Chapter 287: The Great Ming's Grave-Digger — Liu Mao Activates Trap Card

What else could he do? He could only silently shoulder it all.

Never mind the gap in rank between the two principals, or the gap between their departments.

The other side had come at him with righteous certainty, wielding his own fundamental strategy, while for Hong Chengchou this was merely a "solvable" nuisance.

Naturally, he had no room to push back.

He could only think of some way to suppress the potential unrest among the foreign tribes.

Hong Chengchou turned it over in his mind for a moment and soon hit upon an idea, though he would still need to discuss it with the relevant departments.

In truth, for those vassal states, even setting aside the frontier trade markets, the tribute entry alone offered plenty of grease to be skimmed.

For one, the Great Ming's return gifts were exceedingly generous.

Although successive reigns had been cutting them back, for those tribes in remote backwaters it was still a windfall.

For instance, the monks of Ü-Tsang came to offer tribute once every three years, and each time they received close to two thousand taels of silver alone, plus thirty-six thousand jin of tea.

As the strategic report on the Four Barbarians put it — ten thousand kingdoms coming to court?

Court my ass. Ninety-nine percent of those vassal states came purely for profit.

And the Great Ming did not necessarily believe they were truly loyal either; in the end, it was just spending money to buy peace.

But from now on, those rules were going to change.

In the imperial council, the "civilizing" standards debated on the basis of the "people-versus-land" question were far less warm and tender.

Secondly, there was the profit those tribes made by bringing local goods into the capital to sell.

The Interpreters' Institute had a Foreign Market set up where the barbarian tribes brought their goods and traded them.

The scale of the trading was hardly small.

Among them, Turpan, Hami, and Samarkand to the west were the most zealous.

In the past, there had even been cases of them lingering at the Interpreters' Institute for three years, feasting on the Great Ming's banquets and wine while busily plying their trade.

So Li Shiqi's worry about "merchants deceitfully consigning goods" was not a groundless concern.

Hong Chengchou truly could not refute it.

After all, these Muslim tribute envoys came frequently to offer tribute and made great profit from their local trade; they indeed had certain connections within the capital's commercial circles.

The moment his thoughts reached this point, Hong Chengchou could not help feeling a headache coming on.

These barbarian vassal states — apart from Joseon and Ryukyu, who could be counted as civilized, which of the rest had any regard for ritual or face?

The moment their profits were harmed, they were sure to kick up a row.

Never mind a great interest like the local-goods market trade — they could not even bear the loss of a small interest.

For example, the monks of Ü-Tsang, upon arriving in the capital at the start of this month, had already kicked up a fuss over the specifications of the banquet granted them.

These people had devoured the feast down to the last scrap before they began making trouble and raising a din.

They said that in the past the banquet given them had clearly been thirteen tables of the upper grade — how had it become nine tables this time?

A check of the collected statutes revealed that when the handover was done at the Ministry of Rites, the paperwork had not been carefully provided.

It left Hong Chengchou terribly embarrassed; he could only apply all kinds of pressure and make compromises, for fear that if this matter were reported upward, he would leave an impression of incompetence before His Majesty. And now if taxes were to be levied again…

"Ah—" Hong Chengchou could not suppress a long, mournful sigh.

Hampered by factors such as insufficient manpower, a newly created department, and the baggage of the past,

beneath the grand strategy of the Court of Colonial Affairs, the reality was in fact all these messy, rotten problems.

Nor could he simply muddle along the way the old Ministry of Rites had, drifting through the day like a monk striking the bell.

He had no choice but to confront and resolve these problems, and that was what had produced all these unprovoked vexations.

Hong Chengchou rubbed his throbbing temples and was brooding alone.

Just then, a knock came at the door.

"Tap, tap, tap."

Hong Chengchou's brow furrowed, and before he could speak, the door was pushed open a crack.

A young, spirited face, tinged with a hint of apology, poked in.

