The assassination of Qin Shi Huang triggered an earth-shattering crisis

The Fall of the Qin Empire in the Bianzhou Qin-Han Series (XXVI)

In the thirty-first year of Qin Shi Huang, that is, in 216 BC, he was assassinated again:

The first emperor is a micro-xianyang, with four samurai, out of the night to steal Lanchi, see embarrassment, the samurai kill the thief.

This is not the first time that the First Emperor has been assassinated, and it can even be said that the powerful First Emperor has a wealth of experience in assassination, comparable to an expert.

In the first year of the first reign of the First Emperor, that is, in 238 BC, the First Emperor suffered the "Change of Yan Yi".

This was a large-scale mutiny, which can also be counted as an assassination, because a careless first emperor had to pay the grain on the spot.

Then in the twentieth year of the First Emperor, in 227 BC, the famous Jing Ke assassination of the King of Qin took place:

Twenty years later, Prince Dan of Yan suffered from Qin soldiers to the kingdom, fearing that Jing Ke would stab the King of Qin.

About ten years later, it is said that It was Jing Ke's close friend Gao Wanli who assassinated the King of Qin:

Gao gradually left the building with lead, and the re-entry was close, and the Emperor of Puqin was not in the middle.

Around the same time, in the twenty-ninth year of the First Emperor, in 218 BC, the First Emperor was assassinated in Bolang on his eastern tour:

Twenty-nine years later, the First Emperor traveled east. In the wolf sands of Yang Wubo, he was shocked by the thieves.

The first three times encountered a life and death crisis, the opponent was more clear, either the internal palace fight or the remnants of the Six Kingdoms.

Bo Lang was assassinated, and from qin shi huang's point of view, he never knew who the murderer was:

Pray for the lordship, but let the world be great for ten days.

However, the historical record writer Sima Qian knew who the murderer was, because the main messenger was Zhang Liang, who later became famous.

And the last time Lanchi was assassinated, it was the most mysterious. The First Emperor was about to leave the palace at that time, and it was reasonable to say that the itinerary was very confidential.

Therefore, no one knows whether this assassination was a security incident or a premeditated political incident.

But this assassination may be the most unforgettable for the First Emperor, because the follow-up to this incident has triggered a huge crisis that the Emperor did not expect:

The 20th day of the Rinchu Great Cord. 1,600 rice stones.

The assassination of the emperor is not trivial, although the assassin was killed on the spot, but the follow-up will definitely continue to dig deeper.

Is it the premeditated behavior of the enemy elements? Or was it an accidental policing incident?

If it is the former, then there must be a main messenger, of course, the imperial public security department needs to investigate fiercely to the end.

If it is the latter, it is not good, but the security of the capital at the feet of the Son of Heaven is so bad that it must be well rectified.

Therefore, the First Emperor ordered the immediate closure of the city gates and a round of severe strikes in and around the capital.

However, the results of the strike struck a blow to the surprise of the First Emperor, who was afraid that he would not be able to sleep well for many days to come.

Because it was only 20 days of severe fighting, the price of grain in the capital actually soared to 1600 per stone.

One stone in the empire was relatively light, and at that time it was stipulated that the rations of an adult male prisoner for one month should be two stones, so one stone was about 20 pounds today.

What is the concept of one stone 1600? Let's look at the Imperial standard price for grain:

Chengdan Scoop, the public food is responsible, and the stone thirty money.

The above passage is from the Sleeping Tiger Di Qin Jian's "Miscellaneous Copies of Qin Laws", which records the time about the thirtieth year of Qin Shi Huang (237 BC), which is the year before the assassination.

The standard price stipulated by the Empire is 30 one stone, and now the capital is 1600 one stone, which means that the imperial round of severe crackdown for twenty days, the price of rice has increased by more than fifty times!

Such an increase was enough to keep the First Emperor awake at night, because the price continued and the Empire was about to go bankrupt.

The biggest victim of the rise in the price of rice is, of course, the person who buys rice, and who is the biggest person who buys rice at the moment? It is the Empire itself.

