Chapter 155: Seeing the Big in the Small: Ming Dynasty Ecology Through the Lens of the Huangshan Case (Free Chapter)

P. S. If you already know the Huangshan case, you can skip ahead to the party-strife section after the 3,300-word mark. Quite a few people don't know that part.

If you're not familiar with it, I'd still suggest reading through — otherwise it's hard to understand why Wu Kongjia behaves the way he does.

The Huangshan case took place in She County, Huizhou.

(Does that ring a bell? The silk-tax case in Ma Boyong's *Under the Microscope: Ming Dynasty* happened here too.)

Huizhou — well, lots of mountains, little farmland, so many people went into trade. You've probably all heard of the Huizhou merchants.

And the Wu family were the very cream of those Huizhou merchants.

Just how rich were they?

Starting from the patriarch Wu Shouli, they ran salt, timber, and pawnbroking businesses, and became the wealthiest family in She County.

In the early Wanli years, they contributed 210,000 taels, and Wu Shouli was enfeoffed as "Gentleman of Huizhou, Chief Steward of the Court of Imperial Entertainments" (a post in the Nanjing Court of Imperial Entertainments, lower sixth rank).

Wu Shizuo was enfeoffed as "Secretary of the Hall of Culture."

In the middle of the Wanli era, the Three Great Halls burned down, the war against the Japanese in Korea was still unfinished, and trouble broke out in the southwest.

Wu Shouli contributed another 300,000 taels, and in a single day five appointments as Secretariat Drafter were issued.

Wu Yangchun, Wu Yangjing, Wu Yangdu, Wu Jizhi, and Wu the Western Park were all simultaneously enfeoffed as "Secretariat Drafters."

So when many people talk about the Ming selling offices, there really was this tradition — the top-spending patrons, when they splashed out, they did it in grand style.

Of course, I'm not saying the Wu family were some kind of virtuous merchants.

They almost certainly did their share of dirty deeds — bribing local officials, swallowing up farmland, trafficking illicit salt, concealing property from the tax rolls.

But this was 510,000 taels! The annual Gold Flower Silver levy was only a million.

If you had a few dozen merchants like this, would the Ming still be short of money?

Rather than spending your money bribing officials, bribing eunuchs — why not bribe the Emperor instead? Right?

That's exactly what Wu Shouli thought, and he got his corresponding returns.

Beyond the official posts, the Wanli Emperor really did deliver once he took the money:

In the forty-fourth year of Wanli, the Regional Inspector of the South Metropolitan Circuit, Censor Luo Qinceng, proposed confiscating half of the Wu family's Huangshan mountain lands into state hands, on the grounds that they had concealed official taxes on Mount Huang.

And Wanli's response to this routine memorial was: set aside and not issued!

Hahaha!

However — Wanli is dead, and now it's the Tianqi era, with a new man in power.

At this point, two old, unresolved cases became the fuse that would destroy the Wu family.

The first: the dispute between Wu Yangchun and Wu Yangze over the family inheritance.

After Wu Shouli died, when the ancestral property was divided, Wu Yangchun received 2,400 mu of Huangshan mountain land, along with the salt operations in Huaiyang, Tianjin, Renhe, and other places.

His younger brother Wu Yangze was unwilling to let Wu Yangchun monopolize all that Huangshan mountain land, so he took the matter to court.

In the end, it never came to anything — Wu Yangze died midway through. (Whether Wu Yangchun had a hand in it, I don't know. Note: I am objective and impartial; I have never claimed Wu Yangchun was a good man.)

Then Wu Yangze's household servant Wu Rong turned treacherous — he not only embezzled his master's estate but also seized his master's concubine.

Although She County has more mountains than fields, it was actually a major county for producing scholars.

Once merchants got rich, they were most zealous about sponsoring education — they wanted officials and merchants to protect each other, after all.

So to the local clans, with their strong Confucian ethos, this was an absolutely intolerable disgrace.

Wu Yangchun therefore brought suit at the county yamen, demanding that Wu Rong be severely punished.

