The Prosperous Era of Longwan

Wei Guangde's curiosity was naturally impossible to get the answer from Zhang Juzheng.

The matter was kept secret, and Xu Jie did not tell Zhang Juzheng about his arrangements, so although Zhang Juzheng was smiling at this time, he was actually very puzzled in his heart, although he was not jealous yet.

With teacher Xu Jie in the pavilion, Zhang Juzheng certainly would not suspect that Wei Guangde had robbed him of the opportunity. He could only say that there might be something else he didn't know about, and he could only take the time to ask the teacher.

In the next two days, Wei Guangde hosted another banquet at home for his fellow students and fellow villagers. After all, it was a happy event for his promotion.

When fellow villagers get together, the things they talk about the most are naturally things about their hometown in Jiangxi.

"Yesterday I saw the book handed over by the Secretary of General Affairs. The governor, Mr. Hu Songhu, came to Shu. Jiangxi was invaded by Fujian-Guangzhou thieves. The provinces are more than a thousand miles apart. Although the close ones were ordered to suppress them, they joined forces to fight with rats. The forces are uneven, and the Zhangnan, Wuping, and Jianning factions are particularly pushy and pushy. I don’t know what these foreign officials think. At this time, there are no enemies to suppress the thieves."

"I have read the memorial. The main message is that those who have made meritorious deeds from now on should be rewarded according to the regulations of Fujian and Zhejiang for catching Japanese pirates. If rewards and punishments are not clearly defined, Jiangxi officials and soldiers will not be willing to suppress the thieves."

"That's natural. The thieves in Fujian and Zhejiang are rewarded according to the rules of catching Japanese pirates, but the Jiangxi officers and soldiers can only get a small reward even if they kill the thieves, so they will definitely be dissatisfied."

"I think the main battle is the distribution of bounties. Now when Jiangxi is suppressing thieves, the bounty comes from the Jiangxi Chief Envoy, while the Fujian and Zhejiang troops come from Governor Hu's camp. Jiangxi previously asked for instructions to temporarily withhold additional taxes and levies to suppress thieves. Governor Hu objected and ordered the shipment to be delivered within a time limit.”

The people here are all officials from Jiangxi, and naturally their talk is focused on Jiangxi.

Jiangxi was also included in Hu Zongxian's campaign to suppress the Japanese faction, but now that Fujian thieves had fled to Jiangxi, and people were in ruins, Jiangxi had to collect money from its own pockets to exterminate the thieves, and also paid Hu Zongxian to suppress the Japanese, and everyone was unwilling to do so.

Even Hu Song, the governor of Jiangxi, felt that it was very unfair, so while reporting the actual situation in Jiangxi, he once again asked Hu Zongxian to pay the reward for killing the bandits.

"Shan Loan, what do you say?"

At this time, Lao Kan asked Wei Guangde.

Wei Guangde glanced at Lao Kan and then at his fellow villagers. He knew in his heart that these people had probably communicated with each other before entering the door, and perhaps wanted to jointly submit a memorial to support Hu Song's memorial.

"Although I haven't heard anything about the palace's stance on this matter, I think the Ministry of War will be asked to discuss it in detail and draw up a charter that will be approved by His Majesty."

Wei Guangde thought about it and then said: "So, there is actually a lot we can do. We can talk to the adults at the Ministry of War about the injustice, and the Ministry of War will naturally take care of it when considering it."

Within two days, Wei Guangde heard the news in Prince Yu's Mansion, but the memorial was transferred to the Ministry of War, and after discussion with the Ministry of War, Yang Bo submitted the memorial to handle the matter.

