Chapter 269: We Must Hurry Up and Start Cheating!

"Guguan Pass in the Taihang Mountains"

Holding a candle, Zhu Cilang studied the newly hung map in the study on the second floor of Yongchun Pavilion. It was a strategic map of Shanxi plus Northern Zhili. Two enormous arrows, extending from Beijing and Taiyuan, were about to collide at the strategic Guguan Pass in the middle of the Taihang Mountains.

Wu Sanmei, already several months pregnant, also held a candle and stood smiling behind Zhu Cilang, as if trying to give him a little more light.

The second floor of Yongchun Pavilion was one of Zhu Cilang's bedrooms within the Dagong Quarter. If official business kept him busy and he went to bed late, he would not go to the inner courtyard, but instead summon the Palace Attendant Wu Sanmei to attend him for the night. That was right—Zhu Cilang now slept only with Wu Sanmei. The other two Palace Attendants, Ning Xiangyu and Fei Zhen'e, remained so far in name only.

The reason for this was, first, that Zhu Cilang genuinely liked this sweet, naive girl; and second, it was a political necessity—his eldest son had best be born of Wu Sanmei!

After a long while, Zhu Cilang set down the candle in his hand and clapped his hands, saying, "Li Zicheng's position looks quite good! Though not enough to defeat the Tartars, holding Guguan and fighting a protracted war should be no problem. It is already winter now, which should be rather unsuitable for attacking cities, so it seems Li Zicheng can hold out until next spring."

"Thousand Years, from what you say, Li Zicheng will still be defeated?" Wu Sanmei was born into a military family and had seen and heard such matters since childhood, so she naturally had some understanding of military affairs. In her view, Li Zicheng held strategic terrain and had superior numbers, so he ought to be invincible no matter what.

Zhu Cilang smiled faintly, and a trace of helpless, bitter laughter appeared on his young face: Sanmei, oh Sanmei, you do not know that the Tartars are cheating right now!

Li Zicheng's position looks steady on the surface, but when he runs into the cheating Tartars, he will still suffer a crushing defeat.

Once he fails, it will be the Great Ming's turn—so the Great Ming must also hurry up and start cheating!

"Perhaps there is still a year," Zhu Cilang exhaled. "That should be enough to accomplish quite a lot."

After entering Nanjing, the Ming court under Zhu Cilang's leadership was brewing a new round of reforms. The purpose of this reform was to improve the administrative efficiency of the Ming court and strengthen the power of the six Ministers and the Grand Secretaries. Zhu Cilang was preparing to formally abolish the Supervising Secretaries of the Six Offices and turn the six ministries into a system of ministerial responsibility.

Through this reform, the responsibilities of the six ministries would also become clearer.

The Ministry of Personnel would oversee civil official personnel matters—not only promotions, demotions, evaluations, appointments, and dismissals. Anything related to civil official personnel was the business of the Ministry of Personnel. The personnel of all civil clerks serving in the various ministries and courts of the government would also be placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Personnel.

Of course, the Ministry of Personnel managing personnel did not mean it held full authority over appointments and dismissals; rather, it mainly acted according to Zhu Cilang's edicts or the official documents of the various chief officials.

The Ministry of Rites would become a department specifically in charge of education and moral cultivation. It would have authority over the official schools at all levels and the civil service examinations. In addition, the Buddhist Registry and the Daoist Registry were also placed under the Ministry of Rites, and along with them, the affairs of minority religions such as Christianity and Islam were also placed under the Ministry of Rites' jurisdiction.

Besides these, Zhu Cilang also ordered the Ministry of Rites to establish the "Tongwen Institute" and the "Shuwen Institute." The former was a translation agency, primarily responsible for training interpreters and translating the books and institutions of various countries.

The latter was an office in charge of publishing—book publishing management in the late Ming was far too lax, with almost no one in charge, amounting to complete freedom of speech!

It was not that Zhu Cilang opposed freedom of speech, but that the country was currently at war. How could there be so much freedom in wartime? What needed strict control had to be strictly controlled! What needed to be won over, of course, also had to be won over.

The Ministry of War was still an idle office for now, with many of its powers usurped by the Grand Marshal's Office. But Zhu Cilang was also brewing a major reform, preparing to turn the Ministry of War into an office in charge of military administration and to transfer the Military Administration Division of the Grand Marshal's Office into the Ministry of War.

The reform of the Ministry of Revenue was still in the works. The reform would mainly involve three aspects. First, the management of the Ministry of Revenue's warehouses—the most important being the treasury silver (including standard copper cash), which would be turned over to the Salt Merchants' Bank and the Sea Merchants' Bank! The Ministry of Revenue would only manage the accounts and revenues and expenditures, and would no longer directly manage cash.

Second, currency issuance—in the early Ming, "precious notes," that is, paper money, had been issued, but without success. Later, standard copper cash and small cash were issued, but these were likewise poorly managed. So now the Ming's currency was in chaos, with silver, standard cash, and small cash all mixed in use. When going out to buy and sell, one had to carry scissors for cutting silver, small scales for weighing, and tools for melting silver! A regular alchemist's kit.

And Zhu Cilang, this "financial expert," naturally could not tolerate such currency chaos and had to sort it out thoroughly—issuing coins convenient for circulation!