It was none other than Zhang Zhiji, the heir of the Duke of Ying, who had just been transferred from the Secretariat to serve as the capital's Patrol Censor.

Zhang Zhiji first swept a glance around the room; seeing only Hong Chengchou there, he smiled and pointed at the meeting-management form posted on the door: "Assistant Director Hong, I apologize for the disturbance, but…"

"I previously reserved this meeting room from the start of the second double-hour of the afternoon all the way to the end of the ninth double-hour, to interview several candidates for Guard Commander of the Five Districts Troops and Horses Office. So you see…"

His tone was courteous, his manner unassuming, utterly free of the arrogance of a noble scion.

The bellyful of fire and melancholy inside Hong Chengchou, the moment he saw Zhang Zhiji, vanished without a trace like smoke scattered by the wind.

After four months of settling in, the Secretariat had begun gradually releasing personnel to do practical work.

The first had been Ni Yuanlu and Qi Xinxiao.

After them, Yuan Jixian counted as half; the salary-audit team he led was a non-permanent assignment. Once he left the capital, no one knew how he would be placed upon his return, but presumably his prospects would not be too poor.

And Zhang Zhiji and Luo Yangxing were the two most recent.

One had taken over the Five Districts Troops and Horses Office, the other the Patrol Battalion — both were departments of exceedingly low status in the past.

Yet no one felt they had fallen from favor; on the contrary, everyone felt this was paving the way in advance for them, since they had not entered office via the jinshi route.

After all… the very first source of today's thunderous New Policies had come precisely from these "Five Masters of Statecraft."

His Majesty was having them start from the two most wretched places in the capital, where the achievements they could make would naturally be the greatest — in the eyes of the New Policy officials, these were precisely "plum posts."

The Assistant Director Hong of the Court of Colonial Affairs who had been pounding the table and cursing a moment before now, in a single instant, plastered his face with a smile as warm as a spring breeze.

The speed of that face-change was simply breathtaking.

"Ha ha, so the next meeting is Censor Zhang's."

"Look at my memory — once I get busy, I lose track of the hour."

As he spoke, Hong Chengchou briskly gathered up the documents on the desk, without the slightest displeasure.

"Come in, come in! I just finished up here and was about to leave — perfect timing!"

As he spoke, he gathered up his documents, stepped aside to clear the doorway, nodded to Zhang Zhiji, and strode briskly out of the meeting room.

The moment he stepped through the door, the smile on Hong Chengchou's face collapsed.

This was the Thousand-Pace Corridor.

This was the New Policies.

Outside His Majesty's presence, where was all that exquisite solidarity? Where was the mutual forbearance for the sake of the state?

With a broad road to heaven stretching before them and the great work of saving the realm in sight, who — whether for fame or profit — would not want to fight for a piece of it?

Factional strife? Factional strife was already a thing of the past.

The new problem emerging under the New Policies was factional strife born of policy disputes!

Every New Policies official was like a rabid dog, guarding their performance targets with all their might. Gone were the old scenes of mutual forbearance for the state and all-around harmony. Hong Chengchou shook his head and simply rose to his feet.

Forget it. Things having come to this, he might as well go eat—

No. He might as well go to the next meeting.

Hong Chengchou walked briskly, crossing directly over the Imperial Way and heading straight to Meeting Room East 092, diagonally opposite.

He pushed open the door and saw an official with graying hair, dressed in a blue robe, already waiting there.

It was none other than the Supervising Secretary of the Office of Scrutiny for War, Liu Mao.

The man was a native of Lintong in Shaanxi. After passing the metropolitan examination, he had served as County Magistrate in three different postings.

By the time he was evaluated and selected as Supervising Secretary of the Office of Scrutiny for Rites, he was already fifty-five.

After just over a year in that post, he had offended the eunuch Wei and been dismissed and stripped of his official status.

Now, after being restored to office, he was fifty-seven, nearing sixty.

At first, he had gone with the tide and submitted a few memorials impeaching the eunuch faction, but gradually fell silent.

