Chapter 14: My! Money!

Zhu Youjian steadied himself and changed the subject. "In that case, what of the privy purse's income at present?"

Si Zhili still wore a face of utter bewilderment and could only look to Wang Tiqian for help.

Wang Tiqian spoke again, and this time a trace of caution, barely perceptible, crept into his voice:

"In reply to Your Majesty, the privy purse's income derives chiefly from two items: the imperial estate grain levy and the gold-flower silver. All other items — the mining tax, transfers from the outer treasuries, and the like — have been suspended since the final years of the Wanli era."

Zhu Youjian felt a stir in his heart. Imperial estates?

The moment he heard that term, a few notions had already begun to take shape in his mind.

So, aside from being the supreme Son of Heaven of the Great Ming, was he also a great landlord? If so, the tricks he could pull off were many indeed.

"Yes. In the vicinity of the capital, the imperial estates total seventeen thousand qing. There are also ten thousand qing at the Prince Xingxian estate in Huguang," Wang Tiqian replied.

"Since the reign of the Zhengde Emperor, a rule has been set: only three fen of grain levy silver is collected per mu. This sum is earmarked exclusively for the expenses of the two palaces and the crown prince, and each year roughly forty-nine thousand taels enter the treasury."

When Zhu Youjian heard this, his brow lifted.

He turned his head and glanced at Zhou Yu; as expected, her face was a complete blank.

Clearly, this future Empress of the Central Palace had no idea that such an enormous estate was held in her name.

Zhu Youjian laughed inwardly. I'm afraid you'll only get half of this money — the other half belongs to Empress Dowager Zhang Yan.

He was just calculating how to wring this money out when something struck him as off.

He picked up paper and brush from the table, drew a simple vertical multiplication layout, and began to work the figures in silence.

Twenty-seven thousand qing — one qing is a hundred mu, so that makes 2.7 million mu.

Each mu yields three fen of silver, which is 0.03 taels.

2.7 million, multiplied by 0.03…

Zhu Youjian's brush tip paused. A clear figure emerged on the paper: 81,000.

He raised his head, his gaze sharp as lightning, and fixed it directly on Wang Tiqian.

"Twenty-seven thousand qing of land, at three fen of silver per mu — by calculation, that should be eighty-one thousand taels. Why does the account show only forty-nine thousand?"

Wang Tiqian was staring at the incomprehensible scrawl beneath Zhu Youjian's brush, still bewildered.

Now, caught by the Emperor's question, he was scared out of his wits. With a thud he dropped to his knees, his forehead striking heavily against the cold gold brick.

"This old slave… this old slave deserves death! The matter of the imperial estates is riddled with abuses of long standing — embezzlement, encroachment, accounts in chaos… Over time, this… this sum became the accepted custom."

Zhu Youjian was too furious to speak.

At last he understood the boundless rage contained in the Jiajing Emperor's roar from the drama Ming Dynasty 1566.

My! Money!

Three fen of silver per mu — that was already a tax rate so low it scraped the dust.

Those estate stewards would certainly have exploited the tenants even more viciously on top of that; they would never have honestly collected only three fen.

And now, they could not even be bothered to hand over those three fen properly to me!

He drew a deep breath and forced himself to calm down.

Once again he began to lay out calculations on the paper.

An ominous premonition was already forming in his heart.

Calculated at the prevailing typical land rent of fifty percent, 2.7 million mu of land, figured at an average of one shi per mu per year —

then those estate stewards ought to be able to squeeze out over 1.3 million shi of rent each year.

At the current grain price around the capital of 0.5 taels per shi, that came to 650,000 taels of silver!

And this did not even account for the common northern practice of two harvests in three years with intercropping — beans in summer, wheat in autumn!

Zhu Youjian clutched his chest involuntarily; the pain left him unable to breathe.

My money — you take six hundred and fifty thousand, and give me fifty thousand?

This was even more outrageous than what had been done to the Jiajing Emperor back then — it was not even a fraction!

Divide 65 by 10, and you still get 6.5!

He waved his hand weakly, his voice trembling. "Forget it… What of the gold-flower silver?"

Seeing that the Emperor was not pursuing the imperial estate matter further, Wang Tiqian relaxed a little, but still dared not rise. He answered in a quavering voice:

"The gold-flower silver… is still fairly regular."

Wang Tiqian's mind raced; suddenly steeling himself, he continued:

"Only, apart from a few provinces such as Fujian and Guangdong, every other province is in arrears. From the first year of Tianqi to the present, the accumulated arrears have reached one hundred and twenty thousand taels."

"Which provinces owe the most?"

"The three provinces of South Zhili, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang… are rather large," Wang Tiqian's voice sank again.

Zhu Youjian pinched the bridge of his nose; the root of the problem was already clear to him.

Those three provinces were precisely the cultural heartland of the Great Ming, with the largest quotas in the civil examinations and jinshi degree-holders from both lists as numerous as carp crossing a river.

Behind this lay far more than simply the so-called interests of the landlords, the civil official bloc, or the Donglin factional strife.

To put it in more Ming-vernacular terms, this was "resistance to casting one's lot."

The "casting of lots" here did not refer to landlords accepting land from yeoman farmers to help them evade taxes.

It referred specifically to currying favor with the Emperor, acting as the Emperor's dog, and paying money into the Emperor's privy purse.

In the eyes of any scholar-official with the slightest aspiration, such conduct was profoundly immoral.

The Great Ming's tax collection system was chaotic to begin with: the privy purse, the Ministry of Revenue, the Ministry of Works, and the Ministry of War each ran their own operations, and all had the authority to levy taxes on the localities.