However, Wu Rong bribed the runners, got himself released from jail, and fled far away — and the matter went nowhere.

And it was precisely this case that led to the earlier incident where the Regional Inspector of the South Metropolitan Circuit demanded the confiscation of the Wu family's Huangshan acreage.

But Wanli set the memorial aside and never issued it, and with Wu Yangze dead and the servant Wu Rong on the run, the whole thing was simply left unresolved.

Of course, it's also possible that Wu Rong was a loyal servant, protecting his master's property — that I have no way of knowing.

Beyond this, there was yet another old case:

The death of Wu Zuoyan.

Wu Kongjia's father, Wu Zuoyan, was a clan cousin of Wu Yangchun and managed the family business for him.

Yet he died under murky circumstances.

There are three versions:

First: at a clan council, he was publicly humiliated — "they humiliated him before the assembly, and Wen Shi's father died of despondency."

Second: he was in poor health and died of illness — "Kongjia's father died of a weak constitution."

Third: he embezzled money and was beaten to death by Wu Yangchun — "Yangchun, enraged, hurled an inkstone at him, struck his forehead, and killed him."

But whichever version it was, Wu Kongjia was convinced that Wu Yangchun had murdered his father.

While lodging at the Xiangfu Temple on Mount Huang and studying bitterly, he never spoke a word of it — he only covered the walls and his bed curtains with the character "death," to remind himself never to forget the blood-debt of his father.

Up to this point, the Wu family was actually still fine.

And yet…

The storm of factional strife between the Donglin and the eunuch faction was about to break, and it would entangle with those two old stories of vengeance and grievance.

The Wu family's ruin was right before their eyes.

The fifth year of Tianqi.

Wu Kongjia passed the jinshi examination and took second place overall — the *bangyan*.

On the eighteenth day of the third month, he was named *tanhua* (third in the first class); on the first day of the fourth month, he was appointed a Junior Compiler in the Hanlin Academy.

The very night before he was to give thanks at court, he had already drafted a personal statement petitioning for posthumous honors for his great-grandparents.

At dawn he arrived at court and spoke of the matter to his fellow graduates — the Zhuangyuan Yu Huang and the Bangyan Hua Qifang.

Both were astonished at his urgency. Wu Kongjia did not mention the vengeance for his father to them; he only said:

"Ever since I read the *Classic of Filial Piety* as a child, I have held this resolve in my heart. Now that I am fortunate enough to have reached this day, I feel I cannot bear to wait a single moment longer."

— But what he could not endure — was that really filial piety? No, it was the vengeance for his father's murder that Wu Kongjia had carried for over a decade!

Yet the fire of rage in Wu Kongjia's heart would have to burn a while longer.

Soon enough, the opportunity came.

Rebuilding the Three Great Halls required a great deal of timber.

In the ninth month of the fifth year of Tianqi,

Supervising Secretary Huo Weihua submitted a memorial proposing "an additional levy of timber from Mount Huang."

This was, in fact, a perfectly reasonable proposal.

Because timber extraction was a matter of extremely heavy corvée labor.

In the past, timber had been taken from places like Yunnan and Guizhou; adding Mount Huang to share the burden was entirely fair and proper.

But when Wu Yangchun of She County heard this news, he was terrified out of his wits.

In the Ming dynasty, when something like great timber became entangled with the imperial house, it was a death sentence.

So he ordered his household man Wu Wenjie to take a letter in his own hand and hurry to the capital to pull strings.

Wu Wenjie took thirty thousand taels of silver and, together with Wu Junshi, Wu Jianshu, Cheng Menggeng, Xu Yingzhang, Mao Pei, and others, went to the capital to spread money in every quarter.

Among them, Cheng Menggeng was an Imperial Academy student with many acquaintances in the capital, and he actually managed to gain access to the residence of Feng Quan, the Chief Grand Secretary of the Grand Secretariat.

And Feng Quan was, at this very moment, the civil-official ringleader of the eunuch faction.

