"The Ming Dynasty under the Microscope" contains 6 stories, including the Huizhou Silk Case, the Wuyuan Dragon Vein Defense War, the legal affairs of Yang Qianyuan, the past and present of the Ming Dynasty's First Archives, and the Pengxian Xiao The case of official corruption and the four cases of wronged souls during the Zhengtong period.
1. The whole story of the Huizhou silk silk case
In addition to paying taxes each year in the six counties under Huizhou Prefecture in Anhui Province, each county also has a fee called Rending silk silk,* **8780 pieces of raw silk. As a result, when a scholar named Shuai Jiamo from She County, Huizhou looked up past accounts, he discovered that all of the 8,780 pieces of raw silk were borne by one county, She County.
Once this news was leaked, it undoubtedly dropped a heavy nuclear bomb among the officials and people of She County. Why should one county bear the tax that should be shared equally among six counties? The other five counties were also unconvinced. They found various so-called evidences to prove that this tax should have been borne by She County alone. ?
As a result, She County and the other five counties formed an incompatible situation. With the explicit or covert help of She County officials and people, the people of She County represented by Shuai Jiamo began to The long road to rights protection.
In the process of defending rights, the matter went round and round, and finally it went from the state capital to the emperor, and there were even village riots and other incidents. In the end, with the intervention of the emperor, the matter was settled in a peaceful manner. The solution is that She County alone pays its share of tax dollars, while the tax dollars of the other five counties are misappropriated from other allocations. ?
2. Wuyuan Dragon Vein Defense Battle
Candidates from Wuyuan often ranked among the best in the imperial examinations of the Ming Dynasty. But here comes the problem. One year in the imperial examination, not a single student in Wuyuan County got any honors. This caused a great disturbance in Wuyuan. You must know that in the officialdom of the Ming Dynasty, the imperial examination results of local candidates were also an important weight for promotion. As a result, people from the officialdom to the private sector began to find out the reasons for the failure of the imperial examination.
The final conclusion is that some mining people have disturbed the Feng Shui of Wuyuan and destroyed the dragon veins. You have to know that the Ming Dynasty paid great attention to Feng Shui theory. So in the end, the county magistrate came forward and through private fundraising, the county government came forward and spent money to buy the mountain, which put an end to the mining. ?
But if there is profit, some people will take risks. How can we stop? Mining will soon resume. Afterwards, under strong pressure from the imperial court, mining ceased again. But after a period of time, it revived again, and so on until the Qing Dynasty. For hundreds of years, people have fought repeatedly for feng shui and interests. ?
3. Yang Qianyuan’s Legal Affairs
At the end of the Tang Dynasty, Luo’s ancestors came to Longxi, Huangshan, Huizhou to settle down and established a great business. In order to commemorate their ancestors and ensure that their incense was taken care of, descendants built a temple next to their ancestral graves and named it Yangqianyuan. ?
But during the Hongzhi period of the Ming Dynasty, a temple abbot named Foxi wanted to dominate the temple. Of course, the descendants of the Luo family gave up. They built this temple. So a protracted legal battle began.
In the end, there were six or seven lawsuits. At the end of the lawsuit, we were back to the starting point: the monks of Yangqianyuan continued to chant sutras and worship Buddha in the temple. The Luo family still comes to worship at the tomb every year. After all, the solitary tomb and the ancient temple are not separated. ?
4. The past and present life of the First Archives of the Ming Dynasty
The Ming Dynasty used something called the Fish Scale Atlas, which was a land registration book in which the The owner's fields, land, mountains, and ponds are marked one by one and drawn into graphics. These records are then used to determine what level each company is at and how much tax it should pay. Therefore, it is very confidential information.
In order to store these materials, Zhu Yuanzhang specially set aside three small islands in Xuanwu Lake to store these materials. From the 14th year of Hongwu to the 15th year of Chongzhen, twenty-seven issues were compiled in one year, and the number of yellow books accumulated in the past dynasties was 1,797,000.
5. The case of corruption among minor officials in Peng County
In the officialdom of the Ming Dynasty, among the county-level yamen, only three people, the magistrate, the county magistrate, and the chief clerk, were the ones who ate the imperial food. . The people in the other three classes and six bureaus, called "officials", are all recruited by themselves. The state is not responsible for the wages of these people, so where do their wages come from? As a result, corruption and bending the law also appeared. They used their power to extort money from the people. ?
This story is about a man named Dushan, who, together with four other common people, undertook a task of escorting grain. As a result, those four people bribed the officials, and in the end Du Shan was asked to do all the tasks. After that, Du Shan became more and more angry as he thought about it, and filed a complaint against all the people in the provincial capital. In the end, after many twists and turns, he was exiled when he should be exiled and sentenced when he was supposed to be sentenced.
6. The Case of the Four Wronged Souls
A guard in uniform fell in love with a sergeant’s daughter-in-law. It was fine in front of her, but she fell in love with him and didn’t dare to do anything outrageous. But not long after, the soldier died of illness, and the Jin Yiwei came to pester the widow named Yue from time to time. But this Yue family was extremely chaste and determined not to obey.
The Jin Yiwei was angered by the two coming and going, so he falsely accused Yue of having an affair with her son-in-law Qiu Yong, and together with the warlock Shen Rong, killed the sergeant named Yang An. The imperial guards were all out, but the government dared to cause trouble, so they immediately imprisoned Yue, Qiu Yong, and the warlock Shen Rong. ?
At this time, Xue Xuan, an official of Dali Temple, re-examined the case under heavy pressure and vindicated the injustice of the three people who had been wronged. Ever since, the battle began. Jin Yiwei severely forced Yue Shi, Qiu Yong, and the warlock Shen Rong in the case to confess, beat them into submission, and overturned the Dali Temple's referee. The battle was fierce and bloody. In the end, Jinyiwei won a complete victory, all officials of Dali Temple were demoted and investigated, and Xue Xuan was demoted to civilian status.