Spoiling History: Starting from the Three Kingdoms

【In terms of managing the Yellow River, Tuotuo, the prime minister who studied the Han Dynasty classics, did not clearly recognize the difference between the Yuan Dynasty and the Han, Tang and Song Dynasties.

We have repeatedly said before that because of the official promotion law, the central power of the Yuan Dynasty was very divided. If the previous dynasties were "imperial power does not go to the countryside", then the Yuan Dynasty was "imperial power does not go to the province".

For example, when Boyan was in control of the government, a minor official named Fan Fan Mengduan under the Henan Province at that time made a big news.

It is a common problem for ancient scholars to have high ambitions and thin lives. Fan Mengduan is no exception. Although he is just a minor official, he laments that his talent is not appreciated all day long. Later, he got drunk and wrote a poem on the Henan Provincial TV Station:

Slaughtering dragons in the sleeves and cutting dragons in the hands, burying the green sword for twenty years.

This matter would definitely be investigated to the end in any normal dynasty. If it were the more stringent Qing Dynasty, it would probably be directly pushed out and chopped off, but in the Yuan Dynasty, nothing happened, and no one cared about the comings and goings of the provincial TV station.

Perhaps it was because of this that Fan Mengduan saw the loopholes in the Yuan Dynasty's administration. Later, he found a few people to work together. Five people directly pretended to be imperial envoys and went to the provincial government to falsely convey the imperial edict, and they really succeeded.

In the name of imperial envoys, the five people summoned the Pingzhang, Prime Minister, General Manager, Wanhu, etc. of Henan Province into a small room in the government office one by one. After announcing a crime at random, they did not give these central officials a chance to argue. They directly smashed their heads with iron bones, and simply wiped out the high-ranking officials of Henan Province.

After the incident, the person pretending to be an imperial envoy in the gang announced to the public that Fan Mengduan was appointed as the "Henan Marshal", and then this petty official really began to control the big and small things in Henan.

By closing the land and waterways and isolating Henan Province from the outside world, Henan Province was easily taken into the pockets of these people. Fan Mengduan even had the spare time to put on a pomp and return home in glory and killed all his former enemies Shangguan.

Fan Mengduan, who was living a very happy life, got drunk again. It happened that his subordinates wanted to take this opportunity to ask Fan Mengduan to introduce him to the imperial envoy so that he could get a job. As a result, the drunk Fan Mengduan didn't keep his mouth shut and said directly, "Where did the imperial envoy come from? I am the imperial envoy."

Needless to say, the result after the exposure is not enough, but Fan Mengduan's example is enough to show that the Yuan Dynasty's rule not only failed to reach the grassroots, but also had a poor control over the middle level.

In this case, Tuotuo still thought that he could summon hundreds of thousands of civilians to dredge the river without causing chaos. After all, there were a lot of "rebels" among the civilians you summoned.

The most famous among them was Han Shantong, a professional rebel who practiced three religions at the same time.

In April 1351, Emperor Shundi of the Yuan Dynasty approved Tuotuo's river dredging plan and recruited 150,000 civilians from 13 routes such as Bianliang and Daming, and 20,000 garrison troops from Luzhou and other places, totaling 170,000 people, to officially start the work.

The project started in April, dredging was completed in July, water was released into the old course in August, boats were allowed to pass in September and the damming project began. In November, the wood and earthworks were completed and the embankment was built. The plan of "dredging and blocking at the same time, dredging first and blocking later" proposed by Jia Lu, a skilled river dredging craftsman, was perfectly implemented. The whole project took 190 days, and Tuotuo's planned Yellow River management ended successfully.

However, just one month after the start of this project, Han Shantong dug out the stone man he had buried not long ago.

This stone man with the inscription "Don't say the stone man has only one eye, once this thing is out, the world will rebel" also completely kicked off the prelude to the peasant uprising war at the end of the Yuan Dynasty. 】

Liu Bei sighed in the Xuchang government office:

"This Mongol Yuan Dynasty does not know the will of the people, no wonder it died suddenly."

