Chapter 750: Officials and Gentlemen’s Coquettish Operations (Please subscribe!)

Author: Linjiangjun

However, the attractiveness of the land rolls was relatively low, but instead the government and gentry were able to pay for their work together, which had a relatively large impact across the country.

"Officials and gentry want to pay the grain together and serve as servants?! Will there be no civil servants in Dongdong tomorrow? Shouldn't the collection of money and grain be divided into Confucian households and eunuch households? How can we let them pay the grain together with the common people and work as servants together?"

Yangzhou Prefecture.

When Wang Xinjing, the prefect of Xi'an, announced to the gentry in Xi'an that the imperial court wanted to implement the decree that officials and gentry should pay grain and serve as errands together in Xi'an, it caused a great uproar at that time.

An old local scholar who had resigned and retired asked about Wang Xingjing.

Faced with their questions, Wang Xinjing didn't know how to answer.

But his teacher Li Yong helped him shut up: "The imperial decree is such, why do you need to ask more questions? It is no longer a national policy for the officials and gentry to receive food and work as errands. I hope you will respond positively!"

Li Yongfu was a great Confucian in the late Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty. He was a famous Neo-Confucian scholar who had learned about Guanzhong. He was one of the "Three Great Confucians" together with Sun Qifeng and Huang Zongxi.

In the twelfth year of Emperor Kangxi's reign in the Qing Dynasty, Governor Eshan of Shaanxi restored the Guanzhong Academy which had been abolished in the late Ming Dynasty, and invited Li Yong, who was already well-known at that time, to preside over the academy.

Li Yong was originally unwilling to serve the Qing court, but the lesson of the fall of the Ming Dynasty made Li Yong believe that the work of nurturing talents and imparting knowledge in academies should not be abandoned, so after many refusals, he began to accept the offer of lectures at Guanzhong Academy. .

Li Yong deeply reflected on the lessons learned when the Ming Dynasty fell. Most of the Confucian disciples paid attention to talk but not to practice. As a result, Confucian scholars talked rhetorically when talking about principles, but failed to manage the place based on facts. When dealing with military emergencies, their eyes were darkened and they knew nothing.

Therefore, Li Yong asked his students to learn how to govern local areas, identify weapons and equipment, and understand agricultural management. He also wanted to learn water conservancy knowledge from the West...

As Li Yong's reputation grew, the Governor of Shaanxi Province, E Shan, recommended him to the court for his "seclusion in the mountains and forests", and Li Yong wrote eight times to express his regrets.

Later, there was an imperial edict to promote "erudite scholars", and the Ministry of Rites recommended him as "a true Confucian from overseas." The Taishi at that time personally came to Li Yong's house and repeatedly urged him to get up and go to Beijing.

Li Yong was very disgusted by this mistake and refused to give up on the grounds of being ill.

At that time, the officials of the Qing court carried Li Yong to the provincial capital and his bed to the southern suburbs of Yanta. Li Yongjian refused to obey the order and stabbed himself with a knife. The blood flowed profusely, so the officials of the Qing Dynasty gave up.

After the rise of the new Ming Dynasty, Zhu Kezang's practical Confucianism was very different from Li Yong's taste. He spent several years in the Council of Government.

Now 65 years old, he resigned and returned to Xi'an to rest the year before last.

He is highly respected in Xi'an and has many disciples.

As the saying goes, great teachers give birth to great disciples. Many of his disciples are serving as officials in the imperial court, such as Wang Chenglie, Liu Zeng, and the most recent one is Wang Xinjing.

Li Yong said so, and other gentry did not dare to openly contradict him.

But there is one person who dares to make a mistake.

"In this case, when the time comes when he needs to wait for the gentry and the people to go on duty, I would like to ask the magistrate to send someone to give instructions. I don't have money to do it, so I can go and serve in person at that time! There is a lot of next year's tax, and I can't afford it. The corvee silver, you might as well do the corvée yourself, it won’t disgrace me anyway!”

Li Nianci, who also trained in Xi'an Mansion, said to other Xi'an gentry at that time.