"The Minister of War, Yang Bo, and others reported to the governor of Jiangxi Province about the military suppression of bandits in the four provinces. He requested that the leader and one of the evil followers be severely arrested, and then allowed him to be captured and beheaded before he surrendered. Three hundred charges were filed against him at the military gate in vain. Rewards; Erting, Shao Jianning and other places are the main routes for thieves to enter Jiangxi. It is advisable to order all the guards to avoid escaping when the thieves attack together; the third censor Gu Yan said that although the mission is full, he knows that the soldiers are doing their job, please stay, and he will be praised for his merits. "Fourth, please lend me money to support the Nanxiong and Huzhou salt taxes and pay for the troops staying in Guangdong, Guangxi, and southern Jiangxi."

"This memorial by Yang Shangshu should be approved soon."

When Wei Guangde read Yang Bo's memorial carefully, Zhang Juzheng on the side said with a smile.

"Yes, but it seems that Yang Shangshu can also join the Qintian Prison as a supervisor."

Wei Guangde also smiled and replied. In the strange eyes of Zhang Juzheng, King Yu and others, Wei Guangde said again: "Yang Shangshu said that recently, sandstorms and earthquakes in the north and south have been reported as disasters. I think this is a sign of war, haha."

"Shaloan, Yang Shangshu just wants to remind the court not to focus all its attention on the southeast. Captives from the northwest will do more harm."

Zhang Juzheng smiled and said to Wei Guangde: "In Xuan Daji Town, there are Anda Xin Ai Badu'er Tuman, in Liaodong there are Hu Laha, Chi Xiao, Ji Neng, and various small chiefs, Laosatu Tuo, etc., and in Shanxi Yangu, there are three towns The wall is leaning down and should be repaired in time, hey."

When Wei Guangde and Zhang Juzheng were talking, King Yu sat silently at the top, just listening to their conversation quietly.

In the afternoon, Wei Guangde was suddenly invited to a wing by Li Fang. When he entered the room, he saw King Yu already waiting in the room.

"Shandai, sit down and chat for a while."

King Yu stood up and came to greet him. After Wei Guangde sat down, he also sat next to him and said: "Before, you said that if we want to completely eradicate the Japanese pirates in the southeast, we should remove the fuel from the bottom of the cauldron and give the seafarers a way to make a living at sea, and fundamentally eliminate them. I, the people of the Ming Dynasty, have become pirates, and Gu Shen takes it for granted.

Today, the enemy in the northwest is eyeing us. Although our Ming Dynasty built nine border military towns, they are thousands of miles apart, so the response will be insufficient. Is there a way to eradicate the border troubles once and for all? "

After hearing what King Yu said, Wei Guangde understood what he was asked to do.

Thinking of the discussion with Zhang Juzheng in the morning, Yang Bo's memorial was arranged in the southeast, but the military department focused on the northwest. In dealing with the Tatars, it seemed to resonate with King Yu and wanted to ask if there was a solution.

However, Wei Guangde actually has no good solution for the northern grasslands.

In fact, for thousands of years, the northern grassland peoples have been eyeing the Central Plains. This is not an easy solution.

Moreover, Wei Guangde's family is a military household. If the military household is really miserable, it seems that he will put shackles on his own neck.

It is of course impossible to say that Wei Guangde does not understand the current situation of the Ming army.

The problems that the Ming Dynasty is facing now are actually in essence, the adults in the court are well aware that the officials are not governing properly.

Almost all the problems encountered in the Ming Dynasty were ultimately caused by problems in official administration, but the causes of problems in official administration were diverse.

Gao Gong discovered this problem a long time ago, so he was also the official who took the most clear-cut stance on rectifying the government. His thoughts even profoundly affected King Yu.

Chen Yiqin, Yin Shizhen and others also realized this, but they may still have concerns, or they may think that rectifying officialdom is only one of them, and eliminating bad governance is the top priority.

As for Zhang Juzheng, he was similar to Gao Gong in that he was aware of the problem of official administration, but perhaps because he saw many reasons for bad government, he had to grasp it with both hands and be tough with both hands.

The biggest difference between Zhang Juzheng's thoughts at this time and Gao Gong's was that Gao Gong insisted on using severe punishments to combat official corruption, while Zhang Juzheng knew very well that when the water is clear, there will be no fish, and wanted to use more Solving the matter in a gentle way may be the reason why he came up with the "test method" in later generations.