And the local officials, faced with this tax regime tangled like a mass of hemp, naturally developed their own inclinations.

Which taxes absolutely had to be collected, which taxes could not be avoided, and which taxes were best left uncollected — all of this was governed by careful calculation.

The Liaodong levy, sometimes called the new levy, was the most critical, because it fell under "performance evaluation" and was intimately tied to one's own official hat; this was the priority of all priorities.

The imperial clan stipends, fixed at one million taels in the Tianqi era — but the Emperor paid them no mind, and the civil officials paid them no mind either, so they were delayed as long as possible and withheld whenever possible.

As for the gold-flower silver — the money for the Emperor's personal spending? Naturally, they deferred that whenever they could, too!

Zhu Youjian felt a stir in his heart, and suddenly found himself looking forward to the court session the day after tomorrow.

This Great Ming court was truly fascinating — it needed not only to treat external sores, but actually had to regulate internal poison as well.

The so-called external sores were official corruption, a topic already worn threadbare by constant discussion.

And the internal poison was the profound, bone-deep distrust that the entire Confucian civil-official system held toward the Emperor and the imperial house.

But… could one really blame them?

In Zhu Youjian's mind surfaced those eight words: "When the law fails, it is those above who first break it."

Truly, the scholar-official class had its own selfishness and arrogance, but conversely, was their ideology of "resisting illicit contributions" really without cause?

His predecessor's imperial grandfather, the Wanli Emperor, had dispatched mining-tax eunuchs, throwing the realm into turmoil.

He had also raked money madly from the the the Taicang treasury treasury treasury, plundering nearly forty million taels of silver and depositing it into the privy purse.

Yet in the face of the increasingly dire Liaodong war, he was miserly enough to offer a mere five hundred thousand taels, making every excuse that the privy purse had no funds.

Then when his son and grandson ascended the throne, they disbursed twenty million in two years, making the Wanli Emperor look like a skinflint by contrast.

The state treasury had become his private property; all under Heaven had become his personal domain.

As for the enfeoffed princes in the provinces — of course they were anxious when their clan stipends could not be collected in full, but not that anxious.

Why?

Every one of them was enclosing and annexing land in their own fiefs, setting up checkpoints to levy taxes, and even secretly trafficking illicit salt, contending with the state for profit by every conceivable means.

The entire Great Ming imperial clan, from the Emperor down to the commandery princes, were like a horde of greedy rats, frantically gnawing at the foundations of the Great Ming, without the slightest care for this country.

If your own Zhu imperial house does not take this state seriously, by what right do you demand that all civil and military officials under Heaven remain incorruptible and utterly loyal to you?

It was precisely against this backdrop that the ideology of "resisting illicit contributions" spread like a plague through the scholarly world.

In any case, once the gold-flower silver was collected, it merely fattened the Emperor's private purse alone.

Better not to collect it at all — intercept it and either invest it locally, or… let it fall into one's own purse. With a little lubrication, perhaps this official might even get promoted.

And once this official rises, he will surely plead for the people and bring blessings to all living souls!

This mentality was undoubtedly twisted, pathological — yet it had become the unspoken, tacitly accepted rule throughout the entire bureaucratic system.

Zhu Youjian smiled. Very well, bring it on — two days from now was the regular court session on the third, sixth, and ninth days.

Let me see, among all these black crows under Heaven, which one is truly the blackest!

In the hall, seeing Zhu Youjian remain silent for so long, the atmosphere grew unbearably heavy.

Wang Tiqian and Si Zhili knelt on the floor, hardly daring even to breathe.

Even Zhou Yu felt this oppressive weight; she gazed at Zhu Youjian with concern, but did not dare to speak.

Zhu Youjian let out a long breath of stale air and asked his final question.

"And what of the privy purse's annual expenditures?"

Fine, I accept the low income — after deducting arrears each year, roughly seven hundred fifty thousand taels or so still come in.

Next, let us see how much surplus can be saved in a year.

Wang Tiqian drew a deep breath. He no longer dared to underestimate this new sovereign, a mere seventeen years of age, in the slightest.

"In reply to Your Majesty, the privy purse's uses are chiefly fixed annual expenditures — palace eunuchs, serving women, the salaries of capital military officers and ennobled merit officials, and procurement through merchant summons — totaling roughly five hundred thousand taels per annum."

"Beyond that are variable expenditures: military merit rewards, ceremonial bestowals for the various princes, consorts, and princesses, and the like."

Zhu Youjian fell silent again.

He had fallen silent far too many times tonight.

Fixed annual expenditures of five hundred thousand taels…

A common soldier in the Qi Family Army drew eighteen taels of silver in pay and provisions per year.

That meant saving just one hundred eighty thousand taels from here would be enough to cover the annual pay of a ten-thousand-man Qi Family Army near the capital region!

This account must be reckoned! This household must be managed!

Opening revenue sources and cutting expenditures — he still dared not act freely in the outer court for the moment.

Because as long as official governance remained corrupt, any good policy could degenerate into a harmful one.

But the inner palace eunuch system — that he could begin tackling quickly.

Zhu Youjian felt a sense of relief. Once the line of thought was settled, what remained was simply how to execute it.

When all was said and done, it came down to nothing more than the timeworn methods: clarifying rewards and punishments, setting regulations, making examples of typical cases, and establishing rules — no need even for any earth-shattering modern knowledge.

He raised his head and waved a hand, signaling Si Zhili to withdraw first.

Only then did he turn his gaze back to Wang Tiqian, still kneeling on the floor, and asked in a mild tone:

"Tiqian, rise."

"What is your view of the Great Ming's present national condition?"