Li Nianci was one year younger than Li Yong. After the new Ming Dynasty moved to the Central Plains, his official position was gone and he was getting older. The Ming Dynasty did not care about him, and he failed to pass the imperial examination in the Ming Dynasty. He could become a poet and painter, so he was wrong. The country is very angry.

"You are all local celebrities. I beg you not to ask for this. Otherwise, wouldn't it give Tiandong a reputation of being disrespectful to scholars? The Li family is a local wealthy family with tens of thousands of acres of fertile land, so they don't have to pay for the corvee money.

If you can't afford it, why bother trying to trap the court into injustice?"

"Besides, you don't have to do corvee service at the age of sixty. Li Gong should think twice before taking action!"

The prefect Wang Xinjing began to persuade him.

"Hmph! Not only Li Gongqiu will go to serve in person, but also other Jin gentry in Xi'an Prefecture will go to serve! At that time, I would like to ask all the scholars in Xi'an Prefecture to do some hard work like red men, and see if anyone loses face.

!”

"That's right, that's what they did. They called on the children of the clan and stopped taking exams and reading books. Many in the court were working on the first five-year plan? They went to inns, dams, rivers, and railway services

Go to work as corvees, or send taxes and grains! Let the court lose face. Looking at the history, there is no order for scholars to work hard!"

So, the gentry in Xi'an Prefecture really did that.

They knew that the current emperor Zhu Kezang was extremely tough. Thousands of students from the Imperial College were directly blacklisted, and officials were not directly exiled. They did not dare to resist directly, so they resisted by lying down.

Some gentry actually began to carry dry food, wear coarse cloth shorts, carry poles and other things, and go to the railway that was being built in full swing in Dongdong to perform corvées.

According to the current corvee system in the New Ming Dynasty, is it possible to pay the corvee silver to offset the corvee? In that case, the Ming government would use the money to hire workers.

But if you really don’t want to pay and want to sell your labor to serve, you need to report it to the yamen, and the government will arrange the duration of the work that needs to be mortgaged according to the monthly salary standards of some projects.

For this reason, the prefect Wang Xinjing had no choice but to arrange for the gentry to build the railway according to the corvee silver they needed to pay.

Lord, please, if those people are old and weak, and accidentally fall on the railway, won’t the reputation of his prefect be ruined?

"Come and take a look! The great scholar Li Gong has come to serve!"

And when Li Nianci and others came to do corvee work, the scholar who had good intentions started shouting and deliberately asked everyone to know.

"I am over seventy years old, and I will come to serve here tomorrow. I would like to ask all my neighbors to take care of me."

Li Nianci smiled and said a few words because of this.

Li Nianci's saucy tricks made Wang Xinjing's scalp numb, so he couldn't force Li Nianci back home on the pretext of disrupting official business.

Because Li Nianci was considered a good official in the past, he had a good reputation throughout Shaanxi.

That was not the only thing that gave Wang Xinjing a headache. There were also cases of scholars giving up their exams because officials and gentry paid the same salary and were on duty.

"The great master should calm down. It's not that the officials in the East had embezzled the funds for promoting education. It's actually that all the gentry in Xi'an were dissatisfied because the officials and gentry were paid the same salary as errands!"

"The current situation is not the same. The scholars in Xi'an Prefecture do not come to take the exam in the name of having to do corvee service. As a result, the Prefecture Examination and the Prefecture Academic Examination have not been successfully held until now."

When the Shaanxi academic envoy came to Guide to hold the college examination, he saw that there were no students to take the examination, so he questioned the local magistrate Wang Xinjing and asked if there was any bad governance, so he ordered the students to cancel the examination. Therefore, the magistrate

Wang Xinjing explained it truthfully.

After hearing this, the Shaanxi academic envoy also felt irritated. What's that?

After hesitating for a long time, he said: "Prefect Wang, I will report the truth to the court, but please make it clear that the scholars did not stop taking the exams because they were dissatisfied with the new policies of the court, but did they have no time to take the exams because they actively implemented the official and gentry unified payment duties?

So as not to make Long Yan furious!"

The Shaanxi academic envoy had not heard about the Imperial College. He was worried that the scholars in Shaanxi would also be classified as lawless scholars.
Chapter completed!