Chapter 229: The Seven Deadly Sins

By the Qinhuai River, inside the Great Merit Arch.

Huang Shu, the former Regional Inspector of Huguang, and Zhu Guobi, the former Commissioner-in-Chief of the grain transport, were following a handsome young man in jade-colored scholar's robes along a winding path through rockeries, with silent servants and maids hurrying everywhere. Huang Shu had no mind to look around; he had seen far too much of the imposing grandeur of ducal mansions like this.

It was merely gold and jade on the outside, rot and decay within.

Of course, the rot wrapped in gold and jade did not mean that the master of this ducal mansion had squandered his family fortune through extravagance.

Although this branch of Xu Da's descendants had spent lavishly for ten generations, the ducal family's wealth had not been exhausted; instead, each generation was richer than the last. By the time it passed to the present Duke of Wei, Xu Hongji, it could no longer be described as merely rivaling a kingdom. For how could the Chongzhen Emperor, the master of a single realm, dare compare his wealth with the Xu family of the Duke of Wei? To say the Duke of Wei's wealth was ten times that of the state would hardly be an exaggeration.

And the reason the Xu family of the Duke of Wei grew richer with each generation was simple: the Xu family, hereditary guardians of the southern capital, were in truth one of the real masters of the great gathering-place of wealth in the Ming southeast!

At the founding of the Ming, the greater part of the realm's wealth was already concentrated in the southeast, along the river and the coast. And after the coming of the Age of Discovery, the southeast riverine and coastal lands that produced silk and porcelain — the two foremost goods of international trade — gathered wealth on an even more colossal scale.

At the same time, the Ming abolished the kaizhong system, leaving the great profits of the salt monopoly, which had once benefited the northwest, in the two prefectures of Huai'an and Yangzhou.

The profits of maritime trade, the profits of salt, and the profits of the already fertile southeastern lands piled one upon another, turning the Ming southeast into a treasure-basin of gold everywhere.

If the Ming court could have drawn profit from this southeastern treasure-basin, the realm today might not be a golden age of peace, but it could at least have been barely sustained. Yet the Ming, like every feudal dynasty in history, after its peak saw central power slowly decline, and the area the imperial authority could effectively control grew smaller and smaller.

And this decline of authority showed not only in the loss of control over the northeastern and northwestern frontiers, but also in the massive loss of tax revenue from the southeastern coast.

Indeed, this so-called loss of tax revenue did not mean the farmers, merchants, and artisans of the southeast no longer had to pay up — the southeast was not truly without a master; it was quietly changing masters!

The ennobled houses of the auxiliary capital, headed by the Duke of Wei's mansion; the southeastern scholar-officials, with the Donglin Faction as their backbone; and the southeastern maritime merchant powers, represented by the Eighteen Zhi and the Sea Sand Gang — these were replacing the Ming dynasty as the new masters of the wealthy southeast.

This was why the Ming dynasty, even dying of poverty, could not extract sufficient wealth from the southeast!

And the Xu family of the Duke of Wei's mansion was not only the foremost of the auxiliary capital's ennobled houses, but also held the hereditary right to the post of Nanjing Garrison Commander, controlled the affairs of the Nanjing Chief Commissioner's office, and had been rooted in Nanjing for ten generations. In every generation, besides the main line inheriting the title, a host of hereditary military offices were split off. With the help of the main-line Duke of Wei, these branch families of hereditary military officers had little by little eaten away at the military colony lands of the southeastern guard stations. And the many guard-commander families in turn became the foundation of the Duke of Wei's power.

With power, profit naturally followed. The three great profits — military colony lands, maritime trade, and salt — flowed ceaselessly into the Duke of Wei's mansion, becoming silver hoarded in vaults, becoming one magnificent garden after another.

The Great Merit Arch by the Qinhuai River was merely one of the famous gardens the Xu family owned!

In the Record of Visits to the Gardens of Jinling, compiled by Wang Shizhen, a veteran minister of three reigns who died in the Wanli era, sixteen famous Jinling gardens were listed, and ten of them belonged to the Xu family of the Duke of Wei!

From this one can glimpse the Xu family's wealth. And the Xu family of the Duke of Wei was only one of more than a dozen ducal, marquisal, and countal houses in the auxiliary capital of Nanjing!

If the wealth of these dozen-odd families were gathered together, it would absolutely drive Zhu Cilang, entrenched in Yangzhou, mad with desire — mad enough to launch a great slaughter!

Huang Shu, who had now become a Donglin grandee, saw this very clearly. Apart from the southeastern maritime merchant powers, who commanded powerful armed forces at sea and could cooperate with Crown Prince Zhu, the auxiliary capital's ennobled houses and the Donglin scholar-officials, if they wished to remain masters of the southeast, had no choice but to bring down the Army-Pacifying Crown Prince Zhu Cilang.

