Author: Wang Chunyu
Generally speaking, hooligans are the product of the nomadic class, and as the city's economy develops, the ranks of hooligans will continue to expand. This is because, on the one hand, some nomads enter the city without proper occupation, and can only make a living by crooked ways; On the other hand, the increase of urban landlords and magnates has made certain minions and eagle dogs
has a backer behind it. As far as the Ming Dynasty is concerned, the hooligans made a fierce fuss after Chenghua, and the Jiajing and Wanli periods were even more rampant. This coincided with the social and economic development of the Ming Dynasty: after Chenghua, a large number of towns appeared; During the Jiajing and Wanli periods, the feudal urban economic life became more and more prosperous. Hooligans and hooligan consciousness left a deep imprint on the political, economic, and social life of the Ming Dynasty.
One
The hooligans of the Ming Dynasty not only came in groups and in large numbers, but also had their own organization. Some use the number of party members they have corrected as nicknames, such as the Thirteen Taibao, the Thirty-six Tiangang, and the Seventy-two Disha; Some use the weapons in their hands as nicknames, such as rods, chopping wood, and masculets. These people "committed crimes and ran rampant in the market", "gambling and robbing, and Lu Zuoyan said that June was cold, and there was a city in the city, and the dust rose at dusk". It's really doing everything, harming one party. In the early years of Wanli, there was a gangster gang in Beijing, "Ten Brothers of Righteousness, known as the Ten Tigers, rampant in various cities and places", one of the "tigers", called Niu Er, and the "hairless big worm" hooligan Niu Er who ran rampant in the market in "Water Margin", with the same name and surname, which is intriguing. The leader of this gang is called Han Chaochen, and he is a member of Jinyiwei. In and around the city of Hangzhou in the south, hooligans "formed a party and joined forces with the masses and pushed one person to be the leader," which was obviously also organized. During the Wanli period, there was also a hooligan organization in Suzhou that specialized in beating people, "Fighting Xing", also known as "hitting the six cities", "divided into a certain place and a certain class, wantonly and forceful." If one person is unsuccessful, he will be attacked by the same kind, and he will not hurt others. They have a special trick of beating people, or hit the ribs in the chest, or hit the back and lower abdomen, and there is a time limit for slander, or death in March, or death, or death in October, or death in a year, "the time is not happy." Its leaders, who have history to study today, include Hu Long, nicknamed "One Dragon", and Zhu Guan, nicknamed "Dibian Snake", who "loves guns like gluttony and takes risks", and "is also the head of the team in the county (according to: referring to Songjiang)". At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, when the world was in turmoil, "fighting" took advantage of the chaos to rise up, and did misdeeds in the south of the Yangtze River.
Two
The activities of hooligans in the Ming Dynasty were varied, but in a nutshell, there were mainly the following aspects.
Fighting: Adding fists and kicks for no reason, and even using stuffy sticks, is a common occurrence for hooligans. For example, the hooligans in Hangzhou, as soon as they encounter a murder case, treat them as strange goods, or pretend to be relatives of the deceased, or forcibly give false testimony, and extort the victim's wine, food, and property.
Robbing: In the Jiangnan of the Ming Dynasty, there was a rumor of "fake life, real robbery". This is because some hooligans "usually see people who are old and sick", hide in secret rooms, and then find the rich rooms of huge families, and in order to provoke and provoke disputes, they kill those who hide in the secret rooms, but they accuse them of being the work of rich families, and under the guise of demanding human lives and repaying blood debts, they gather their party "hundreds of people who are homeless, first go to their homes, loot all of them, and then Mingzhi Gongting, kindness and poisoning, it is no longer a one-time thing." In the middle of Jiajing, the hooligans in Beijing even tried to rob on a large scale when I was in danger of entering the city and the Beijing division. Shi Zai: "When the evil and young murderers in the capital often gathered, the ministers of civil and military affairs inside and outside the country accumulated millions of gold and silver, and the captives were near the city, and we set fire to the ministers' homes. ”
Blackmail: blackmail, scoundrels. This is a trick often used by small, single-action rogues. The Ming novel "West Lake Two Episodes" volume 20 "Qiao Whore Zofu Became Famous", which describes the story of the Southern Song Dynasty, actually reflects the reality of the Ming Dynasty, which talks about the hooligans in Hangzhou: "There is also the flying bachelor, pretending to be a trap, trapping people's lives, doing all kinds of evil, accumulating gold and silver." The words "flying bachelors" make it not difficult for people to imagine what they have done. Let's take another very typical example: at the end of the year, there is a hooligan who has no money to celebrate the New Year, and his wife is so anxious that she asks him what to do, and the hooligan says, I have my own way. I happened to see a grate master passing by the door, so he called him to come in and get a haircut, and insisted that the master shave off his eyebrows, and the master complied, and then shaved off one side, and the hooligan shouted: "Who has never damaged people's eyebrows with grate heads?" The master was afraid of seeing the officials, so he had to "pay 300 yuan for his love", and the hooligans used the money to organize New Year's goods. When his wife saw that his eyebrows were gone, she felt unpleasant and said, "I think you might as well shave your eyebrows, and it will look better." The hooligan laughed and said, "You didn't calculate, this side of the eyebrows, left the Lantern Festival!" ”
