Chapter 633: So I Was Huang Taiji All Along!

Zhang Zhao had originally intended to start planning how to deal with Ma Chu as soon as he returned, but from the day he came back to court, civil affairs piled on all at once — and many of them were major matters that only he, as Emperor, could decide.

Zhang Zhao was somewhat inclined to push these matters back a while; after all, the realm was not yet settled, and military affairs were the top priority. But on second thought, he could not do that.

It might look as though a huge pile of business was waiting for Zhang Zhao the moment he returned to the capital, but this was actually a "sight" unique to the Zhang-Zhou house.

The former Later Liang, Later Tang, and Later Jin had never had this situation. In fact, ever since the late Tang military provinces broke away, there had never been such a "grand spectacle."

Because at this time the status of men of letters was too low and they were not valued, which led to one extremely serious problem.

It was not that no one studied anymore. Learning and knowledge are forever the driving force of human progress, a preference carved into human genes. So even in the Five Dynasties, there were quite a few who studied letters and read books.

The truly serious problem was that civil officials began slacking off on a massive scale. Wasn't it true that the fat posts were occupied by military men, their status was low, and their pay was poor? Fine, then I'll just do less work.

The degree to which Five Dynasties civil officials slacked off was simply appalling. Never mind prefectural and county officials or the middle and lower ranks at court — even men like Feng Dao and He Ning had once been master slackers.

From the very beginning, they would not offer counsel unless the emperor asked; later, even when the emperor asked, they still would not offer counsel. Every day they basically just went through the motions.

When they discovered accumulated social ills, they did not report them. They waited until the emperor found out himself, or until the contradictions could no longer be concealed, and then they began papering things over.

This led to a series of quite serious consequences. After the civil officials gave up, the emperor could only rely more and more heavily on military men. At the same time, out of distrust of the military men, he often began trusting the confidants and strategists around him.

Empress Liu's meddling in politics and the actor Jing Jin monopolizing power under Emperor Zhuangzong of the Later Tang, the treacherous minister An Chonghui under Emperor Mingzong of the Later Tang, Sang Weihan under Shi Jingtang, and Feng Yu under Shi Chonggui — all were violent manifestations of this consequence.

Among them, Sang Weihan was somewhat better; at least he truly had talent. But the others had little culture to begin with, and the harm they did was especially savage.

For example, Jing Jin gathered palace women for Li Cunxu to fill the inner court, and in one sweep he carried off three thousand young women. He even dared to seize the family members of the Weibo yabing guards, and the whole realm looked on in shock!

Li Cunxu truly did not die unjustly. He himself had relied on the Silver Spear Filial Piety Regiment formed from the Weibo yabing guards, which played a decisive role in the Battle of Huliupo and the Battle of Desheng, and only thus could he hold Zhu Liang in check.

Yet in just a few short years, he treated the Weibo yabing guards as paper tigers, even daring to seize their family members.

So it was no surprise at all that within a few years, Zhuangzong was bitten to death by the Weibo yabing guards.

Therefore, after the Zhou state was established, Zhang Zhao keenly detected the deathly, listless slacking atmosphere below.

Because this thing — I, Sage Zhang, am all too familiar with it. Before going into short videos, Sage Zhang had been famous as a master slacker in a certain state-owned enterprise.

After understanding the deeper causes, Zhang Zhao seized the opportunity when the Later Jin officialdom was given a great purge by Yelu Deguang, and at the right moment cleared out a large batch of superfluous officials.

Then, using the opportunity of institutional reform, he returned to the civil officials the posts that had originally belonged to them but had been seized by military men.

After that, he set an example at court by carefully listening to the opinions of all the bureaus. Whenever any civil official — even a minor official of the eighth or ninth rank — submitted a memorial, Zhang Zhao listened seriously. Either he answered personally, or he had the six secretaries of the Secretariat answer on his behalf.

For every official who submitted a memorial, Zhang Zhao prepared a small gift of encouragement — though it was no more than ten jin of mutton, a few jin of white sugar, a few bolts of cloth, or a jar of fine wine.

But still, those were imperial gifts! This enormously stimulated the enthusiasm of court officials for submitting memorials and speaking on affairs.

At the same time, Zhang Zhao gave extremely rapid feedback on correct proposals.

Last year, a gate captain of the Wansheng Gate west of Kaifeng city submitted a letter to the memorial office of the Secretariat, saying that the Empress Dowager Ciyou's processions when she went out were too numerous and too huge, and that she liked to leave the city at crowded times, frequently causing inconvenience to the common people.

