Chapter 1116
Growth
With the help of Xue Shaoxing, Pan Yun and his group brought the wealth collected from various tribes into the pass and headed south to the capital.
Five months later, His Highness the Crown Prince returned to the capital after his travels. Before the other seven teachers could even rejoice, Pan Yun took him on another trip.
This time, she wanted to take him to see the prosperity of Jiangnan, the corruption in officialdom, and the hardships of ordinary people beneath the surface of prosperity.
They then took the opportunity to send away the spies who had come to the capital with them.
They had already ordered a batch of discarded weapons from the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Works. It wasn't much; they just needed it to deal with the people on the grasslands.
Pan Yun instructed Zhu Jianji: "These things are just to whet their appetites. The real weapons are the silk, porcelain, tea, and various treasures that we need to import from Jiangnan."
Zhu Jianji: "What kind of weapon is this?"
“This is a powerful tool,” Pan Jun said. “I ask you, what is the one thing the emperor and Grand Secretary Yu have been doing since he ascended the throne?”
Zhu Jianji thought seriously: "Light taxes and levies?"
Pan Yun shook his finger and said, "That only applies to designated areas, not nationwide. The nationwide political issue that has always been and has never stopped is the rectification of officialdom."
Why do the emperor and Grand Secretary Yu attach such importance to the administration of officials?
"Only with clean and efficient governance can there be smooth administration and harmonious society."
Pan Yun snapped his fingers and praised, "That's right. This shows how powerful silks, satins, gold and silver jewelry are. Even powerful emperors and Grand Secretaries need ten years or even longer to reform the bureaucracy."
Zhu Jianji blinked: "Sir, you want me to use these things to corrupt the other party? This... You also said you wanted to win people's hearts, how can you win them over like this?"
Pan Jun glared at him: "Fool, this is called sifting through the sand. Use these sharp tools to wash away the sand, and what's left is gold. Why don't you just win over the heart of gold?"
The Imperial Guards standing nearby gaped in disbelief. They hadn't expected that the Imperial Advisor's plan would involve upheavals in several tribes, replacing them with new leaders. That... was indeed a way to win people's hearts.
They hurried to see His Highness the Crown Prince.
His Highness the Crown Prince was full of excitement and eager to try, clearly showing a strong drive to take the plunge.
As expected of a young person, they dare to think and act.
Pan Yun looked at him approvingly. How could a young man be so lifeless?
Only by witnessing all the hardships of the world can one eradicate all injustices. Once you've seen and experienced enough, you can go back and learn how to solve problems from those old foxes.
Therefore, Pan Yun also brought Miao Zhen and the other two, and selected seven students from the Imperial Academy to accompany him.
It's essentially like having a study companion.
Although he never formally became a disciple, he genuinely received instruction under the Imperial Preceptor alongside the Crown Prince and served as the Crown Prince's study companion. Members of the imperial clan who had many opinions about Pan Yun also wanted to place their own children there.
They wrote letters to the emperor, and the princes in the capital even went directly to the palace to talk to the emperor about their ancestors, the succession of the imperial family, and the future.
Zhu Qiyu really wanted to agree to their request, but he didn't dare to agree on behalf of the Grand Preceptor. He could only hint at it indirectly by complaining.
Pan Yun's cultivation has been increasing recently, and she needs to accumulate merit for her next tribulation, so she is keen to do good deeds every day.
As we all know, doing good deeds requires money.
She cannot use the national treasury's money, as that originally belonged to the people of the Ming Dynasty;
She couldn't use the money from Zhu Qiyu's private treasury either, as it didn't belong to him, and to a certain extent, the money in Zhu Qiyu's private treasury also belonged to the people of the Ming Dynasty. Therefore, she could only earn it herself.
Aside from the meager salary provided by the imperial court, she could only earn money by selling talismans and telling fortunes for court officials.
Once she leaves Beijing, she will have even more ways to make money, given her much larger customer base.
Even carrying a banner and parading through the streets can earn you a tael and a half. Don't underestimate this amount of money; for some people, half a tael of silver can save their lives.
This money came from her hard work, in addition to income from the silver mine in Omori-go, Japan.
She could ride back on the imperial silver ships every quarter from her small private mine there, earning a net income of 12,000 taels a year.
And then there's her eldest nephew, Wang Cong, whose maritime trade and caravan business is thriving.
He travels to increasingly distant places now. In earlier years, he could return once a year, but in recent years, a single trip at sea takes two or three years. Each time he returns, after deducting all costs, his net profit reaches more than 200,000 taels of silver.
This shows just how profitable maritime trade can be.
This also suggests how much money those royal families, nobles, and local tycoons made through maritime smuggling over the past few decades.
This also shows how much customs revenue the Ming Dynasty currently has.
Last year, the Ministry of Revenue reviewed the accounts and found that customs revenue was approaching that of salt and tea taxes. In recent years, the court has been paying officials and members of the imperial family in cash, and has also added an extra allowance for maintaining integrity. Overall, their salaries are much higher than before.
Therefore, Yu Qian made great efforts to rectify official corruption and introduced a new method for evaluating officials, which did not cause any major problems.
Leaving aside the high-ranking officials, the lives of the middle and lower-level officials are much better than before;
Besides them, honest officials also earn higher incomes than before, and these are legitimate incomes.
For some officials who have ideals but do not want to be corrupt, this extra allowance for maintaining integrity has made them much more confident, and corruption has decreased in the last two years at least.
Of course, water that is too clear has no fish, let alone the already murky officialdom.
No matter how much the government tries to clean up its bureaucracy, corruption can never be eradicated, especially in important places like customs, where it is rampant despite repeated crackdowns.
However, Zhu Qiyu was not as anxious as before, probably because the national treasury was finally not empty, he had money in his pocket, and he became more tolerant.
So, taking advantage of the emperor's broad-mindedness, good mood, and generous spending, Pan Yun took the crown prince to Jiangnan to see the people's conditions.
Less than two months later, the crown prince personally submitted a memorial to the emperor, requesting that the taxes on the people of Jiangnan be reduced.
The ten-year-old prince wrote and cried at the same time, his tears soaking through the paper. The lives of ordinary people in Jiangnan were truly too difficult.
The taxes levied in the Ming Dynasty were divided by region and were not entirely uniform.
In the north and southwest, because the yield per mu was low, the tax was low. The government land was basically paid about 5.3 sheng per mu, while the private land was paid less, at 3.3 sheng per mu.
However, in Jiangnan, especially in Suzhou and Songjiang, the tax on government-owned land was more than one dou (a unit of dry measure). In the highest cases, some government-owned land that was confiscated and land rented by government slaves was taxed at one dou and two sheng (another unit of dry measure), which was about three times that of government-owned land in other places.
However, this is not the case in all parts of Jiangnan. In Qingtian County, Zhejiang Province, the tax per mu is only half a liter, which is one-twentieth of the general tax rate in Jiangnan.
"It is not scarcity that is a concern, but inequality," Pan Yun asked the Crown Prince. "With such harsh taxes in Jiangnan, how can the common people cultivate their affection for the Ming Dynasty?"
Even worse, the gentry in Jiangnan would protect each other with officials and evade taxes through means such as "deceptive taxation" and "tax evasion." When the imperial court could not collect taxes, local officials would shift the burden of taxes onto powerless self-cultivating farmers and tenant farmers in order to complete their tasks.
As a result, ordinary people in Jiangnan, who already bore more than three times the tax burden, ended up having to pay eight times more taxes than people in other places. (End of Chapter)