In 1395, Zhu Yuanzhang, who was nearly seventy years old, often dreamed in his dreams that dead ministers and generals came to him to ask for his life. In his old age, this ruthless man who ruled the country with fierceness gradually realized the terrible nature of killing.
Maybe it was the scene in the dream that made his back cold, or maybe it was his own remorse for his excessive killing. In June of that year, Zhu Yuanzhang issued a special edict to stop the heavy punishment and strictly order future generations not to reuse the punishment.
Zhu Yuanzhang started from herding cattle, worked as a monk, survived famine, and his turbulent life over the years made him understand the sufferings of the people, and he had a hard memory of those grass-roots officials who did not do personnel affairs and ignored human life. When he ascended to the throne, there was still an instinctive distrust of the gentry by the grassroots.
In order to completely rule the empire, he promoted his own political ideas. Zhu Yuanzhang adopted a heavy rule of law. Although he exhorted his descendants in the "Ancestral Precepts of the Emperor and Ming Dynasty" to rule the country by law and not to "use torture outside the law." But he did not care about this set, in his dictionary, as the founding emperor, he had a heavy responsibility, and punishment was an important way for him to govern the country.
In Zhu Yuanzhang's time, whenever the local people found that there were corrupt officials and corrupt officials, they could go to Beijing to file a complaint, and once the officials embezzled more than sixty taels, they would be sentenced to capital punishment of showing their heads to the public, and they would peel the skin and fill in the grass. The land temples everywhere are the places where the prisoners are skinned.
Although Zhu Yuanzhang severely punished officials with torture, major corruption cases continued to occur during his reign. Among them, the empty seal case and the Guo Huan case are the most famous. These two cases caused a sensation throughout the country, causing Zhu Yuanzhang to be extremely angry, Tianzi to be angry, and millions of corpses to be ambushed, and behind these two cases was a piece of human head landing.
After the two cases, the spirit of the Ming Dynasty doctor was completely destroyed by Zhu Yuanzhang. Although Zhu Yuanzhang's harsh punishment did play a positive role in the administration of officials in the Hongwu period, the harshness, meager qilu, and ubiquitous legal net made the life of the early Ming Dynasty doctor very miserable.
But the more this happened, the more Zhu Yuanzhang felt that his policy was successful. As the patriarch of the family, Zhu Yuanzhang regarded the country as the family property of the Zhu family, and he did not want anyone to touch it and physically destroy the enemy. What he hopes to pass on to future generations is a thornless thorn, an iron barrel that he has built by his own hands.
Although Zhu Yuanzhang hopes to leave the system he personally created as the best gift for future generations. But he eventually miscalculated, and a civil war between the North and the South completely disrupted his deployment. Because of his killing of his heroes, the imperial court lost control of the local lords, and his almost cruel control of the subjects weakened the spirit of responsibility of the subjects.
During this war, most people watched the power struggle within the royal family as a passer-by. If Zhu Yuanzhang learned about it, how would he feel? Do you still feel that your rule over art is impeccable, and do you still rule the country with heavy rules?