It was just a normal sigh, but for Cao Cao, every time he heard Liu Bei talk about the will of the people, he felt a little irritated, so he simply responded:

"What is the will of the people? Isn't it the rise of Chen Sheng, the king of the Chu?"

"More than a thousand years have passed, and everything is still done by divination, nothing new."

This made Liu Bei shake his head and smile:

"The will of ghosts is the will of people, and the will of people is the will of the people. It is used by ghosts and gathered by the masses. What is the difference between the will of the people and the will of ghosts?"

Cao Cao frowned, and just when he was about to organize his words to refute what Liu Bei said, he was interrupted by Zhang Fei mercilessly:

"Since the Prime Minister is familiar with the "Records of the Grand Historian", he must have memorized what Chen Sheng said when he started the uprising?"

Most of Chen Sheng said a lot when he started the uprising, but the only sentence that was recorded in the "Family of the Grand Historian" was: Are there any kings, princes, generals, and ministers?

In the past, Cao Cao would have just laughed at this.

But now, seeing Liu Bei's serious expression and the light curtain calling the turmoil at the end of the Yuan Dynasty a peasant uprising war, these seemed to be the best footnotes to Chen Sheng's roar four hundred years ago.

So Cao Cao finally fell silent.

Unlike the sharp conflict of opinions here, Kong Ming felt a little regretful after writing down the key points he had extracted:

"If Zichu were here, he might have gained something from seeing this policy of exchanging banknotes for banknotes."

Pang Tong was immediately refreshed:

"Kong Ming doesn't understand?"

"It's not that I don't understand, but human power is limited."

Kong Ming looked at the words he had written down again and began to carefully annotate his thoughts below:

"But the more I calculate the matter of paper money in my mind, the more I feel that the theory of economic currency in later generations is so broad."

"Currency standard, margin, policy of exchanging banknotes for banknotes, dual lines of main currency and subsidiary currency, etc., each word is enough to make people think for a long time, and what I have gained is only one or two ten thousandths."

Pang Tong was also silent: next time I will never believe Kong Ming's sigh again, this is clearly a disdain for not understanding currency.

But he was still a little unwilling, so he asked:

"Then when we pacify the four borders, does Kong Ming have a plan for the matter of paper money?"

Kong Ming shook his head again:

"Although we have entered Xuchang now, the world has been in chaos for more than thirty years, and the people's livelihood in the world is so weak."

"When we were in Chengdu, Zichu and I had already discussed that in today's world, mining and minting coins are enough to correct the situation. Although the policy of paper money is of great use, at present, Chengdu's rare goods are based on quantity and invoices are sufficient. No more is appropriate.”

Seeing Kong Ming's "You should know this" expression on his face, Pang Tong didn't want to speak anymore.

…

Seeing the young man talking about Tuotuo, Zhu Yuanzhang also felt a little more sad on his face:

"The Hu people have been stealing the Chinese orthodoxy for more than a hundred years, and they have always fallen behind the leadership. They took over China with Beidi and refused to surrender all over the world. How can this be a manpower?"

"Tuotuo used Han Confucian methods in an attempt to prolong his life as a fishy man. However, his debauchery made the people trapped in greed and cruelty, and they are disgusted by nature. How can Han methods be effective on people who are ignorant of education?"

Zhu Biao was somewhat impressed. Most of his father's current literary words were mentioned in his message to the people of the north on the eve of the founding of the Ming Dynasty.

It was just that it was still early, so my father was more interested in declaring to the people of Hebei that the Ming Dynasty and Hu Yuan were irreconcilable, and telling the people of the North that the time had come to restore China.

And now that later generations are commenting on Tuotuo's achievements in regulating the Yellow River, and the Ming Dynasty has been founded for more than ten years, it is obvious that Dad's mentality has also changed.

"Dad, do you think this Tuotuo is an unworthy person?"

Zhu Yuanzhang rolled his eyes at his son and said leisurely:

"We lament that Hu Yuan Nei fought well and saved many casualties among the people."