In the third month of the sixth year of Tianqi,

it looked as though, with gold and silver paving the way, the matter was about to be settled successfully.

Wu Wenjie breathed a sigh of relief — and then he did one thing too many.

He paid a visit to Wu Kongjia's home.

After all, a clansman the family had funded for years had placed third in the palace examinations; such a connection always needed tending.

Who could say — perhaps the Wu family's business might even rise to a higher level.

When that day came, why would they need to go about everywhere paving roads with gold and silver as they did now?

An official merchant, an official merchant — you needed an official before you could have a merchant.

That single visit ruined everything.

In Wu Kongjia's home, Wu Wenjie actually laid eyes on Wu Rong — the household servant who had betrayed his master and been in hiding for years!

In a towering rage, he was about to seize Wu Rong and haul him before the magistrate, but he held back out of deference to Wu Kongjia.

Wu Rong was stricken with terror, and that very night he brought up again the matter of Wu Yangchun's murder of Wu Kongjia's father.

Under every kind of pressure, Wu Kongjia at last made up his mind!

And Wu Kongjia was at that time engaged in compiling the "Three Dynasties Canon."

This gave him just the opening to connect with Wei Zhongxian.

And so, Wu Rong came forward as the accuser, denouncing Wu Yangchun for seizing Mount Huang, concealing lands, persecuting his own family, building academies, and other crimes.

Wei Zhongxian seized on this as if he had found a priceless treasure, and at once the Eastern Depot's riders fanned out in all directions, arresting every person involved and bringing them to justice.

Why did Wei Zhongxian treat this as a priceless treasure? Was it merely for the money? Permit me to keep you in suspense a moment — let us first follow the thread of money and make this matter clear.

Wei Zhongxian the juice press — makes his entrance!

Wei Zhongxian first seized Wu Junshi and the other five who had come to the capital to work connections, and held them in his grasp.

Once he had secured all the confessions and evidence, in the intercalary sixth month of the sixth year of Tianqi, Wei Zhongxian at last formally memorialized the throne on the aforementioned crimes of Wu Yangchun.

Tianqi was furious and decreed for the remaining offenders: "Let the Embroidered Uniform Guard dispatch proper officers and banners to proceed thither, together with the Governor and the Inspector, to arrest and bind them, and convey them to the capital for joint interrogation."

In the seventh month of the sixth year of Tianqi,

Wu Yangchun and the other principal offenders, under escort by the Embroidered Uniform Guard riders commanded by Chiliarch Wang Limin, arrived in the capital.

Yet no sooner had he reached the capital than he followed Wang Limin and delivered tens of thousands of taels into the hands of Tian Ergeng, the Left Commissioner-in-Chief in charge of the Embroidered Uniform Guard.

Did it do any good?

It was useless. This case was no longer merely a matter of money.

Feng Quan could not protect you — and Tian Ergeng certainly could not protect you either!

In the ninth month of the sixth year of Tianqi,

it was soon over. Under the three wooden instruments of torture, what confession could not be had?

Wu Yangchun was convicted of illicit gains of over six hundred thousand taels of silver; Cheng Menggeng and the others, over one hundred thirty-six thousand taels; and the timber from his mountain holdings, over three hundred thousand taels.

In total, 1,036,000 taels — let the plundering begin!

In the twelfth month of the sixth year of Tianqi,

Lü Xiawen, Bureau Secretary of the Construction Bureau of the Ministry of Works, was dispatched to She County to recover the illicit funds.

This fellow was something else — on a simple assignment, he brought along his entire household, over thirty people in all.

Upon arrival, he discovered that Wu Yangchun's family estate had already fallen into decline.

After Wu Shouli's death, the line had split into five branches, and the line descending from Wu Yangchun's father had divided into several more.

Wu Yangchun's own estate was a far, far cry from this so-called million taels of illicit gains.

No great problem.

If Wu Yangchun's assets fell short, there was still the entire Wu clan.

If the Wu clan fell short, there were still the households of all She County.