Deception: Swaggering, deception, and human trafficking are the usual methods of hooligans. There was a hooligan in the late Ming Dynasty, who boasted that he was a descendant of Bao Zheng, who lived for more than 100 years, "once saw the king of Hades, and let him go", which is completely alive and dead. There was also a Taishi named Chen Sichu, who claimed to be the tenth grandson of the Song Dynasty poet Lin Hejing, who asked him to read Lin Hejing's biography and read that "he will never marry and have no children", and this person was immediately speechless. Taishi laughed, and his mouth was a must: "Mr. Hejing doesn't marry a wife, how can the descendants have grandchildren." Don't be idle flowers and plants, not necessarily lonely mountain plum branches. "It's a wonderful irony. According to the Ming Dynasty's Yuzhang Drunken Yuezi Anthology's "Elegant and Vulgar Tongguan": There are people who sell mosquito repellent charms, and one person buys and sticks them, and the mosquitoes are not reduced. When he asked where he posted it, he said, "It must be posted in the account." "It's such a spicy joke. And selling mosquito repellent charms is just a small trick. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, there was a squire surnamed Zhang in Songjiang, who was a good man, and a hooligan did what he liked, and one day he came to the door, with a sword on his waist, a chivalrous appearance, and a "bag, dripping with blood" in his hand, and said to the surnamed Zhang: "I have avenged your great revenge, and the bag is his head." Zhang was ecstatic and lent him 100,000 yuan on the spot. However, after this person left, Zhang took a look at it, and the bag was just a pig's head, and there was no trace of this person. It should be noted that this kind of liar dressed as a chivalrous liar is very easy to deceive people.
What should be pointed out is that hooligans have infiltrated the economic field and the erosion of hooligan consciousness on the circulation of commodities has led to the occurrence of all kinds of deception and cheating of customers. Such as: with fake silver. Sun Yi, a native of Yuyao in Zhengde, "went to Ningbo to buy a cow with fake silver", the owner of the cattle took the silver to pay the official money, and was investigated by the government for the crime of forging two silver, "remorse, because of hanging himself". Another example: selling counterfeit medicines. Chen Duo, an outstanding satirist of the Ming Dynasty, wrote in "Zhegui Ling· Crude Medicine Shop": "The store of the medical assistant is opened, miscellaneous shops are arranged, and the top products are collected. The high price is empty, the value of the brain, and the bezoar is rare. Waiting for the plate is not according to the catty, and the tube in the paper bag is cold. If you are sick and die, you will be repaid twice. Fake as true, there is no prescription. Someone once made a satirical plaster poem: "There is also a first-class good plaster, called Golden Silk Universal Plaster, in fact, there is merit: the benefits are swollen, the swollen place is not eliminated, and it is not lifted for three days, and it is a mess." "Outside of the gold and jade, the ruins are in it, the sky-high asking price, the marginal, is also a typical fraud.
It should also be pointed out that the evil consequences of the infiltration of hooligan consciousness into the cultural sphere have caused some people to become obsessed with deception and only know how to turn their heels in the eyes of money. Counterfeit cultural relics and antiques are very prominent. Li Rihua, a famous literati in the south of the Yangtze River at the end of the Ming Dynasty, pointed out: "Since the scholars and doctors searched the ancient for hobbies, the disciples of the scholars became a trend, and they did not hesitate to buy gold and silk, while the Qianjia Shiding wore and chiseled at will, chiseled the void, and was almost a dream." In the past, the so-called Li Si dog flail, like a calf's nose, is ridiculous. After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, there were "writers" in the Jiangnan region who specialized in falsifying history and compiling genealogies. There is a person named Yuan Xuan, who "has a lot of books to learn", but he is a poor bastard. In order to make a fortune, he specially compiled genealogies for people in Suzhou, "studying the Han, Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties, and making it his own." Where the rich have a spectrum, its first is not from the Hou Wang generals, the past dynasties of the edicts, celebrity preface stationery. I believe it at first sight, and Xu Kaozhi is a multi-hyun fake author". Fabricating history in this way is really raping history, and countless nails have been planted in historical materials.
Three
The above-mentioned hooliganism, the erosion of hooligan consciousness, and the harm to society should not be underestimated. However, what was more harmful to the society of the Ming Dynasty was the hooliganization of Ming Dynasty politics.
