Chapter 440: The Dark Side of the Palace

In the Qianqing Palace, Zhu Youjian was carefully reviewing the documents submitted by the Directorate of Ceremonial detailing the number of palace personnel and the annual consumption of grain and silver.

Wang Dehua, Wang Cheng'en, Cao Huachun, and others stood respectfully to the side, awaiting the Emperor's orders after he finished reading.

Zhu Youjian had a general understanding of the total number of palace maids and eunuchs in the Forbidden City since the Jiajing reign: the two combined totaled roughly ten thousand people.

The Directorate of Ceremonial's report confirmed this.

Currently, the palace housed 1,532 palace women and 9,428 eunuchs, for a total of 10,960 people.

These ten thousand-plus people consumed over 78,000 dan of white rice and over 100,000 dan of firewood annually.

Since early in the tenth year of Chongzhen, when Zhu Youjian substantially raised salaries for palace personnel, the monthly wage expenditure now stood at 42,500 taels.

Apart from grain expenditures remaining basically level with the Wanli and Tianqi reigns, monthly salary outlays had already far exceeded those of every emperor since the founding ancestor.

Wang Cheng'en had complained countless times in front of Zhu Youjian, grumbling that His Majesty was far too generous with his purse, stopping just short of openly suggesting that Zhu Youjian might be a spendthrift.

Wang Cheng'en believed that while the privy purse had indeed grown considerably in recent years, no amount of silver could withstand such spending; although His Majesty's family had earned even greater reverence throughout the palace because of it, the price was simply too high.

Because beyond these monthly wages and provisions, there were far too many places throughout the vast palace that required silver.

Setting aside everything else, just consider food and clothing.

The normal monthly food expenses for these ten thousand-plus people reached over 36,000 taels, amounting to roughly 400,000 taels per year; adding the annual salary expenditures, these two items alone required nearly one million taels annually.

Then there was clothing.

The palace women and eunuchs were issued one set of summer clothes and one set of winter clothes each year, and the expenditure for these outfits came to nearly 100,000 taels annually.

This did not even include various other miscellaneous expenses; when carefully calculated, simply maintaining the entire Forbidden City required Zhu Youjian to draw around two million taels from the privy purse each year.

You never know until you calculate — and once you do, it's a shock.

Only now did Zhu Youjian understand the mentality of successive Ming emperors in desperately scraping together money, and he also understood why Wang Cheng'en kept nagging endlessly.

Because the number of people in the palace he needed to support was enormous, and the items requiring expenditure were far too numerous.

If the Emperor did not find ways to raise money, he would not even be able to support the people who served him; being emperor would then be both humiliating and joyless, and he might even be cursed and mocked behind his back.

The Emperor was also human, facing day after day a group of household slaves greedier than ordinary people; apart from the few high-ranking eunuchs, those grooms, sweepers, washers, errand runners, and tea-and-water servers also needed silver to live.

These people toiled from dawn to dusk all year round for the nobles of the palace — you could hardly just feed and clothe them and call it done, could you?

Fortunately, his own money-making methods were numerous, so supporting these ten thousand-plus people showed no strain at all; but the emperors who had lived within the tracks of history — how could they have possessed the vision and thinking that came from an age of information explosion? How could they have had such means of making money?

The Wanli Emperor's dispatch of mining and tax supervisors was not for his own private desires; during his reign, the palace population was at least three to four thousand more than now, and even without salary increases, simply feeding and clothing them meant the annual million taels of "golden flower" silver was utterly insufficient.

Having sorted out his thoughts, Zhu Youjian gave no further consideration to the palace's enormous annual expenditures.

The silver earned by the Four Seas Trading Company was now quite staggering; added to the salt profits and the output of the imperial estates, the cost of supporting these ten thousand-plus people was hardly worth mentioning.

He had long ago given the Directorate of Ceremonial an oral decree that the number of eunuchs and palace women must not continue to increase — especially palace women — and that no new recruits would be taken until Zhu Cilang's wedding, when a hundred or so newcomers might be brought in; thereafter, only as many would be released from the palace as were recruited from among the people.