But we are officials, after all — we must be civilized, not so utterly devoid of finesse.

And so Lü Xiawen put up for auction the lands of Wu Yangchun that were said to be worth three hundred thousand taels, and compelled the wealthy local households to buy them.

Naturally, he himself had to earn a little something on the side as well.

How much did he earn? Not much — a mere twenty thousand taels tacked on.

(This also serves as a reference point for late-Ming corruption — yes, there was corruption, but it really wasn't that much. One-fifteenth is a bit low.)

One of the merchants, Wu Xianji, was assessed to purchase over ten thousand taels' worth of Yellow Mountain land; unable to bear the cost, he was forced to flee.

And that flight — that's when things blew up.

Thirtieth day, second month, seventh year of Tianqi

The imperially dispatched constables and two bailiffs went to Wu Xianji's relative's home in Yansi Town to "recover the illicit gains." No one was home.

But if you, Lord Lü, want to make money, are we constables not supposed to make money too?

So they broke down the door and entered the home of an unrelated neighbor to extort her. The woman, who lived alone, screamed for help. Nearby commoners rushed over upon hearing the commotion and, seizing the momentum, beat the bailiff to death.

Wuhu is about to have a popular uprising.

That very day, someone posted the four characters "Expel the Ministry, Pacify the People" all over the main streets. (I suspect the merchants and gentry were starting to flex their muscle.)

First day, third month, seventh year of Tianqi

The next day, the then magistrate of She County, Ni Yuangong (Ni Yuanlu's cousin), took the anonymous placard to see Lü Xiawen and urged him: "One must take pity on the people — their collective anger is not to be provoked. You should think of a good strategy to quell the unrest."

Lü Xiawen would not listen. As a result, that very night, commoners came and surrounded the county yamen. Lü Xiawen fled in utter disarray.

The enraged commoners smashed up the county yamen and destroyed his official seal and his imperial commission, reducing all of it to rubble.

Second day, fourth month, seventh year of Tianqi

Word reached the capital. Very quickly, Lü Xiawen was stripped of his rank and sent home.

Wei Zhongxian dispatched his loyal subordinate, Xu Zhiji, Chief Judge of the Court of Judicial Review, to go seize the illicit gains.

Who was Xu Zhiji?

He was the grandson of the late Grand Secretary Xu Guo of the Wanli era. Through his grandfather's yin privilege, he became a Secretariat Drafter, bypassing the jinshi examination route, and was promoted to Chief Judge of the Court of Judicial Review.

This is one of the reasons Wei Zhongxian could rise so fast.

As long as you submitted to him, he didn't ask about your character, he didn't ask about your background — official posts were yours in abundance.

More crucially, Xu Zhiji was himself of local Huizhou merchant stock, also from a powerful and wealthy family.

Once he went down there, what damned popular uprising? Not a peep was heard.

He simply ground the Wu lineage directly into the floor.

Of course, graft and bribery were unavoidable. After all, once you've thrown your lot in with the Depot Minister, are you still supposed to talk about morality and public justice?

In any case, that million-plus taels — in the end, they still couldn't extract it.

Because — on the twenty-second day of the eighth month, the seventh year of Tianqi, the Tianqi Emperor passed away.

Reckoning the time, it was right around now. Xu Zhiji should have received the news too.

But no matter what, of the entire Wu lineage, some had their families destroyed, some fled, and some hanged themselves.

Wu Yangchun, whom Wu Kongjia had originally wanted dead, was certainly dead — but Wu Kongjia had also cut himself off from his own entire clan.

The ecology of Great Ming under the Yellow Mountain case

① Merchants are shit. Officials come first.

No objections, everyone?

Also, palace eunuchs are officials too — in fact, they're the most badass officials of all.

All those Jiangnan merchants, Shanxi merchants, salt magnates — sure, they have money in their hands, but they all have to attach themselves to officials (or ennobled aristocrats).

Why was the Wu family so miserable?

On one hand, the Wanli Emperor was gone, replaced by a new emperor.