When Zhang Zhao's legal mother, Empress Dowager Ciyou, heard of this, she flew into a rage and ordered her number one lackey, the Princess of Han, Li Zhen'er, to take men and break the Wansheng Gate captain's leg on the spot.

When Zhang Zhao learned of this, he severely punished the Princess of Han, Li Zhen'er, confiscating twenty households of her stipend fief.

He also ordered palace attendants to carry the Wansheng Gate captain to the Vermilion Bird Gate, where he personally comforted the gate captain and expressed his apologies. He further gave the princess's twenty stipend households to the gate captain as compensation for medical expenses.

Afterward, he ordered that a separate small gate be opened to the right of Wansheng Gate, to serve as a dedicated passage for Empress Dowager Ciyou when she went out of the city for recreation.

And the gate captain, who continued standing guard at Wansheng Gate with his broken leg propped up, became a "lovely scenic sight."

At the same time, the county lieutenant of Kaifeng County in the Eastern Capital of Kaifeng submitted a proposal, saying that the duties of the Eastern Capital's Seven Gates patrol commissioners and the county lieutenants of the two capital counties, Chenliu County and Kaifeng County, were confused and responsibilities and authority unclear.

Zhang Zhao also responded immediately, ordering the Bureau of Military Affairs, the Ministry of Personnel, and the Ministry of Revenue to deliberate, and then returned civil affairs and public order within the city to Kaifeng and Chenliu counties.

The Seven Gates patrol commissioners were also divided into the Inner City Patrol Commissioner, the East City Patrol Commissioner, and the West City Patrol Commissioner.

They were responsible only for matters the two counties could not manage: investigating unlawful conduct by meritorious officials, officials, and the sons of wealthy merchants, as well as patrolling the three cities for privately stored armor, long weapons, and crossbows.

The Kaifeng County lieutenant who had raised the issue was immediately promoted beyond his rank to East City Patrol Commissioner of the Eastern Capital.

At the same time, Zhang Zhao stipulated that any official of the fifth rank or above in the central court who did not submit at least one memorial per month would face strict measures such as salary fines, demotion, or even dismissal.

Since Zhang Zhao paid such attention to small matters, he naturally placed even greater importance on large ones.

At the cost of exhausting himself so thoroughly that he could not even muster interest in going to the rear palace to flirt with Lady Fu, Zhang Zhao finally stimulated the administrative capacity of the Zhang-Zhou officialdom.

And so Sage Zhang, having "brought this on himself," was submerged in memorials the moment he returned to the capital.

He had no choice but to relieve Yin Zhengqi (Yin Yaozi), who had been left to guard the Eastern Capital, of his authority as Chief Commander of the Palace Guard Army and Troop Commander of the Eastern Capital's Seven Gates.

He then appointed Yin Zhengqi as Commissioner-Bearing-the-Tally for the Jiangnan Command, leading three thousand men of the Left Dragon Elite Guard, the personal army left behind this time, south to Xiangyang Prefecture.

Yin Zhengqi's (Yin Yaozi's) main task was to coordinate the two regional commanders Liu Zaisheng and Ma Zhaoyuan (Ma Yaozi), making preliminary preparations to settle the matters of Nanping and Ma Chu.

I, Sage Zhang, must finish matters in the Eastern Capital before I can continue south.

Among the many affairs before him, the most urgent at present was abolishing the harsh governance inherited from the previous dynasty and even from the late Tang, as well as the deeper question of taxation.

The origin of the matter was still Zhang Zhao's abolition of harsh levies and the poll tax in Hedong. The people of Hedong had gained real benefits, and the people of other places wanted the same.

In truth, this era had indeed arrived at a major turning point in the ancient Chinese taxation system.

In the ancient Chinese tax system, during the Han, Wei, and Jin periods, taxes were divided into two types: zu and fu. Zu referred to the land tax, and fu was the poll tax. In addition, the common people still had to perform corvée labor and military service.

From the Northern and Southern Dynasties to the Sui and Tang, because of the rise of the fubing system, battles no longer required the mass conscription of peasant soldiers, and so the tax system changed into the zu-yong-diao system.

The saying went: where there is land, there is zu; where there is a person, there is yong; where there is a household, there is diao. Taken together, it was still land tax plus poll tax plus corvée labor and the like.

Of course, this is only a rough understanding; there were far more intricacies within it.

And the zu-yong-diao system, by the late reign of Emperor Gaozong of Tang, after the fubing system gradually collapsed, began to become difficult to collect.

