After the age of thirty-three, the emperor stopped looking at the dynasty and hid quietly in the deep palace.
The cabinet minister loves to see it, and the song chapter loves to criticize it, and no one knows what he has done
〇 Wanli Emperor (Fang Jia Yi)
On August 23, 32 of the Wanli Calendar, officials of the imperial court, from cabinet ministers to six ministries to the imperial historians, knelt down at the Mandarin Gate in unison. Each of the officials held a copy of the recital in his hand and asked the emperor to answer their questions. And looking at that posture, I am afraid that the approval will have to be issued immediately.
It is rare to ask for such a work.
This is actually forced helplessness.
After the eighteenth year of the Wanli Calendar, until his death in July of the forty-eighth year, the emperor had only been to the throne twice in thirty years, on May 13, 1919, and on the twenty-third day of the first month of the twenty-third year. If you can't see each other, how can the group of ministers be sure in their hearts?
The feeling of being unsteady has long been there.
At the end of September of the fourteenth year, the emperor began to say that he was ill, and he was only twenty-four years old. Therefore, an official of the Ministry of Etiquette said that a disease such as dizziness and dark eyes is not deserved by young people. If there is not something to have, it will hurt the heart of the Virgin Mary and the listening of the subordinates. Don't scare people, emperor.
Wanli did not care, and if he could not say that he was not in the dynasty, he would not go to the dynasty.
Anyway, the model of "the government is made by the Ning clan, and the sacrifice is widowed" has been around for a long time, and it is also a duty to be able to sacrifice the ancestors of heaven and earth.
Unfortunately, the emperor did not want to do this.
The first day of April in the nineteenth year of the Wanli Calendar was his last ancestor worship, and since then, he has been done by others.
It seemed that he didn't even want to see his ancestors, let alone his subordinates.
Of course, His Majesty is not completely isolated from the world, and the summoning of cabinet ministers alone also occurs from time to time, but most of them are occasional.
On November 19, 211, because of the birthday of his birth mother, Empress Dowager Cisheng, the Wanli Emperor Jimen accepted congratulations from his courtiers, and then talked with the first assistant Wang Xijue. When bidding farewell, Wang Xijue said pitifully: When I see the emperor today, I don't know when I will see you again? It can be seen that it is not easy for the first assistant to see him.
The emperor's "legitimate reason" was that he was not in good health.
He said to Wang Xijue: Shuo should also be common with Mr. Wang, but the decay body will move from time to time. This is a very clear thing.
To pretend to be sick, I am afraid it is an exaggeration. There is too much hospital in, how can people who are alive and well dressed? Decades of making up pathologies are also cumbersome. But to say that it is incapacitated to work is equally exaggerated. What's more, Wanli is still quite in charge.
The most managed is to get money.
Get money because of the large gap in expenses. In the leap month of the twenty-seventh year of the Wanli Calendar, His Majesty demanded 24 million taels of silver from Taicang for the marriage of the princes, and the answer of the household department was that the national treasury was empty. How do you live your life? Although that day was also too extravagant. But the emperor could not be shabby, especially when Zhang Juzheng still talked about thrift and thrift. Even in order to take out this bird's breath, you can't tighten your grip and shrink your hands and feet.
〇 Wanli Dynasty Ministry of Science advised the court to block the consumption of articles
Intercepted before the preparation of the Wanli Wedding. Since then, the consumption of the court has begun a new round of expansion, and the advice of the courtiers has not worked. (According to Wang Huiming's thesis "Zhang Juzheng's Reform from the Perspective of Palace Finance in the Early Wanli Period")
Of course, the emperor spends money, and it is not exactly a retaliatory consumption. Some things are still necessary, such as fighting wars and repairing palaces. However, what he most wanted to do was to bypass the six departments to open up the source of wealth and increase the internal budget. This can only rely on eunuchs. Thus, the mining supervisor in charge of mining and the tax supervisor in charge of taxation were invented.
On July 20, 2024, the first batch of mining supervisors were sent to Gyeonggi, and it did not take long to rapidly expand to the five provinces of Henan, Shandong, Shanxi, Zhejiang and Shaanxi. On October 22, the tax inspector also arrived in Tongzhou. It is worth noting that seven days before the dispatch of the first batch of mining supervisors, Empress Rensheng died of illness. The emperor was absent from his mother-in-law's funeral due to illness, but did not delay the dispatch of the tax inspector, not as strong as the patient did.
This is really filial piety and weakness, and the accumulation of wealth is good.
The result was also satisfactory to the emperor.
Twenty-five to thirty-four years, a total of more than five million taels of silver. This figure is not as high as the agricultural and salt taxes, but it is more than the customs and commercial taxes. Unfortunately, His Majesty did not know that his income was far less than the income of those eunuchs, and Li Feng, the tax inspector of Guangdong alone, had embezzled fifty million taels, and the other property obtained by extortion was not counted.
Isn't this emperor wronged?