Then, after a period of quiet, he unexpectedly submitted a memorial titled "A Proposal to Reform the Abuses of the Postal Relay System." Solidly grounded in data, thoroughly reasoned, and deeply moving, it won a five-circle evaluation in one stroke.

But then a strange thing happened.

His Majesty the Yongchang Emperor seemed to take little interest in the matter. He neither brought Liu Mao into the Secretariat — perhaps on account of his advanced age — nor issued any order to launch a project for postal relay reform.

Liu Mao was baffled for a while. Thinking his reasoning had been insufficient, he submitted memorial after memorial: "A Method for Reforming the Postal Relay System Beginning in Northern Zhili, According to the Way of Self-Cultivation, Family Regulation, State Governance, and World Pacification"; "A Supplement to the Postal Relay Reform — Taking the Abuses at Liangxiang Post Station as an Example"; "A Supplement to the Supplement on Postal Relay Reform — Taking the Abuses at the Twenty-Three Postal and Relay Stations of Northern Zhili as Examples"... and more documents of the sort.

By this point, even the officials in the capital could not make sense of it.

The postal relay matter offered little merit, was not urgent, yet carried high risk.

The man was nearly sixty. Why not ride the wave of the New Policies to do something else? Why insist on plunging headlong into this quagmire?

As everyone asked around, even Hong Chengchou learned the reason.

It turned out that Liu Mao's father had been a post-station groom, and had suffered a lifetime of torment under the relay system.

People guessed that Liu Mao, seeing he had few years left to live and with the New Policies stirring such waves, had simply decided to make the postal relay matter the final undertaking of his life.

In this way, he could both requite his father's spirit in heaven and ease the burdens of the common people — truly a deed that served both ends.

But admiration was one thing; not a single person wanted to touch this matter.

After all, the postal relay issue implicated local authorities and had far-reaching repercussions, yet offered scant merit. It was decidedly not a "plum assignment" by the standards of the New Policies. At the local level, postal relay silver was a major item in fiscal taxation, into which countless petty clerks dipped their hands. (Note: for example, Leting's figure was 4,367 taels, roughly 20% of local revenue.) At the relay stations themselves, there were officials such as Water-and-Horse Station Masters and Relay Station Commissioners, with all manner of customary exactions and corvée labor pressed from the people.

At the county, department, and prefectural levels, the chief officials of every yamen pocketed the groom allowance that accompanied their salaries, yet also commandeered the relay stations' horses for their own use. In the villages, the process of conscripting relay station corvée laborers was exploited by cunning and slippery characters who colluded from top to bottom, coercing the village tithing units and profiting from it all.

As for usage, whenever the various circuit and provincial surveillance offices made their routine inspection tours or assumed new posts, their retinues numbered in the dozens or even hundreds at a time — how could they be restrained? Not to mention... among all the officials under heaven, apart from their own travel, whenever their relatives or servants traveled, which of them did not affix an official seal and privately misappropriate the service? A postal relay reform, done well, would benefit only the several hundred thousand common people, yet offend everyone from top to bottom...

Who would be willing, and who would dare, to do it?

Hong Chengchou looked at Liu Mao's head of white hair and inwardly shook his head.

Why must you be in such a hurry over this?

Self-cultivation, family regulation, state governance, and world pacification — that does not simply mean proceeding from the capital to all under heaven.

The relative urgency of affairs is also something that self-cultivation, family regulation, state governance, and world pacification must take into account.

Liu Mao perhaps knew, or perhaps did not know, what the capital officials thought of him.

But he did not care.

He simply heaped a smile at once onto his aged, wrinkled face.

"Assistant Director Hong, please, have a seat first."

With that, he even personally adjusted the chair for him.

Hong Chengchou felt somewhat uncomfortable, but it was impossible that he would, for such a small courtesy, rashly drag the Court of Colonial Affairs into this wretched business.

He deliberately stiffened his expression and spoke flatly.