On the other hand, the people they attached themselves to were on a downhill slide.

Who were the people they attached themselves to?

The first-phase Donglin! (My own name for them — meaning Yang Lian, Zuo Guangdou, that batch.)

How can you tell?

Remember the Wu family's charges? Apart from concealing fields and persecuting his brother, there was also one count of "establishing an academy."

This academy was the Chongwen Academy.

The original text of the charges says: By imperial decree, all academies under Heaven were to be torn down. Wu Yangchun disobeyed the clear decree, craftily changed the name, and turned it into a library, letting his son Wu Jixu and Wang Shiyin read books inside, gathering cliques and factions.

This brings us to the matter of factional strife.

② The struggle between Donglin and the eunuch faction.

Rather than calling it factional strife, it's more accurate to call it the eunuch faction's unilateral purge of the Donglin (because by this point it was already the sixth year of Tianqi).

To talk about factional strife, we have to go back a bit further.

She County, that locale — going further back, it produced a formidable figure: Wang Wenyan.

If you're interested, you can go search for him. If I write about him here, the word count will get a bit too long.

In short, he was a pivotal figure within the first-phase Donglin.

Wei Zhongxian once used him as a starting point, using the "Case of Bribery in Border Appointments" to launch an attack on Yang Lian, and ultimately swept up the entire Donglin Faction in one net.

Those who say Wei Zhongxian saved the nation need to get one fact straight.

It wasn't until the fourth and fifth years of Tianqi that Wei Zhongxian truly swept away the Donglin and seized full power.

When I see people attributing every success of the entire Tianqi reign to Wei Zhongxian and every failure to the Donglin, I just want to laugh.

These people can't even clearly state when Wei Zhongxian rose to power.

— Is it possible that the one truly behind all this, pushing events forward, was the Tianqi Emperor himself?

Forget it. I've been attacked by moronic commentary lately, and I'm full of pent-up anger.

Let's get back on track.

Now connect this to what was mentioned earlier: letting his son Wu Jixu and Wang Shiyin read books inside, plus the matter of not tearing down the library.

Then the truth surfaces.

Why was Wu Yangchun's money useless when given to Feng Quan, and just as useless when given to Tian Ergeng?

Because Wei Zhongxian was sweeping him away as a Donglin man, plain and simple.

And that is exactly what happened. In his Donglin Comrades Register, Wei Zhongxian labeled Wu Yangchun a "money-bought military hanger-on and mountain hermit," and further called him the "Donglin Treasury."

③ The eunuch faction saved the nation? Saved my ass!

I don't understand why so many people reading late-Ming fiction identify with the emperor, with the eunuch faction.

Imagine this: you're sitting peacefully at home.

Suddenly someone local commits a crime, and a swarm of Embroidered Uniform Guard comes pouring in.

And many of these guards are outright thugs — the moment they hear of a field assignment, they rush to bribe their way onto the roster just to get out of the capital.

So what happens next?

I do believe the local merchants and gentry were behind the scenes, fanning the flames and stirring the pot.

But does that mean those Embroidered Uniform Guard didn't deserve to die?

It baffles me — in real life most of us have never held any high office (myself included) — so why this urge to identify with the eunuch faction and the secret police cliques?

The truth is, when a Ming scholar-official chose the ill-reputed eunuch faction,

even as he threw himself heart and soul into doing whatever the emperor wanted, he most certainly lined his own pockets on the side.

Using this kind of secret-police politics is like fighting with Frostmourne — you chip away at the enemy's health bar while draining your own at the same time.

And the fact is, better methods did exist.

What's more, Wei Zhongxian never collected commercial taxes — he actually abolished them in Shaanxi.

He wasn't the representative of any class; he simply looked after his own faction, crushed rival factions, and carried out the emperor's decrees with single-minded devotion.

Yet somehow he's been mythologized as the standard-bearer of tax collection.

During the years Wei Zhongxian held power, the the the Taicang treasury treasury treasury's annual revenue plunged from nine million taels all the way down to 3.6 million.

