Chapter 255: Handing Out Rewards!

Outside Sanshan Gate in the inner city of Nanjing, along both banks of the Qinhuai River, shops stood in dense rows, their cloth banners fluttering in the wind.

This area fell under the jurisdiction of Shangyuan County, one of the eight counties governed by Yingtian Prefecture. Because the Qinhuai River flowed into the Yangtze right here, this had become the most bustling district in all of Nanjing. And unlike the equally prosperous Qinhuai riverbanks inside Nanjing's inner city, the bustle here belonged more to the merchants of the marketplace and to the southeastern scholars sojourning in Nanjing.

By the Qinhuai River near the Yangtze stood a teahouse. Though small in size, it was exquisitely refined.

The teahouse backed onto the Qinhuai River, so patrons could sip tea while enjoying the river's beautiful scenery.

Not far from the teahouse were a dozen or so inns clustered together in a row. Many merchants and scholars newly arrived in Jinling would first put up at these inns before slowly seeking out permanent lodgings.

Ji Kun, a Left-Ban Supervising Censor who had come to Nanjing with the Chongzhen Emperor and Zhu Cilang's "southern inspection procession," had brought his family along, and his official rank was low, so he had not been assigned quarters. Instead he had received a few taels of silver for lodging and found his own place to stay. As a Yangzhou scholar, he was quite familiar with Nanjing, so he strolled over to the Qinhuai riverbank in Shangyuan County and rented a fine room at an inn. That very evening he went out to this rather elegant teahouse to meet friends.

The friends meeting Ji Kun tonight had all been brought together by Huang Zongxi; they were all Jiangnan scholars sojourning in Jinling, and Zhang Huangyan and Luo Dagong were prominently among them. It turned out that Huang Zongxi and Ji Kun were old acquaintances. A few days earlier, when the Crown Prince's army had entered the city, Ji Kun had been with them and had happened to run into Huang Zongxi, who was watching the excitement in the street. Hence tonight's tea gathering.

In addition, Huang Zongxi's friend Luo Dagong had also invited a somewhat renowned singing girl of the Qinhuai River, Li Yulin, known as the Suzhou Talented Lady, to play the pipa.

Amid the melodious, lilting strains of the pipa, several loose-tongued romantic scholars began to hold forth freely. Speech controls in the late Ming were practically nonexistent; scholars had long been accustomed to freedom, spoke very casually, and no one paid them any mind.

"Brother Taichong? Why do you keep frowning? Are you caught up in this eunuch-faction trouble?" Ji Kun asked half-jokingly, looking at Huang Zongxi's tightly knit brow.

Huang Zongxi shot him a glare. "Does Brother Chunfan truly think this upheaval in Nanjing has anything to do with the eunuch faction?"

"Well..." Ji Kun gave an awkward smile and shook his head. "The victor becomes king, the loser a bandit! Still, by pinning the eunuch-faction label on Xu Hongji and the rest, the Crown Prince has at least signaled an attitude of closeness to the Donglin."

"He means to use the Donglin, doesn't he?" Huang Zongxi's expression was grave. "And he uses them very cleverly. Qian Muzhai and Hou Ruogu have both entered the Grand Secretariat, Shi Daolin has been given the post of Governor-General over seven provinces, and Gao Jingzhai has been packed off to Shandong as Governor. The leading figures of the Donglin line have now either been co-opted into the Grand Secretariat or dispatched to the frontier, and all under the banner of defending the Confucian orthodoxy and safeguarding Confucius!"

"Now he has also branded the meritorious nobles and meritorious officials who rallied to the throne in Nanjing as the eunuch faction, and he poses as a Donglin Crown Prince. It seems he intends to launch a great purge in Jiangnan in the name of exterminating the eunuch faction."

Ji Kun's face darkened too. He had in fact already seen through Zhu Cilang's cunning — was he himself not appointed Left-Ban Supervising Censor and made to take part in the anti-corruption drive in the Huai-Yang guard stations, where, against his conscience, he had joined Zhang Shize and others in seizing the lands of many military-register scholar-officials?

Of course, the policies Zhu Cilang adopted in the two prefectures of Huai'an and Yangzhou were not broad in their reach; they were limited to the guard stations and the salt merchants. Toward scholar-officials who had not encroached on military fields or dipped into salt profits, he still pursued a policy of co-optation. He turned a blind eye to their profiting through fraudulent land registration and sheltering merchants from taxation — fraudulent registration and sheltering merchants from taxation were the two great means by which Ming scholar-officials profited, both operating on the principle of expanding the scholar-officials' tax and corvée exemptions.

Fraudulent registration profited by helping large landholding tax households evade levies and corvée. Sheltering merchants from taxation exploited the Ming customs houses' "three exemptions" principle, allowing traveling merchants to operate under one's own name in exchange for a share of the profits.

Through these two channels, the Ming's land tax and commercial tax revenues drained away in vast quantities, and the late Ming's fiscal difficulties arose from precisely this.

