The most reckless man in the Ming Dynasty

Kaiping City.

The Minister of Works Li Shan personally led his men to arrive.

Zhongshan Hou Tang Hao led his army to welcome Li Shan. After a day of rest, the two sides immediately began to repair the military fortress.

Kaiping City is not an ordinary border town, but the capital of the former Great Mongol Empire!

This place is located in the Jinlianchuan grassland, on the edge of the Mongolian Plateau. Since ancient times, it has been a battlefield for repeated tug-of-war between farming peoples and nomadic peoples. People at that time called it: "Control the desert in the north, screen Yan and Ji in the south, the mountains and rivers are majestic and solid, and the loop is thousands of miles."

As early as the Qin and Han Dynasties, the Xiongnu and Donghu launched a war around the "Ou Tuo" where Jinlianchuan was located; during the Northern Wei Dynasty, a military town was set up here to defend against the Rouran in the north; later, Jin Shizong held summer and autumn hunting in Jinlianchuan many times, and implemented a policy of control to win over the Tatar tribe on the Mongolian Plateau.

The importance that emperors of all dynasties attached to Jinlianchuan is enough to prove the importance of its strategic location.

Kublai Khan chose to build a city on the Jinlianchuan grassland, not only for the purpose of connecting with Karakorum, the political center of the Mongol Empire, but also for the consideration that the fertile and vast pastures here were sufficient to provide military supplies for the Mongol cavalry to go south.

The Jinlianchuan grassland is located on the main transportation route connecting the east, west, south and north of the Mongol Empire, and is an important strategic hub for controlling the Han area in North China.

During the Hongwu period, Emperor Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang stepped up the integration and improvement of the northern defense system, and established sixteen guards in the northwest. In addition to the Dongsheng Left and Right Guards, sixteen guards including Zhenlu, Yunchuan, Yulin, Weiyuan, Xuande, Guanshan, and Datong were successively established to Liaodong, as well as the thousand households under the jurisdiction of each guard, forming the eastern and northern defense lines.

To the west of Dongsheng Guard, similarly, through the thousand households under the jurisdiction of Dongsheng Guard in Ordos, it was connected with the Hexi Corridor in Ningxia and Gansu, thus forming a strategic and tactical defense system of mutual support, mutual support, and mutual response.

This line of defense resisted the Wuliangha in the east, the Waqir in the middle, and the Tatar in the west. This made the northern border defense of the Ming Dynasty, from point to surface, connected from east to west, and echoed each other, thus steadily advancing its entire northern border defense line hundreds of miles north of the Great Wall.

Unfortunately, due to the Jingnan Campaign of Emperor Yongle, most of the Sixteen Guards were disbanded and moved inland. When Emperors Renzong and Xuanzong comprehensively contracted the defense line, they were completely destroyed and could only fall into passive defense.

Among the Sixteen Guards, Zhong Kaiping Guard and Dongsheng Guard are particularly important.

The arrival of Li Shan, the Minister of Works, in person is enough to show the importance that His Majesty the Emperor attaches to Kaiping Guard.

It is still the same plan as Dongsheng City. First, build a steel city on the old site, and then slowly build other guard bastions to ensure that this place will not be taken away by nomadic peoples again.

At the same time as Li Shan arrived, the Jinyiwei also delivered a secret letter from His Majesty the Emperor.

After Tang Hao opened it and read it, his brows frowned.

The gentry in Jiangnan began to make trouble again. The civil officials headed by Xu Mengchun and others tried to force the emperor to stop recovering Hetao and coveted the East China Sea trade controlled by the emperor.

The emperor Zhu Houzhao was furious and determined to severely hit these gentry in Jiangnan. He wanted to reform the commercial tax and make these gentry in Jiangnan surrender!

Tang Hao looked at the secret letter and fell into deep thought.

The tax revenue of the Ming Dynasty was mainly agricultural tax and salt tax, which accounted for about 90% of the main income!