Through "What is the Lifeblood of the Qin Empire" and the following sections, we already know that the fundamental economic model of the Empire is the economy of prisoners.

Usually, the salaries of local grassroots officials cannot be self-sufficient by taxation, let alone the expenditure of off-the-job personnel needed for infrastructure construction and military mobilization.

Therefore, the main salaries and materials of the empire were supplied by prisoners, and the main source of off-the-job personnel performing public administration functions was also prisoners.

The nearly a thousand counties of the Empire were in fact small, self-sufficient state-owned enterprises.

Under this model, the pressure on the capital will be particularly great.

Because the capital, as the political center of the country, needs a particularly large number of off-the-job personnel, far exceeding the grass-roots counties.

The imperial capital had at least a few thousand garrisons, the empire had thousands of officials and office personnel, and the empire had tens of thousands of harem and court personnel.

The capital needed at least 30,000 of the empire's off-the-farm population to supply food and salaries, and the monthly grain needed was about the size of 100,000 stones.

Of course, the capital certainly has more prisoners and public land than the localities, but there is always a limit.

Moreover, no matter how high the looting, the prisoners must first support themselves before they can feed the rest of the off-the-job personnel.

A total of 52 civil servants in Qianling County need an additional 300 prisoners and 5,000 mu of public land to support.

Now that the capital has started with 30,000 people who have started working, don't they need hundreds of thousands of prisoners and millions of public land to feed them?

The reality is only going to get worse!

Because near the capital was the main concentration of large-scale works of the Empire.

All kinds of construction and border needs represented by the Shi Huang Mausoleum, Afang Palace and the Great Wall require a large number of manpower.

In "Why Gongzi Fusu Obediently Committed Suicide", we carefully introduced the composition of the personnel of these large-scale projects.

The Empire of Engineering Prisoners had to provide food unconditionally.

Civilians in servitude ostensibly bring their own food, but the question is what if they run out of food? Still not allowed to borrow money from the Empire to buy grain?

That is to say, with a force of hundreds of thousands of people, the Empire must prepare at least half of its food reserves.

Otherwise, when the grain is "borrowed", the armed personnel who have no grain can do anything.

So the food shortage in the imperial capital was really big.

The total amount of grain that the various departments of the empire need to purchase on the market every month is about 100,000 stones, and it costs 3 million yuan.

Now one stone is 1600, and 100,000 stones is 160 million.

If the money the Empire spends on food a month rises from 3 million to 160 million, the Empire can immediately declare bankruptcy.

Of course, the Empire will certainly not spend this unjust money, after all, the Empire says that it will pay the debt, and no one dares to pursue the account.

However, the problem is that the reason why grain prices have risen more than fifty times is because of the inconvenience caused by the strike-hard crackdown, and there is no grain on the market.

Even if you want to buy and sell, but there is no food in the market, what can you do?

Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them armed men, were ready to turn the empire upside down.

As a result, the severe crackdown in the Imperial Pass can only end hastily.

After the end of the strike-hard crackdown, transportation and production and commercial operations in various localities have returned to their previous situation, and the serious shortage of grain can probably pass.

But this obviously gave the First Emperor a huge shock.

It turned out that the hidden crisis in the imperial capital was so serious that it was enough to shake the country in just 20 days!

So what happens if the capital faces a military threat? How long can the Empire last?

In fact, the crisis of the Empire fully demonstrates that the imperial capital cannot be maintained for a long time.

So when a few years later, when the imperial capital really suffered a crisis, it seemed very fragile.

People were shocked that the empire at that time easily abandoned defense in the capital, and it was not known that this scene had been rehearsed many years ago when the first emperor was still alive.

The first emperor was born a prince, became a king at the age of 13, and then became an emperor. He probably had no way of reaching the real grassroots.

It wasn't until this assassination and the scene that followed that he understood that the crisis of the Empire had penetrated so deep into the marrow of the bones.

