave attempt,
Formulate policies in accordance with economic development, implement a whiplash law to reduce the burden on the people at the bottom and ease the sharp class contradictions.
▲ Zhang Juzheng's reform brought huge fiscal revenue to the Ming Dynasty treasury
Once Zhang Juzheng's new law is implemented,
The interests of the gentry and landlord class will be compromised
。 Measures such as measuring land and spreading acres in the new law will compress the space for their black-box operations.
Zhang Juzheng was liquidated after his death,
The new laws enacted have also been largely repealed.
The old interest groups remain. For the sake of self-interest, they form groups and fight against each other.
The government tends to be useless, and the main role is to prevaricate.
▲ Corrupt and serious internal friction of the ruling class at the end of the Ming Dynasty
The sinister and complex political environment is an excellent soil for corruption, such as Zheng Zhilong on the southeast coast as a pirate, through the transaction with local bureaucrats.
Being able to bypass the imperial court's borders and carry out a huge smuggling trade, his growing wealth gave him full power to divide one side.
When war comes,
The lands of the Empire became gladiatorial arenas for the powerful
At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the control of the imperial court at the local level was greatly reduced, and the lonely Chongzhen seemed to be sitting on the crater, and the flames that spewed out could swallow him at any time.
Fourth, Xiaoice climatic disaster brought about by the river period
From the end of the 16th century to the middle of the 17th century,
The Earth's average temperature has fallen to its lowest level in 10,000 years
。
The cold will greatly reduce the production of grain, and the Ming Dynasty, which is in an agrarian society, cannot import a large amount of food when there is a shortage of grain like modern society.
So the resulting damage will be infinitely magnified.
▲ The sudden change in temperature is a devastating blow to the agricultural economy
Hunger and starvation left the people at the bottom struggling on the death line, starvation on the road, and the imperial court was not only unable to distribute relief food to the victims but even doubled the tax.
The people could not bear to kill officials, and attacks on county towns often occurred.
The overall drop in temperature caused the rain to move south, forming a strange phenomenon of drought in the north and flood in the south, and at the same time appeared on a large scale. Among them, the northwest region was the most severely affected, with eight major famines in just a few decades, and the lack of land harvest or even the loss of harvest led to the inability to feed a large number of cultivators.
▲ Victims struggling on the line of death
The area from Shaanxi to the western part of Henan originally had little rainfall, and even if there was no disaster, it could only barely be self-sufficient, and the long-term drought led to civil unrest.
The Ming government suppressed the nationalist army
Cao Wenzhao, Lu Xiangsheng, Sun Chuanting and other good generals were sent successively.
The weak combat effectiveness of the civil army is naturally not the opponent of the officers and soldiers, but it is not easy to destroy, and once the civil army fails, it will quickly be reduced to zero until the officers and troops retreat and make a comeback. Therefore, the more officers and soldiers fight, the less the civilian army fights, the more they fight.
In the face of a large number of disaster victims, the Ming government simply did not have the financial resources to provide relief and resettlement, and had to let them fend for themselves.
The victims joined the nationalist army in order to survive, which became the last straw that crushed the Ming Dynasty.
Author: There is a pear on the tree
(Don)