The localities are miserable. Think about it, where do eunuchs understand mining? It can only be nonsense, either to blossom and dig everywhere, or to scrape the ground in this name. In any case, it is possible to be mighty and blessed, it is possible to levy and expropriate, and it is possible to pervert the law by taking bribes. Moreover, they were appointed by the emperor and directly paid tribute to the inner treasury, and the government officials could not control them, and there was no institutional guarantee. In addition to disrupting the economy and provoking popular uprisings, how can there be him!
Eunuchs supervise mining taxes, which brings calamity to the country and the people.
Wan Li was thinking of this. Other people's chapters, no matter how urgent things are, they do not care, but the mine supervisors and tax inspectors follow the review. In the first month of the thirty-fourth year, a civil revolt occurred in Yunnan, and the evil mining eunuch Yang Rong was killed and burned, and the emperor heard that he did not eat for several days, until he was alarmed by the Empress Dowager Cisheng.
This should really be called a disease.
Fortunately, by December of the thirty-third year, he finally stopped mining, but he also continued not to go to the dynasty, did not see people, did not approve the chapter, and did not fill vacancies in the main officials of the central and local governments, and even the position of shangshu of the official department was vacant. It is difficult to judge whether the emperor is playing a rogue in this way to gamble with the cabinet and the courtiers, but the long-term vacancy of the head of the central department is exactly the same as the dispatch of mining tax eunuchs.
That is to say, it is all in the twenty-fourth year of the Wanli calendar.
The state apparatus does not seem to function. On the twenty-fourth day of the first month of the twenty-fifth year, Zhao Zhigao, the first assistant who could not bear it, wrote to the emperor bitterly saying that there were no officials in charge of the official department, and the four divisions and various affairs were suspended; the old officials of the imperial court and local officials were not promoted, and the new ones were not appointed; the supervision departments were powerless, the fox rats and jackals did not ask anything, and there were many vacancies in the county officials of sidao counties and counties everywhere. All these things are things that the ancestors have not done in two hundred years!
So what? Wanli was indifferent.
At this time, Zhao Zhigao was already seventy-four years old. He was originally cowardly and despised, and it was even more difficult to be caught between the emperor and the courtiers at this moment. In desperation, Zhao Zhigao had no choice but to declare his illness in the second year, which lasted for three years, and finally died of illness in the official residence, receiving the title of Taifu and the title of Wen Yi.
If the missing officials are not filled, as always. By the 30th year of the Wanli Calendar, the six ministries lacked three chiefs Shangshu, ten deputy chief attendants, and ninety-four officials in the central speech and supervision departments. There are three provincial magistrates who are short of central commissioners, equivalent to sixty-six envoys and envoys of the governor, and twenty-five prefects. There were originally thirteen missions in the country where imperial history should be dispatched, but nine were unmanned.
Thirty-two years of petitions from qifu Wenhuamen is not unreasonable.
Since then, the problem has become more and more serious. On April 17, 39 of the Wanli Calendar, the cabinet minister Ye Xianggao reported to the emperor: Of the nine government departments of the central government, there were only eight heads and deputy heads and deputy heads, one person insisting on going to work, two deputy posts, and the other five people were all out of the door, and the cabinet was only himself on the post, and he was actually in a semi-paralyzed state.
The emperor still didn't care.
In fact, Wanli's slack government will not stop the lack of officials and not make up for it. Ye Xianggao's summary on July 11, 1941 was:
Ceremonies should be done and not done,
Chapter loose when hair is not sent,
Talents should be used without use,
Government affairs should be repaired but not repaired,
The discussion is constant.
In short, everything that should be done is not done, and even the courtiers sometimes turn a deaf ear to their resignation.
Helplessly, everyone had to leave on their own.
In September of the 40th century, the first assistant Li Tingji went to visit himself.
In July of the forty-first year, Sun Weibai, the head of the Bingbu Shangshu Prefecture, neglected to leave.
In September of the same year, the official Shangshu Zhao Huanbai neglected to go.
In August of the 42nd year, Sun Shenxing, the right attendant of the Rebbe, went away to worship himself.
The meaning is clear: we can't do this job!
These people who left were all in the key departments.
In fact, that Li Tingji had already gone on strike. He entered the cabinet as a Rebbe Shangshu in May of the 35th year of the Wanli Calendar, and in October of the following year, he took sick leave and refused to go to the Que. For the next four years, he was nominally the first assistant, but in fact recuperated from illness, and finally chose to lay himself off, and actually worked in the cabinet for only eleven months.
Other times, it is maintained by the leaf direction.
Ye Xianggao was actually very young and powerful at the time, only in his fifties, but he was also deeply exhausted, and finally successfully resigned in August 1942. Think about it, in order to increase the number of cabinet ministers, he actually wrote hundreds of copies of the chapter. The supreme supervisor Was Yushi was untouched for ten years, and only Zhao Huan was left with the six Shangshu, and later he went to worship himself, but His Majesty always refused to make up for it, and everyone would feel discouraged.
It seems that this emperor is really "sluggish in the government and has the courage to amass wealth".
Why this is so is a mystery, and even since the late Ming Dynasty, there have been many opinions.
Some people believe that Shen Shixing should not be allowed to pay attention to principles and only know how to accommodate, and take on the heavy responsibility of the head assistant of the cabinet. Wanli's laziness and trickery are also his habits.
Is this really the case?
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