We have reason to believe that the First Emperor will then gather all the outstanding talents of the central government to explore the root cause of the crisis and find a solution.

So then the Empire seems to have introduced a series of targeted actions to try to solve the problem.

The first action comes from a record in pei xiao's "Commentary on the Collection of Historical Records" of the Southern Dynasty:

Xu Guangyue : "Make the qian head from Shi Tianye." ”

This happened in the same year that the First Emperor was assassinated, and it is very likely that it was an emergency policy after the strike hard.

Qianshou refers to the people, the free people other than the prisoners.

The meaning of making a qian head from a solid field is to let ordinary people freely declare their own number of fields.

Everyone may think it is very strange, can the people report how many fields they have, and what is the impact?

The impact is great, because in the past the empire used to collect taxes according to your nominal fields.

After the people of the Empire were beheaded and made meritorious contributions, the first rank of the knight could be given a plot of land, that is, 100 acres.

Ordinary people, on the other hand, have 50 acres of land per household, which is also distributed by the state.

But these 50 acres and 100 acres are all figures set by the leaders in formulating policies and patting their heads, so where is there actually so much land?

In the section "State-owned Enterprises and 996, Which One Do You Choose", we found that the average household in Qianling was only 35 acres of land, and in the central plains, where the land was narrow and densely populated, the average household was only more than 20 acres.

When the household is counted, it also includes people with knighthoods, and their land is definitely a little higher than that of ordinary people, so the land owned by a household without a knight will only be less.

The situation near the capital is only worse than the place:

(27 years) Migrated to the world and became rich in 120,000 households in Xianyang

A few years ago, the First Emperor, who had just unified the world, deliberately relocated 120,000 rich households to Beijing in order to break up the local grassroots outside the Guanxi.

120,000 households have a normal population of at least 600,000, and this round of migration is rich people from all over the world, including a large number of slaves, so the actual population may be as high as more than 800,000.

The influx of so many people into the capital can certainly help develop the capital, but the amount of arable land around the capital is limited.

Moreover, the empire was still in the stage of rotation at this time, and even less than half of the cultivated land could be used for cultivation every year.

Therefore, the influx of these 120,000 households into the capital will inevitably further reduce the average arable land of the people in the capital, and the average household will be at most 20 or 30 acres of land.

However, in the imperial ledger, the cultivated land of each household is 50 acres, and the cultivated land of the first-class knighthood is 100 acres.

In short, who dares to say that my land is only 20 acres or 30 acres, that is to say, the local governor has violated the laws of the empire, and that official dares to admit it?

Therefore, the tax of the ordinary people without a knight is still charged at the standard of 50 acres.

Obviously, there are only 20 or 30 acres of land, but the amount of 50 acres is taxed, which is naturally equivalent to paying half of the tax.

Until this time when the crisis broke out, some officials of the central government were probably able to put forward some discussions on the actual situation of this issue.

Some officials who have more access to practice will point out that the loss of control in food prices is related to the fact that there is too little surplus grain for the people.

If the taxes paid by the people are too high, the willingness to produce and the enthusiasm for production will be reduced.

Moreover, the more taxes are paid, the less surplus grain is paid, the less grain can be brought with them during the conscription, and the more grain to be borrowed from the Empire will be.

Excess tax empires collected, transportation centralized storage and borrowing, waste too much, it is better to let the people of their own to bring.

Moreover, if the people borrow more money from the Empire than they lack food, they will become debtors, and then they will delay production and form a vicious circle.

Therefore, the Empire should collect a little less tax and let the people have more surplus grain in their hands.

First, there is more surplus grain, and more grain on the market;

Second, the people had more grain in their hands, and less grain that the Empire needed to prepare for loans when they served in force.

In any case, after this crisis, the Empire finally began to recognize the number of fields that the people actually owned, and the people benefited.

However, such a move is obviously only the beginning, and the Empire is bound to study this round of crisis and take more drastic measures in the future.

At the same time, we also want to know what kind of principle is behind this round of crisis in the Empire.