In addition, the Ming's gold-silver exchange rate was out of step with the international market—this was because in the Ming, gold's monetary function was insufficient. Therefore, there was also a need to mint gold coins for large payments in order to raise the price of gold.

Third, the Ministry of Revenue's taxation also had to be greatly improved, especially the privilege of the scholar-officials' exemption from commercial taxes (customs duties), which had to be abolished—this was the deep-water zone of reform! But it could not be left untouched, otherwise the court under Crown Prince Zhu's leadership would run deficits and sooner or later follow in the footsteps of his father, the Chongzhen Emperor.

And while tax reform was underway, reform of spending was also in progress—in Zhu Cilang's view, the Ming was not only inefficient at collecting money, but equally inefficient at spending it!

The first step in improving spending efficiency was to drastically reduce the expenditure on imperial clan stipends, while increasing the actual salaries of officials at all levels, and abolishing "commuted payments" and in-kind salaries, switching entirely to silver payments. At the same time, the establishment of office fields would be studied—that is, a portion of the land recovered from clearing military colonies and surveying fields would be set aside as office fields and distributed to civil and military officials, so that they could obtain a substantial rental income.

Although raising salaries might not necessarily stop corruption, the previous practice of adding various commutations on top of already low salary levels had a strong flavor of a black-hearted boss docking wages. For officials whose hometowns were in the southeast and who could profit through fraudulent land registration and tax-exemption privileges, it did not matter, but for the "bureaucratic proletariat" who had followed Zhu Cilang south, it would not do.

Crown Prince Zhu would never let his own people suffer losses!

As for reducing the expenditure on imperial clan stipends, to some extent this was thanks to Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong. The lands where the vast majority of the Ming's imperial clan princedoms were located had now been overrun by these two. The imperial clan members had either died or lost contact. The number of imperial clan members who had fortunately fled to Nanjing was not large to begin with, and the death and disappearance rate among Princes and Commandery Princes was even higher! Even if they made it to Nanjing, they were princes who had "lost their princedom," which according to ancestral institutions was itself a crime.

Zhu Cilang could grant them a princely residence in Nanjing, give them a demoted princely title, and provide a discounted stipend, and they would already be endlessly grateful.

While reducing imperial clan stipend expenditures, Zhu Cilang also decided to terminate the "clan confinement" and "perpetual imperial clan" systems, two institutions that placed an enormous burden on the Ming's finances.

As an important spending department, the reform of the Ministry of Works was equally urgent. The Ming Ministry of Works oversaw the four bureaus of Construction, Forestry and Crafts, Waterworks, and Agricultural Colonies, as well as the Construction Office, the Wensi Institute, the Leather Works, the Saddle and Bridle Bureau, the Baoyuan Mint, the Pigment Bureau, the Armory Bureau, the Jieshen Treasury, the Weaving and Dyeing Works, the Miscellaneous Manufacturing Bureau, the Bamboo and Timber Bureau, and the Firewood and Charcoal Bureau.

This setup had been fine in the early Ming, since at that time industry and commerce had not recovered after years of war and Mongol devastation. So the system of artisan households serving rotational labor, combined with state-run handicraft industry, was appropriate.

But by now, the artisan household system had long existed in name only. In places like Jiangnan, where industry and commerce were extremely prosperous, the situation was even more pronounced. Without artisan households, the state-run handicraft industry lost its cheap labor, and with civil officials lacking the ability to manage handicraft production, the state-run workshops under the Ministry of Works were extremely inefficient—those barrel-bursting guns and barrel-bursting cannons were their products!

This situation had to be changed!

The approach to reforming the Ministry of Works was, of course, marketization—there was no other choice. Zhu Cilang currently had neither officials capable of managing handicraft industry nor many skilled artisan households, so it was simply impossible to comprehensively revive state-run handicraft industry. Although there were some "volunteer artisan households" who had followed from Tianjin, their skills were not particularly good—weren't those barrel-bursting guns used by the Ming army their masterpieces? And they were "volunteers" with meritorious service, so the Ministry of Works still had to pay them high salaries!

Relying on them, the Ministry of Works could at most set up one firearms workshop, one armor workshop, one sword-and-shield workshop, one cannon foundry, and one bow-and-arrow workshop. The raw materials used by these workshops would still have to be purchased, and their output simply could not meet demand—in this era, machining a single gun barrel with crude drilling equipment took twenty days to a month, and producing one high-quality composite bow took several months, perhaps longer! And in Nanjing, only one or two hundred drilling machines could be put into use in the short term. The number of skilled gunsmiths who could be hired was even smaller, since Jiangnan could not produce many usable firearms to begin with, so there were hardly any craftsmen. And craftsmanship could not be cheated with a golden finger, so in the early days of the workshops, low output was certain, and the rate of good products would surely also be very low.

Therefore, large-scale weapons supply would still have to rely on the market, especially by attracting Foshan's blacksmiths to move north and start businesses.

As for the Ministry of Justice, there was no need for major reform for the time being. Although there were many unreasonable aspects to the Ming criminal code and the Ministry of Justice, they were not urgent matters after all.

And this whole pile of reform projects would all offend people. Although Crown Prince Zhu was not afraid of offending people, he could not always play the villain!

(End of Chapter)