This thing was based on the individual as the unit, placing great emphasis on personal control and the government's ability to suppress land annexation.

Once the government could no longer effectively suppress annexation, landless commoners fled in great numbers, the zu-yong-diao could no longer be collected, and the burden would then be spread evenly onto the neighbors who could barely hold on — until finally everyone could only escape by fleeing.

Therefore, by the Tianbao era, the household tax, which levied taxes based on acreage, began to grow in importance.

But by the mid-to-late Tang, the household tax no longer worked either, and the state's financial resources dried up. So finally, in the first year of Jianzhong under Emperor Dezong of Tang, the Two-Tax Law was formally introduced.

The so-called two taxes meant collecting taxes twice a year, in summer and autumn. The summer tax was collected by the sixth month, and the autumn tax by the eleventh month.

But the most important change was transforming the original zu-yong-diao, which looked at the number of people, into separate taxation based on wealth.

From the standpoint of the state's taxation, this was undoubtedly an enormous step forward.

It avoided the flaw of the zu-yong-diao period, when great households could easily shift heavy corvée burdens onto the poor.

It not only increased fiscal revenue, but also to a certain extent lightened the burden on the poor, simplified the complexities of paying taxes, and liberated the productive forces.

To sum it up: the rich paid more taxes, the poor paid less, taxes were paid directly in money, and there was no longer any need to hand over grain, livestock, cloth, and all the rest.

Looks good, doesn't it! It really is good — if it could be strictly enforced, of course it would be good.

But this ideal model — never mind the Tang dynasty, even the later United States, whose tax police were said to be the ceiling of federal combat power, still couldn't manage it.

So the Tang dynasty's Two-Tax System lasted less than thirty years before it basically fell apart. Officials at every level worked it for their own benefit, and they also exploited the rule that taxes could not be paid in kind, forcing the common people to sell their produce cheap for cash, then fleecing them all over again.

By the Five Dynasties, the methods had grown even more varied. Beyond the two taxes, every military province invented its own levies, plunging the common people into ever deeper misery.

Moreover, the Two-Tax System had another effect that Zhang Zhao did not know whether to call a flaw — or perhaps not a flaw at all.

That is, the Two-Tax System was built on the collapse of the fubing system. It reflected the central government's shift from strong intervention in land, to little intervention, or even none at all.

If Zhang Zhao continued to implement the Two-Tax System, then Zhang Zhou would inevitably end up like the Two Songs — even if it wanted to curb land annexation, it would simply be unable to do so.

This was also reflected in the state's basic guarantee — its military force.

The rent-levy-labor-corvee model, from the Two Hans to the early Tang, could be effectively implemented, which allowed the state, from the Two Hans all the way through the Sui and Tang, to mobilize a fairly formidable military force at any time.

Sometimes even after the regular army was wiped out, the powerful local magnates could immediately supply a considerable force. As long as the Central Plains court had not lost its power to command allegiance, the state was in no danger.

By the middle and late Tang, after the fubing system collapsed, Emperor Xuanzong was forced to adopt a mercenary recruitment system, and then lost control of it, giving rise to autonomous military provinces.

After Huang Chao, the Tang court completely lost its military foundation, and the military provinces' armed forces transformed further. They went from mercenary recruitment to warriors controlling everything, directly replacing the role of the state — using political power to guarantee military force, and military force to protect political power.

That is why, in the waning Tang and Five Dynasties, the warriors were so formidable in battle: because all the state's benefits went to them.

For a time, there were almost no peasant uprisings at home, and foreign enemies could only lower their heads and act like submissive grandsons.

But this thing had a huge problem, because the warriors simply did not understand how to govern a state.

And if the power of governance was handed to civil officials, those civil officials would use every means to strip the warriors of their control over the regime.

So the warriors simply despised the literati to the extreme, and ran the state like a gang, like an underworld syndicate.

In the end, by the Later Jin, it all came to a total collapse, because the common people could no longer bear it.

They either fled into the mountains and marshes to become unregistered households, or had already died from various natural and man-made disasters.

In fact, the Central Plains had been on the edge of total collapse ever since the last years of the Zhu Liang.

Was the Later Jin defeated by the Khitan? No! It was defeated by poverty.

Whether in this timeline or in history, even with few cavalry, the Later Jin could have thrashed the Khitan in any number of ways.