And if Zhu Cilang wanted to seize the wealth of the southeast for his own use, he likewise had to crush the auxiliary capital's ennobled houses and the Donglin scholar-officials.

Yet the Xu family, foremost of the auxiliary capital's ennobled houses, glorious beyond measure on the surface, had within it not a single son who could truly lead troops into battle — that was the real rot!

After walking for who knew how long inside the Xu family's Great Merit Arch, until even Huang Shu's legs began to ache, they arrived before a somewhat plain and old-fashioned hall.

From inside the hall suddenly came violent coughing. The young man leading Huang Shu and Zhu Guobi frowned, then called loudly from outside the door: "My lord, are you all right? Your son has brought the Marquis of Funing and Censor Huang."

The coughing inside the hall was hard put to stop. Then the door was opened, and inside sat two elderly men and a middle-aged man of imposing bearing. One of the old men had a face full of illness; two maidservants were pounding his back and rubbing his chest. This must be the Duke of Wei, Xu Hongji, sick beyond cure. The middle-aged man was Zhao Zhilong, the head of the Nanjing Capital Camps and one of the ennobled men most trusted by the Chongzhen Emperor.

The other old man, though also advanced in years, was full of vigor and robust in body, with the look of an old Lian Po. He sat there, his face full of anxiety, one hand furiously fanning himself with a folding fan. Seeing Zhu Guobi and Huang Shu enter, he bawled in his loud voice: "Marquis of Funing, you and Shi Kefa have brought ruin upon our Xu family of the Duke of Wei's mansion!"

This man was none other than Xu Yongji, cousin of the Duke of Wei Xu Hongji, who had just fled from Yangzhou to Nanjing.

The middle-aged man of imposing bearing cleared his throat: "What is the point of saying such things now? Didn't Chang Yan'en say it? What the Crown Prince wants is the land your family has passed down from generation to generation! Are you willing to give it?"

"I—" Xu Yongji stamped his foot. "What land do I have left now? It's all fucking lost in Yangzhou Prefecture!"

"Seventh Brother!" Xu Hongji coughed a few times and shook his head. "What they want is the property of all the families of the Duke of Wei's mansion!"

"Why stop at the Duke of Wei's mansion?" Huang Shu said. "All the auxiliary capital's ennobled houses, and the families of the commanders, vice commanders, assistant commanders, and chiliarchs of nearly a hundred guard stations in the southeast — all will suffer! Southeastern scholar-officials like Huang here cannot escape either; it is only a matter of suffering sooner or later. This Crown Prince has come south with tens of thousands of starving wolves. If they do not devour us, can they have any good days themselves?"

"Hmph!" Xu Yongji snorted. "A mighty dragon does not oppress the local snakes! They are nothing but stray dogs fleeing in defeat — and they dare seize our family property! Elder Brother, why not rebel?"

"Rebel?" Xu Hongji glared at his cousin. "Do you want to be emperor?"

"I — how could I possibly?" Xu Yongji clapped his hands. "But we can't just hand over the property our ancestors passed down, can we? The Crown Prince has already taken the Yangzhou Guard, and he has confiscated the households of four salt chiefs who worked for our family!"

Huang Shu interjected: "The four Huizhou salt chiefs have also been taken by him. They were not arrested, but they were forced to contract for the entire Lianghuai salt administration, at six million taels of silver a year!"

"What? Six million taels a year — ahem, ahem..." Old Xu Hongji was so angry he fell into fit after fit of coughing. The two serving maids moved again to pound his back and rub his chest, but he shoved them away. "Truly insatiable! Insatiable!"

"Right! The Crown Prince's faction's first great crime is greed!" Huang Shu said sternly. "He was greedy by nature even in Beijing. When Beijing was about to fall, he thought not of serving the realm, but only of greed, and in the end fled with several million taels of the people's blood and fat! After fleeing to Shandong, he seized the property of many commoners in the two prefectures of Dengzhou and Laizhou! Now that he has reached Yangzhou, he has gone even further — he is simply the most avaricious lord in all history!"

"Not only greedy," Zhu Guobi said. "He is also unfilial! He staged a mutiny at the Gate of Imperial Supremacy, imprisoned his father, and seized power — the height of unfiliality!"

"And debauched!" Zhao Zhilong added. "Inside the besieged city, he thought not of serving the realm, but gave himself wholly to debauchery, and even seized Wu Xiang's daughter as a concubine — utterly debauched!"

"And bloodthirsty and tyrannical!" Huang Shu said through gritted teeth. "He once launched a great slaughter outside the Meridian Gate, executing several hundred officials and commoners who opposed him in a single stroke, and he personally killed his lecturer Xiang Yu! Now among the officials of the traveling court, there is no one who does not fear him, no one who does not dread him; everyone flatters him to save their own skins! If this goes on, the Ming will surely perish!"

"But the Crown Prince's greatest fault is not greed, debauchery, unfiliality, bloodlust, cunning, or tyranny — it is heresy!"

(End of Chapter)