And for the numerous middle- and lower-ranking scholar-officials who controlled the grassroots of the southeast, salt profits were beyond their reach, and military fields were not theirs to swallow either. In fact, by the time the Ming scholar-officials had grown powerful enough to overshadow the meritorious nobles, the military colonies of the southeast had long since been devoured clean by the meritorious nobles, meritorious officials, and military-register scholar-officials — there was simply nothing left for civilian-register scholar-officials to sink their teeth into.

So by touching only salt profits and military colony lands, Zhu Cilang had not infringed upon the fundamental interests of the broad mass of civilian-register scholar-officials. Still, it left them feeling a bit displeased!

Therefore, before the "eunuch-faction upheaval" in Nanjing, most of the scholars and students within the city had actually been, in spirit, supportive of "rallying to the throne."

"Brother Taichong!" Luo Dagong, the Songjiang scholar, interrupted Huang Zongxi. The plump juren laughed and said, "What's the point of talking about all this now? The meritorious nobles and meritorious officials in Nanjing are already finished, and rallying to the throne has become the eunuch-faction upheaval. We civilian-register juren were never involved in any of it, so why keep stirring things up? The top priority is to seize the time to study more and prepare for the special examination!"

"Dagong, all you ever think about is office!" Huang Zongxi shook his head at Luo Dagong's eager expression.

"We scholars, of course, must serve the court." Luo Dagong beamed. "Brother Cangshui, what do you say?"

Cangshui was Zhang Huangyan's courtesy name. Zhang Huangyan nodded lightly and said, "Now that the southeast faces a great enemy, we ought indeed to contribute our strength."

He turned his gaze to Ji Kun. "Brother Chunfan, now that you hold office, will you still sit for the special examination?"

"I'm not allowed to!" Ji Kun sighed. "The moment one enters the Censorate, one's whole life is ruined!"

"What do you mean by that?" Zhang Huangyan was taken aback.

Ji Kun said, "This is the Thousand Years' rule: any official who enters the Censorate, apart from the Left and Right Chief Censors, may never again hold office outside the Censorate, whether of the Left Ban or the Right Ban. Moreover, except for the Left Chief Censor, Censorate officials are never to be jinshi; their examination honors stop at juren. Censorate officials are also forbidden from sitting for the civil service examinations again."

Zhang Huangyan was again startled. "But the Censorate's remit is extremely broad. How can it be handled by juren alone?"

Ji Kun shook his head. "The censors won't handle so much anymore. They only investigate official corruption — the Left Ban investigates civil officials, the Right Ban investigates military officials!"

Huang Zongxi drew a sharp breath. "This is turning the Censorate into the whip of officialdom! There is something very wrong with this Crown Prince!"

"Indeed there is!" Ji Kun lowered his voice, his face grave. "He may very well be possessed by the spirit of the Great Ancestor, the Exalted Emperor."

"Nonsense!" Huang Zongxi shook his head. "Ji Chunfan, how can you believe that too?"

Ji Kun said, "I didn't believe it at first either. But in the Censorate, the young Right-Ban censors from Beijing meritorious noble and meritorious official families all say that on the night of the thirteenth day of the third month, the Crown Prince was not himself — he raved nonsense in his dreams, then slept long into the day on the fourteenth, still raving, saying things like 'the Great Ancestor, my grandfather, said thus and so,' and after that he seemed a changed man."

At those words, the pipa music, which had been lilting and melodious all along, suddenly went out of tune, and then stopped abruptly.

Luo Dagong turned to look at the flower-like beauty Li Yulin and said with a smile, "Forgotten the score? Would you like me to teach you?"

Li Yulin was quite familiar with Luo Dagong. She shot him an annoyed glare. "Thank you, Brother Dagong, but I have not forgotten the tune. I merely recalled a story I heard on the Qinhuai River in the fourth month, about the strange event at the Filial Mausoleum. They say that on the night of the thirteenth day of the third month, a long howl came from the sky above the Filial Mausoleum for no reason, like someone weeping in the heavens, and it did not stop for about a quarter of an hour."

"There was such a thing?" Ji Kun was startled, and looked at Zhang Huangyan, Huang Zongxi, and Luo Dagong.

Zhang Huangyan and Huang Zongxi both looked at Luo Dagong. It turned out that those two had only entered Nanjing after news of Beijing's fall arrived. Luo Dagong, the Songjiang scholar, however, had long resided in Jinling and was a regular on the Qinhuai River.

"There does seem to have been such a thing!" Luo Dagong thought carefully. "Right, right, right — I heard it from members of the Mei and Xiao families! Could the Crown Prince truly be the Great Ancestor, the Exalted Emperor, reborn?"

Zhang Huangyan shook his head. "Isn't that all a bit too fantastical?"

Luo Dagong said, "Better to believe it than not, better to believe it than not. If it is true, then it would be a good thing!"

"Good how?" Huang Zongxi snorted. "What kind of ruler was the Great Ancestor, the Exalted Emperor? Does Brother Dagong not know?" He sighed. "If it is true, then disaster for the Jiangnan scholarly world is not far off!"