As for eliminating drawbacks, Zhang Juzheng had previously realized that the biggest drawback was the complexity of the government's collection of taxes and services. Even many officials themselves did not know how to collect taxes according to national laws, so they just took it for granted and collected it from the people.

During the discussion with Wei Guangde, Wei Guangde also gradually realized that Zhang Juzheng actually just wanted to find an easy-to-understand collection method so that the government would know how much to collect and the tax-paying people would know how much to pay, instead of listening to the following. The official told me how much to charge.

However, until now, he and Zhang Juzheng only thought of merging and quantifying taxes and levies, but they had never figured out how to collect them, because at this time, in the north and south of the Ming Dynasty, monetary and physical taxes were collected, as well as corvee labor, and it was really difficult to find a unified solution.

Thinking of what Zhang Juzheng said at the beginning, "the common people are working hard in corvee", Wei Guangde felt the same way.

In fact, many of the things that forced the people of the Ming Dynasty to lose their homes were not taxes but corvee labor.

It should be noted that it is not that Wei Guangde did not know how to reform the Ming Dynasty's tax collection model and directly adjusted the past physical, monetary, and labor services to a method of collecting silver. In fact, the current Ming Dynasty actually lacks silver, not to mention copper coins. .

Thinking about it, his uncle and father worked hard to replace the copper cannons issued by Jiujiang Wei in the early Ming Dynasty with iron cannons. It can be imagined that the copper materials obtained were directly cast into money.

The government does not have enough copper to make money. What kind of currency will be circulated among the people at this time?

As for silver, it is even more in short supply. Normally, it is no problem to collect hundreds or thousands of taels, but it is another matter to collect taxes.

The Ming Dynasty now collects about three million taels of taxes every year, many of which are copper coins. Silver is only exchanged for the convenience of escorting. It is not a currency recognized by the court and belongs to the category of precious metals.

During the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty, silver was collected and used by the government as currency, but it was not used in the Ming Dynasty.

Wei Guangde thought a lot, and his thoughts wandered unconsciously.

But in the eyes of King Yu, all this was that Wei Guangde was thinking and thinking deeply, so he sat quietly and waited.

The decline of the Ming army's military strength was not a matter of one dynasty or two dynasties. Although it is said that Yingzong defeated all the elite Ming army in Tumubao, the real situation is that before that, the Ming army's military strength had been declining.

Before being surrounded in Tumubao, Yingzong sent several groups of soldiers and horses, especially the cavalry from the Beijing camp. They all suffered defeats in the battle with Wala, so they had no choice but to shrink their troops and gather together. In the end, they were all overthrown.

But now, the situation in Daming Border Town is even worse.

There were millions of troops in the Ming Dynasty, but they were all dispersed and stationed in the border forts. Each fort had more than a thousand soldiers and as few as a hundred. However, the originally designed strategy of sending out reinforcements when a nearby military fort was attacked failed. It’s no longer possible to fight.

In the end, the border forts were often destroyed, the population and resources were plundered by the Tatars, and they fled.

On the Ming Dynasty's side, there will be endless mutual accusations.

Do governors and governors have responsibilities? Do general soldiers and guards have responsibilities?

If the quarrel got a little more serious, it would turn into a civil and military dispute. Emperors like Emperor Jiajing, who played with their courtiers, were helpless.

This is the current situation of the Ming Dynasty. When some border towns were defeated, all parties passed the blame to each other. The original intention of setting up many official positions was to nip problems in the bud, but in the end it became like this, and no one could be found to deal with it and be responsible.

In the end, the emperor often selected a few unlucky ones to top the vat based on his own preferences, and dismissed them from office.

However, these involve the administration of officials. Regardless of whether they are punished by civil servants or military generals, there are actually very complicated backgrounds behind them, and the most effective method is nothing more than "selecting generals" and "training troops."