But they had no money. They didn't even have the money to send out thirty or fifty thousand troops and fight for two or three months. The last sum of money Sang Weihan scraped together for Shi Chonggui let the Later Jin fight Yelu Deguang into becoming the Camel God of War.

But the second time, they were completely out of money. The great army was besieged for two or three months, and the Later Jin court, let alone dispatching reinforcements, couldn't even keep the troops garrisoning Yedu from going hungry.

Truly a surreal era — the great armies of a Central Plains court were not defeated militarily by a frontier state, but economically.

This was the problem Zhang Zhao faced. Equal-field land distribution was secondary; the key lay in the state's operating mechanism.

If he accepted the Two-Tax System, he would inevitably be unable to forcefully curb annexation. Even if Zhang Zhao could do it, the moment he kicked the bucket, that would be when it all fell apart.

And implementing the Two-Tax System while not lowering the status of the warriors meant Zhang Zhou would soon walk the old road of not curbing annexation, with military governors recruiting troops to garrison the regions — and then the story of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang would be waiting for Zhang Zhao not far ahead.

If he was lucky, he would die on the last day of the final year of Kaiyuan, and then his son would enter the Tianbao era, and ten or twenty years later the realm would be thrown into turmoil, and a great upheaval would arrive.

If he was unlucky, he would become Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, watching with his own eyes as everything he had painstakingly built was swept away by the torrent of history.

And returning to the rent-levy-labor-corvee system was also nearly impossible, because the Central Plains was not the backward Hexi. The productive forces had already developed to this point.

From the Two Hans to the early Tang, it took two or three hundred mu of land to support one family. Now, with a bit more development, the time when seven or eight mu, or three or four mu, could support one person was about to arrive. The time of great development in handicrafts was also coming, and the population would explode.

When that time came, there would be too many people and too little land, and they would still have to bear the labor and levy obligations. Hmm, the foundation for popular revolt would be in place.

Handicrafts and the like would develop greatly, but the production model of the rent-levy-labor-corvee system and its near-barter market would severely obstruct their development, offending the urban commoners and the farming households of prosperous regions too.

Everyone would grow poorer and poorer under the rent-levy-labor-corvee model, until annexation grew ever more intense, and then some local strongman would rise up with a single rallying cry.

Crack! This Zhang Zhou he had built, before it even began to take off, would go straight back to the late Tang.

Simply put, the rent-levy-labor-corvee system meant everyone living in poverty together — the powerful and wealthy above living in boundless luxury, the common people below struggling to survive, with almost no middle class in between, and a commodity economy that was underdeveloped.

The Two-Tax System, on the other hand, once implemented in history, was clearly better suited to the further development of handicrafts and the commodity economy.

It broke the insurmountable chasm between great clans and the poor that had existed since the Two Hans, and gave rise to a large middle stratum. The prosperity of the Northern Song largely reflected the growth of this middle stratum.

In the Qin and Han periods, households of wealth without rank were extremely rare, and could not yet form a class. By the Tang, a middle stratum of those rich but not noble, poor but not base, base but not poor had begun to appear.

By the Song dynasty, middle-class households with wealth counted in fifty thousand strings of cash were beyond number. In the capital, households worth over a hundred thousand were everywhere, and in every prefecture and county, rich commoners could be found according to its size.

This was the result of the development of productive forces. Wealth finally began to flow in large amounts into the homes of ordinary people, no longer entirely monopolized by the powerful. This was the great tide of history, and no one could block it.

It won't work! Going against the wheel of history is bound to cause problems. If he insisted on the rent-levy-labor-corvee system, his name, Zhang Zhao, would stink worse in the annals of history than Emperor Yang of Sui.

Zhang Zhao groaned in anguish, collapsed onto the bed, and stared at the ceiling in silence for a long time. What was the point of knowing so much? If he didn't understand, he wouldn't have to worry about it. Wouldn't it be fine to not care about the flood after his death?

He let out another long sigh. The door creaked open, and Empress Cao Yanxi slowly walked in.

She could tell at a glance that Zhang Zhao had run into a difficult problem. She said nothing, just silently came over and sat down beside him, resting his head on her plump thighs.

Zhang Zhao took a deep breath of the fragrant scent on Cao Yanxi's body, mumbled something, turned his head, found the most comfortable position, and continued thinking.

In history, the Northern Song, which succeeded the Five Dynasties, naturally also inherited the Two-Tax System. So they did not curb annexation — or rather, even if they wanted to, they were powerless to do so.