Commercial tax and mining tax are called miscellaneous taxes, which are much less than the previous two.

The main reason is that the court does not attach importance to business and has not introduced any strict measures to strictly control it, which has caused the Jiangnan merchants driven by the gentry in Jiangnan to pay almost no taxes, but these merchants are still rich!

However, as a later generation, Tang Hao naturally knows that when the country develops to a certain level, commercial tax will be the main source of tax revenue. At that time, there will be no need to pay taxes for farming, and the court will also provide subsidies!

But there is a prerequisite, that is, the industry and commerce of the Ming Dynasty have developed to a certain level before this situation can occur.

But now most people are bound to the land, and the land is in the hands of the gentry. Even self-cultivating farmers with a few acres of thin land have to rent some land from the gentry in order to get more harvest to subsidize their families.

After all, the Ming Dynasty is an agricultural society. Whoever controls the land has the right to speak. To put it bluntly, the gentry's annexation of land is not only greedy for land income, but more importantly, it is to control the right to speak over the people. Only by controlling the right to speak over the people can the gentry call the shots in the countryside. Every tenant who rents the gentry's land dares not offend the gentry, for fear that the gentry will no longer allow them to rent the land.

And Zhu Houzhao's desire to formulate a new commercial tax policy is indeed an opportunity to rescue the people from the control of the gentry.

When these people find that they can support their families and even live better than before by working in factories, they will naturally not be willing to go back to the hard life of slavery and oppression.

However, the problem is that if a large number of people leave the fields, grain production will definitely decrease, which is the negative impact of developing industry and commerce.

Tang Hao wrote down all his thoughts and understandings, including the pros and cons, and how to start if Zhu Houzhao really wants to do it.

As for what Zhu Houzhao will choose to do in the end, it is not Tang Hao's concern.

Because His Majesty the Emperor is no longer the little emperor of the past, Tang Hao can no longer treat Zhu Houzhao in the same way as before.

As a mature emperor, it is time to face the civil officials and gentry alone.

At the same time, in the capital city.

In a secret courtyard, many officials and gentry were gathering together, and the leader was Xu Mengchun.

Xu Mengchun played with a celadon tea bowl in his hand, without saying a word.

The atmosphere in the study was heavy, and an official could not bear the heavy atmosphere and shouted: "How dare His Majesty the Emperor act like this? Killing Han Lin in public with a stick?"

"Does he really want to be a tyrant?"

It has to be admitted that the gentry in Jiangnan are full of confidence and have always lacked respect for the royal family.

Xu Mengchun glanced at this person, and then said lightly: "There is no need to mention these trivial matters. We have seen the emperor's determination with our lives, so it is not a loss."

"The problem now is how to make the emperor retreat in the face of difficulties, interrupt the recovery of Hetao, and give up the East China Sea trade!"

Interrupting the recovery of Hetao is not giving military generals and nobles the opportunity to rise.

And giving up the East China Sea trade is the real goal of the gentry in Jiangnan.

An emperor who is short of money, like the previous emperor, will be restrained and controlled by civil officials and gentry, and he must discuss with them if he wants to do anything.

Instead of being like the Zhengde Emperor Zhu Houzhao, who had money and food in his own treasury, he would send troops to start a war at the slightest disagreement, and he would ignore the attitudes and ideas of the civil officials and gentry at all, and he was so strong and overbearing that it was hard to accept!

Xu Mengchun's words were the final word, and everyone knew that what he said made sense.

The civil officials and gentry had experienced too many strong emperors, such as Emperor Taizu Gao, Emperor Taizong Wen, and Emperor Chenghua, and they had lived a cautious life enough.

It was not easy to have a previous emperor who was in tune with them, but he died when he said he would.

The current emperor is even more excessive than Emperor Chenghua, more overbearing and powerful, and more unreasonable!

This is something that all gentry and gentry cannot accept!