The current side generals of the Ming Dynasty are different from what most people in later generations understand. They are not all generals who dare to fight and fight. After all, they all come from generals and have been hanging around in the north all year round. They still have some blood. .

However, Wei Guangde knew that these people also had a lot of scruples. If they won, it would be easy to talk about it. If they lost, they would get a pension if they died on the battlefield. But if they were defeated and escaped, they would often become the scapegoat for the superior officials to shirk their responsibilities.

Generals who command troops are inevitably injured on the battlefield, but not many die in battle.

It is precisely because of this that more and more generals, especially older generals, have gradually developed the habit of fearing war, and always try to find reasons to avoid war before starting a war.

In fact, they led the soldiers of the imperial court. There was no need to preserve their strength. They just didn't want to be thrown out as scapegoats.

In this era, there were no communication tools such as mobile phones and radios. They could only rely on messengers to deliver orders everywhere. The backward communication methods gave them good reasons - they did not dare to act rashly without receiving military orders.

As a result, the war that was supposed to be supported by all sides gradually turned into a battle between trapped beasts. The Tatars besieged the Ming army's border fortress, while the surrounding Ming army watched the fire from across the bank, euphemistically called waiting for orders.

King Yu has been waiting for a long time. Although there is no impatience on his face at this time, Wei Guangde also knows that he cannot delay it any longer. He still has to give some explanation today.

"Your Highness, there are actually many ways to solve the border troubles, but to truly eradicate them, the only way is to become stronger yourself."

At this time, Wei Guangde simply organized his thoughts and looked at King Yu talking eloquently: "At the beginning of the founding of the Ming Dynasty, our military strength was so strong. We drove the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty to the north and restored China."

Wei Guangde did not directly talk about selecting generals and training troops, but first explained the glorious history of the army. Although it was intended to put some gold on his family's face, this was also Wei Guangde's discovery that King Yu had a hobby, which was to brag about the past of the old Zhu family. His great achievements often made King Yu extremely happy.

Sure enough, when Wei Guangde said that Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhu Di had made many northern expeditions to Mongolia, which overwhelmed the Mongolians, King Yu smiled enthusiastically on his face.

"It's just that now, our Ming Guard system has become dilapidated and decayed, and most of the guards are unable to fight. This is because the guards can only farm and cannot kill.

I told His Highness at the beginning that the Jiujiang Guards had outstanding achievements in several expeditions, but the actual situation of the Guards was no different from that of other Guards. They were skilled in battle formations and had very few soldiers who could go on expeditions. However, when they encountered an enemy with limited strength, the enemy Not a crowd.

If the enemy is outnumbered or even equally matched, the outcome of the battle will be unpredictable. "

Wei Guangde then denigrated himself again. Although he was telling the truth, it sounded self-effacing to Prince Yu.

At least according to the news known to King Yu, Jiujiang Guards defeated Japanese pirates several times, fought several battles with Japanese pirates in Zhejiang, and later chased and annihilated Japanese pirates who had left Nanjing's tens of thousands of troops helpless.

"To stabilize the northern border defense, it is actually simple to say, it is nothing more than selecting generals and training troops, choosing generals who are good at fighting, such as Ma Fang and Yu Dayou, and letting them train troops according to their own fighting habits, but this is very difficult.

Once an officer is transferred, half of the trained soldiers will be wasted. But if the soldiers leave with the general, it will be easy to change in the long run. When I tried to transfer Ma Fang to Jizhen, the Ministry of War never approved it because of this intention. "

Wei Guangde's words made King Yu nodded slightly, "The generals you recommended are all good. Although Ma Fang suffered several defeats on Xuanfu West Road, he is also the most dazzling general in Xuanda."

After saying this, King Yu couldn't help but hesitate, as if he thought of something, and murmured: "It turns out that Shandai recommended those virtuous people to Gu Ju for this reason."