So for the sake of stability, there was only one road to take: thoroughly discredit the warriors. Once the warriors had been turned into dog shit, they could be raised like pigs with money, creating a ridiculous military empire in which military spending consumed the vast majority of the budget.

Thinking of the Song army's style — the Jin soldiers' wolf-tooth clubs could be about to smash their skulls, and without reward money they would absolutely refuse to fight — Zhang Zhao felt a chill between his legs.

Then came the Ming dynasty. Zhu Hongwu used a compromise: among the common people he still implemented the Two-Tax System, but he gathered the warriors into military households, and within those military households implemented a system that to a certain degree resembled the rent-levy-labor-corvee model.

Clearly, in the end it still failed. The late Ming guard-battalion troops were worse than even the Great Song's worthless imperial army, and the common people's martial capacity was completely ruined.

Then came my Great Qing.

Zhang Zhao suddenly sat up. My Great Qing's Eight Banners system — how to put it — this thing was actually not decadent at all. On the contrary, it was a rather perfect military-merit system that combined the military institutions of the Han and Tang.

Though it couldn't compare to a modern nation-state, it was by no means some rotten thing.

Some might say that the Eight Banners troops would still rot, and rot fast.

No! No! In fact, the Eight Banners' military force — that innermost core of ten or twenty thousand men — always maintained considerable combat effectiveness. It was just that they were too few, and didn't dare to be thrown out for a winner-take-all gamble.

The Manchu Qing's Eight Banners military force only finally vanished after it was shattered at Baliqiao by the Anglo-French forces.

Looking across the entire Manchu Qing, from the Eight Banners entering the pass to their campaigns against the Dzungars, the Jinchuan campaigns great and small, the Burma campaign, all the way to Baliqiao — decay was certain, but the kind of total rot seen in the Song dynasty's Palace Army or the Ming dynasty's guard-battalion system never occurred.

This was a remarkable achievement. Since the Eastern Han, which perished through its own strength, no Central Plains dynasty had ever again possessed a force that ran through the entire dynasty, rising and falling yet always retaining some fighting capacity.

The brain-dead part of the Eight Banners system lay not in its military structure, but in its political structure.

That utterly idiotic ban on intermarriage between Manchus and Han, and the even more idiotic bannerman system — those were the true culprits that destroyed them.

But even so, the Manchu Qing was still the most tenacious survivor among all the Central Plains dynasties. Had it not encountered the Western powers, Zhang Zhao reckoned the Manchu Qing could have held on for three hundred and fifty years, perhaps even close to four hundred.

So what could he himself draw from the Eight Banners system?

Generous treatment, a strict military selection mechanism, a sense of honor as masters of the state, and the Emperor's absolute control over them.

If one added a sound competition mechanism, along with a system open to the outside that absorbed new blood.

Perhaps he could use such a system — with his personal army as the Upper Three Banners and the imperial guard as the Lower Five Banners — and, combined with the military examination system, recruit the brave and valiant men of the realm into the personal army and the imperial guard.

The role of the Green Standard Army would be filled by the prefectural and county troops of the various regions, along with civilian militia stalwarts and sworn-follower cavalry.

Then the future Zhang Zhou could perhaps use the stalwart men of Hexi and Longyou from Liangzhou, Lanzhou, Ganzhou, and the other prefectures to form the core of the personal army and the imperial guard.

Then, with a perfected military examination system to gather the brave and valiant men of the realm, he could form an absolutely elite standing army of eighty to a hundred thousand.

At the same time, he would perfect the competition mechanism: if the next generation of the personal army and imperial guard produced no qualified successors, they could be dismissed.

And on the political side, he would use the civil examinations to select the realm's talent and perfect the civil bureaucracy.

In the future, on the military side, Zhang Zhou would share power with the Emperor, the meritorious officials, the personal army, and the imperial guard.

On the political side, he could share power with the scholar-officials and literati.

It was just that the realm's benefits were only so many — at this rate, no one would get enough to eat!

Hmm, no fear. The greater share of domestic benefits and power would go to the civil bureaucracy; the military system would eat a smaller share. Whatever remained insufficient could go outward — to feast on the dividends of the vast world beyond.

As for ordinary people, he would continue the Two-Tax Law to unleash productive forces and promote the great development of handicrafts and the commodity economy.

This has real potential! Zhang Zhao grew more and more excited. Although this idea still had many gaps, they could be slowly perfected!

Damn! As he thought on, Zhang Zhao froze. He had thought he was Li Erfeng — he never expected he was actually a fusion of Zhu Hongwu and Hong Taiji.

What the hell.

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