Only after Chongzhen ascended the throne did it recover to eight million.

And this is the eunuch faction saving the nation?!

④ Finally: in the entire Great Ming, not a single person was innocent.

Take Wu Yangchun in this story — he looks utterly innocent.

But in what way was he truly innocent? He dealt in bribery, concealed landholdings, and may even have persecuted his own lineage (this last is uncertain).

All one can say is, by the time the Ming dynasty reached this year of 1627,

the officials were dog shit, the merchants were dog shit, the Confucian scholars were dog shit, the petty clerks were dog shit, and the emperor and the imperial clan were the shit of all shits.

Even Sun Chuanting, when he was a County Magistrate, probably took his customary fees — because the histories never say he didn't, ha.

Generally, when someone refused such fees, the records would trumpet it loudly — for example, Shi Wancheng, the Prefect of Huizhou in this story.

Later, when he was reappointed in the Chongzhen era as Prefect of Changzhou, he did refuse them.

(The Chongzhen Emperor was actually a rather good man; from this angle, it's a pity.)

Most people were soaking in the same cesspit; none had the right to point fingers at the others.

By comparison, the first-phase Donglin actually possessed a touch of romantic idealism.

Zuo Guangdou and Yang Lian genuinely did accomplish certain things.

Of course…

By the second-phase Donglin, things started getting a bit ridiculous (I mean the Restoration Society crowd, the ones who gathered by the thousands).

But even within the second-phase Donglin, men like Gu Yanwu and Wang Fuzhi eventually emerged, didn't they?

In this book of mine, Sun Chuanting is also a landlord, Huang Liji also takes money, Xue Guoguan is no saint either, and Lu Xiangsheng is Huang Liji's protégé — all of this will be written in due course.

Zu Dashou is greed upon greed, and Cao Wenzhao is greed, greed, greed.

It's just that once the protagonist sounds the horn, the people closest to him have to put on an act for a while.

Within the radius of the protagonist's firepower, the moral baseline will at least sit a little higher than the Great Ming's.

I'm already planning to find a chapter to kill off an important character — I just haven't decided who yet…

If there's anyone you dislike, feel free to recommend them; I'll use them later as a "tiger" to strike down.

Just don't kill Gao Shiming — he's actually decent.

The protagonist is in this cesspit, and honestly, if he went on a slash-and-burn killing spree to force reform, the whole realm might well collapse first.

If he tried the path of a traditional emperor, a New Deal like Zhang Juzheng's, that would probably be just as impossible.

Not for lack of ability, but because time won't allow it — the protagonist has only about ten years.

If he can't get it done before the full-scale natural disasters arrive in 1637, he might as well head straight for the South China Sea and practice his swimming.

Who knows, he might even write a book called North America 1637, ha.

To put it plainly, the only way is to swap out interest groups bit by bit, constantly pulling in the majority to strike at the minority, and slowly, slowly cleanse the public climate.

This is precisely why I insist on building up the capital first.

The capital must be forged into a "Confucian Holy Land," so they can see with their own eyes that the realm can become like this.

Use an advanced, hygienic, civilized city to batter their preconceptions — strengthening the appeal for "good men" and the suppression of "bad men."

(Of course, this is only one method among many; a whole mess of other methods must be applied together to work.)

Let those who have visited the capital return to their hometowns the way one returns to India after visiting China!

Honestly, if the capital right under his nose cannot be governed, he can forget about governing the Great Ming.

Cultivate the self, regulate the family, order the state, bring peace to all under Heaven — so it truly is.

Ah, I'll stop here.

I have no idea where the recent traffic is coming from — a thousand bookmarks a day, and every so often a few people pop up to curse me.

I spend every day hunting down historical sources, reading paper after paper, only to be cursed out by people who've never read a single history book in their lives. It really drives me up the wall.

I am a man who detests stupidity above all else, and I truly had a bellyful of pent-up fire — everyone, forgive me.

This chapter is free and does not count toward this month's word count.