Zhu Youjian had already learned a great deal about the plight of palace women through various channels, and for these women who had devoted the finest years of their lives to the imperial palace, he now had new ideas and plans.

Once selected for entry into the Forbidden City, palace women lost their freedom; most had meager food and clothing, crude lodgings, lifelong hard labor, and could not see their parents. The cumbersome etiquette, the strict hierarchy, and the frequent humiliations left them almost no hope of ever rising above their station.

After entering the palace, palace women held extremely low status; they had to attend to their masters' every need, and their persons received no respect whatsoever.

The founding ancestor had once issued a specific regulation concerning palace women: "For those below the rank of imperial concubine who fall ill, physicians may not enter; medicines are to be obtained based on symptoms described."

The intent of this regulation was to prevent scandals from occurring in the harem, but in doing so, it also caused many palace women to die from sudden illnesses because no physician could attend them.

The Ming imperial palace also had a highly inhumane regulation: once one entered the palace, being graciously released was almost impossible.

West of the Golden Turtle and Jade Bridge, north of the Lingxing Gate along the Sheep Pen Passage, there stood the Hall of Peace and Joy, where palace women who fell ill or grew old were sent, like criminals, to prolong their days by their own vitality — or to await death.

These palace women who were left to live or die on their own could not even be buried in peace after death; unless they had served as female officials in the palace, they were not granted tombs but were cremated, and after burning, their ashes were generally dumped into dry wells.

In other words, over the course of more than two hundred years, within this Forbidden City with a total building area of eight million square meters, no one knew how many lives had been buried that had perished in agony.

And there was an even more brutally inhuman regulation in the palace: burial with the dead.

Many palace women had just been selected to enter the palace when their names appeared on the sacrificial burial lists; once an emperor died young, it meant that some beauties in the very flower of their youth had to follow him to the grave.

No wonder that whenever word spread that the palace was selecting maidens, commoners would frantically rush to matchmakers to arrange marriages for their daughters, no longer caring to be picky.

Zhu Youjian, a man from a later age, harbored extreme abhorrence for this series of inhuman practices; with all conditions now in place, it was time to reform and abolish these outdated customs and vile conventions.

"Wang Dehua, the rules I previously instructed — that the number of palace entrants shall only decrease, never increase, and that all items purchased for the palace shall not be apportioned to the common people — has the Directorate of Ceremonial passed these down?"

Zhu Youjian set the documents aside and addressed the seal-holding eunuch of the Directorate of Ceremonial.

"This old servant, upon receiving Your Majesty's oral decree, immediately assigned the relevant personnel to attend to this matter; all have now been carried out accordingly. Please rest assured, Your Majesty!"

Wang Dehua hastily bowed with clasped hands in reply.

"Mm, that is well! But I know full well that whether in the palace or at court, there is always talk of paying lip service while acting otherwise; whenever anyone's own interests are harmed, they will carry such duplicity to the extreme! I have already ordered the eunuch director of the Eastern Depot to send men to monitor the progress of this matter. Should anyone dare to test the law, once verified, they shall be beaten to death on the spot!"

After speaking in a stern tone, Zhu Youjian rose to his feet, clasped his hands behind his back, and began pacing back and forth within the great hall.

Wang Dehua and the others quickly followed at his side, awaiting his next instruction.

"Distressed that several vile customs within the palace offend the harmony of heaven, I wish to implement benevolent governance within the palace, to ease the hearts of all, and to free you from all lingering worries!"

Zhu Youjian halted his steps, turned to look at Wang Dehua and the others, and spoke slowly.

"This old servant and the others first thank Your Majesty for your grace. May we ask what proposals Your Majesty has this time? We beg Your Majesty to make them known, so that we may go forth and proclaim Your Majesty's benevolence!"

The several men, who knew well the various evils within the palace, all looked toward Zhu Youjian with expectant eyes.