Zhao Yi, a famous historian of the Qing Dynasty, once said: "Gai Mingzu is a person, a sage, a hero, and a thief. In fact, in a more accurate sense, Zhu Yuanzhang is a sage, a hero, and a hooligan. Zhu Yuanzhang long before he sat on the first position in the Ming Empire, he used to pee on the hat of Confucianism, and slaughtered the "gong dog" after ascending to the treasure, taking Liu Bang, the ancestor of the Han Dynasty, who was quite a bit of hooliganism, as a model to follow. But in terms of hooliganism, Zhu Yuanzhang is really better than Liu Banglai.
Zhu Yuanzhang successively created Hu Weiyong and Lanyu Prison, and the Hu Prison clan was sentenced to more than 30,000 people, and the Blue Prison was sentenced to more than 15,000 people, and the heroes were almost wiped out. As early as March of the year after Zhu Yuanzhang became emperor, Zhu Sheng, an old strategist who had suggested to Zhu Yuanzhang to "build a high wall, accumulate grain, and slow down the king", asked to return to Linquan, when he asked to return to Linquan, Li Shanchang, the prime minister of Zuo and the Korea of the , specially sent a letter to retain, saying what "Mr. literary reputation, the sage knows, the old success of Confucianism, and the great hope of the country...... Shouldn't you go high in the Qiu Garden, just be good", and this old Li Yuanxun who strongly persuaded Zhu Sheng not to retire, what happened to him? In the twenty-third year of Hongwu (1390), Zhu Yuanzhang dragged Li Shanchang into the Hu Weiyong case, pretending to be a star change, and he needed to kill the minister in response to the disaster, and killed him (he was a 77-year-old man at the time!) There are more than 70 people in the family of his wife, daughter, brother and nephew. Afterwards, the famous genius Xie Jin wrote a letter to defend Li Shanchang, and Zhu Yuanzhang had nothing to say, but the family of Shanchang who was unjustly killed had already been "blood-stained wandering souls"!
Hanging a black card on intellectuals is a major invention of Zhu Yuanzhang. The reason for the matter is: Emperor Yuan Shun has an elephant, and when he feasts his ministers, he can worship and dance, which can be called empathetic. After the death of Yuan, Zhu Yuanzhang transported this elephant to Nanjing, "set up a banquet to make the elephant dance, the elephant could not be ambushed, and killed it". It seems that the elephant is willing to give the Yuan Dynasty a burial, Si Yiqi. Zhu Yuanzhang remembered Wei Su, an old scholar who was an old minister of the Yuan Dynasty and a bachelor of Hanlin after surrendering to the Ming Dynasty, so he ordered "to make two wooden cards, one book 'Danger is not as good as an elephant' and the other book is 'Su is not as good as an elephant', and hang it on the left and right shoulders of Wei Su". Isn't this kind of ugly behavior that insults people and disgraces Sven a complete hooliganism?
Uplink and down. Some of Zhu Yuanzhang's descendants, that is, vassal kings, are also hooligans and scoundrels. As early as the early years of Hongwu, Zhu, the king of Jin who had been sealed in Shanxi for a short time, coerced the children of the people to enter the palace, and those who did not like it were killed, burned to ashes, and sent out of the palace; The palace maids were tortured indiscriminately, some of them had their tongues cut out, and some were tied up with flowers, buried in the snow, and frozen to death; More than 150 young boys between the ages of 7 and 10 were castrated, and before the wounds had healed, they were transported to the prefecture, resulting in the death of many young children. In the last years of Chongzhen, there were few evils in the Ning Domain of Nanchang, and there were even dozens of fierce parties, each in a group, catching people's children in the city during the day, or stripping people's clothes, or involving each other to ruin people's property, pedestrians did not dare to cross its doors and alleys, and the people ordered each other to be gods." Clearly, these people have completely degenerated into organized, planned gangs of hooligans.
Another important manifestation of the political hooliganization of the Ming Dynasty was the beating of ministers with sticks in the dignified Jinluan Palace, which was the so-called "court staff". It is true that the court staff also appeared in the previous dynasty, but the Ming Dynasty developed this kind of torture that insulted the minister's personality to the point of reaching its peak, from Zhu Yuanzhang to Zhu Youzhen, the bitter cries of the ministers who were beaten to the point of flesh and blood (some people were killed on the spot) were endless, and from the time of Zhengde, it was stipulated that the ministers must take off their clothes when they were scepter, and some ministers could not get out of bed for several months, and some were disabled for life. In this regard, the Ming Dynasty can be said to have started with the court staff and ended with the court staff.
The political hooliganization of the Ming Dynasty led to serious consequences. One of the most notable is the politicization of hooliganism. For example, the notorious eunuch Wei Zhongxian, when he was young, he was originally a hooligan who ate, drank, prostituted and gambled in Suning County, and fooled around with a gang of scoundrels all day long, but later lost a lot of money in gambling, couldn't afford to pay it back, and was desperate, so he castrated himself and entered the palace as a eunuch. But it was such a hooligan scoundrel who grasped the power of the country during the Apocalypse, dictatorship and disorderly government, called 9,900 years old, intensified various social contradictions, and accelerated the collapse of the Ming Dynasty.