"Mm. The previous meeting ran a little long, so I am somewhat late."

Liu Mao waved his hands repeatedly, without the slightest trace of temper:

"No matter, no matter. This humble official also just arrived a moment ago. Perfect timing, perfect timing."

The pleasantries concluded, Liu Mao could wait no longer. He drew a document from his sleeve and presented it with both hands:

"Might I ask whether Assistant Director Hong has already read this humble official's document on reorganizing the postal relay system?"

Hong Chengchou glanced at the document.

In truth, he had read it long ago. But since it involved matters touching the Court of Colonial Affairs, he had not yet devised a pretext for refusal and could only stall for now.

So he assumed an air of importance and said vaguely:

"I have skimmed it briefly, but have not yet examined it in detail."

"For postal relay reorganization, one either goes to the Ministry of War's Bureau of Equipage, which is the responsible authority, or to the Administrative Reform Group or the Northern Zhili New Policies Group, to approach it from the angle of officials or localities. Why come to my Court of Colonial Affairs?"

Hearing this, Liu Mao, far from growing angry, seemed even more invigorated.

"No matter, no matter. Then this humble official shall explain it to you in detail."

"The day before yesterday, this humble official received His Majesty's decree, transferring from the Office of Scrutiny for Rites to the Office of Scrutiny for War, and was ordered to prepare for the postal relay reform."

"On the matter of the Ministry of War and the Secretariat groups that Vice Director Hong just mentioned, I've actually already sounded them all out. The only one left now is the Court of Colonial Affairs."

He first borrowed a bit of authority before laying out his proposal:

"The abuses of the postal relay system involve officials, village headmen, clerks, and local powers, but those have little bearing on the Court of Colonial Affairs, so I won't dwell on them. The matter of tributary missions, however, is far more pronounced in the Northern Metropolitan Region than in other provinces, and that is precisely what I wish to discuss with Vice Director Hong."

Liu Mao paused, then spoke:

"The capital is the center of all under Heaven, the place where ten thousand nations come to pay court. The relay stations in the surrounding region have, in truth, long suffered bitterly from these tributary missions!"

"The western barbarians wreak havoc on Baoding and Liangxiang; the Mongols coming down from the north wreak havoc on Xuanfu, Yongping, and the Ji Garrison; as for the tribal chieftains and vassal states from the southwest, whether they come through Daming Prefecture or Hejian Prefecture, the entire route to the capital suffers their depredations!"

Liu Mao sighed and continued:

"Whenever a tributary mission arrives, they come shouting and swaggering in droves, never fewer than several hundred strong. On top of that, their private goods and tribute items pile up like mountains, their carts and baggage trains stretching on without end. Along the entire route, any relay runner or corvée laborer who shows the slightest negligence is met with whips and abuse. The relay horses are driven at will until they drop dead in numbers beyond counting. As for extorting food and drink or forcibly commandeering civilian labor, those are everyday fare."

"A single tributary mission passing through costs no less than a thousand taels of silver! Every place it touches, the relay stations are left gutted, and the common people are driven to ruin!"

"Worse still, unable to bear such harassment, the relay runners and corvée households can only abandon their homes and livelihoods and flee with their entire families!"

"For these reasons, your subordinate has come today to pay a special visit to Vice Director Hong, precisely to discuss this matter in earnest. Might the Court of Colonial Affairs be able to produce a set of regulations to impose some restraint?" Listening to this account, Hong Chengchou nearly nodded in agreement.

He had served in the provinces and was no armchair purist; he knew perfectly well that what Liu Mao described was the truth.

But it was the same problem as the commercial tax…

He, Hong Chengchou, was certainly willing to reform it — just not at this moment…

Hong Chengchou weighed the balance of power between them for a moment, then decided not to beat around the bush and simply laid his bottom line on the table:

"What Supervising Secretary Liu says is no falsehood. The tribute of the barbarians does indeed exhaust the postal relays of the metropolitan region."

"It's just that…"