Zhu Yihai left his five adopted sons to dine together.
The food in the army is also simple, and the emperor doesn't like to make any ostentation. He still has four dishes and one soup, one is roasted deer breast, one is stewed wild boar, one is spicy stir-fried rabbit, and then there is a dish of Tongbai bean tendons, with a
Cold purslane, a seaweed egg soup.
Deer, wild boars, and rabbits were all hunted by Zhu Yihai with his five adopted sons and two princes after the meeting. Even the purslane was picked in the wild.
The dishes were cooked by the King of Qin and the King of Han. The cooking was quite good, and the five adopted sons praised it repeatedly.
The deer was very plump, and he left a piece of deer breast. The emperor gave the rest to the bachelors and prime ministers who were accompanying him, and the rest was rewarded to the admirals of each town and the generals of the army.
The remaining wild boar meat was rewarded to the minister, the deputy general, and the guerrillas.
Zhu Yihai looked at the five foster children and gave each of them a large piece of roasted deer breast, "I shot this deer myself, but you also had the credit for hunting it down, and you slaughtered and divided it. The two princes personally
Shao stew, you guys eat more."
"Thank you, Your Majesty, the King of Qin, and His Highness the King of Han."
Although Zhu Chenggong is young, he is the eldest among the five adopted sons. In this new adjustment, Zhu Chenggong was renamed the Navy Admiral and became the new 24th Town Admiral, stationed in Qingdao Port on the Shandong Peninsula.
, Dengzhou, and Yantai are all garrison areas for his fleet.
He was transferred from the commander-in-chief of the Fujian camp to the admiral of the navy garrisoned in Shandong. This was obviously a promotion, because Shandong is the key point of Gyeonggi Province, and his 24 towns are also the first town of the navy, which can be called the royal navy.
Zhu Shengli, Zhu Pengfei, Zhu Zhongyi and Zhu Dingguo also expressed their gratitude.
In terms of age, Zhu Shengli is actually the oldest. He is quite senior and has a military background. What is rare is that the emperor has always trusted him, and he has not let him down in the past few years. He is not only a guard in front of the emperor, but also established a military camp in Huguang.
, stabilized the upper reaches, and made a lot of contributions.
In fact, since Zhu Yihai had an heir, many officials in the court suggested to him that there was no need to adopt adopted sons anymore. For Zhu Chenggong and others, they could be restored to their original surnames and no longer be the adopted sons of the emperor.
A adopted son is also a son. In front of the ministers, he is regarded as the adopted son of the emperor. Even a great scholar must be honored. His status is too special.
However, Zhu Yihai did not reply to these memorials.
When he adopted Zheng Sen as his adopted son and gave him the surname Zhu, he did have the intention to win over the Zheng family in Fujian. At first, he even spread rumors to the Zheng family that he wanted to adopt Zheng Sen as his son-in-law through marriage to the princess. Later, when he entered the court, he gave the surname Zhu as his adopted son.
Son, it is a step further than giving the princess the choice of being her son-in-law.
Although the situation is different now, Zhu Yihai admires these adopted children.
Now Zhu Chenggong is the admiral of the 24th Town Navy, and the other four are also admirals of the First Town of the Imperial Camp.
Zhu Shengli's ninth town is in Hunan, Zhu Zhongyi's eighteenth town is in Henan, Zhu Pengfei's nineteenth town is in Shaanxi, and Zhu Dingguo's twentieth town is in Hubei.
They are all generals who guard a province, and their titles are also conferred to the county princes.
The emperor appreciated them very much. Even Zhu Dingguo, who had recently surrendered, received such treatment. Zhu Dingguo was now very grateful to Zhu Yihai.
Zhu Dingguo was known as an outsider and an enemy, Xiao Yuchi. Although some people secretly called him a slave with the third surname, Zhu Dingguo knew that the emperor was kind and would not blame them. He could save their lives at critical moments, accept them, and treat him.
He appreciated and valued this young peasant army general even more. He didn't know many words, but he knew loyalty.
"Your Majesty, I have something that I am unhappy about. Please be on guard against the thief Zhang An. This person dares to contradict and disobey Your Majesty in front of the emperor. He also speaks rudely and is full of resentment. He will definitely plot chaos and rebellion when he turns around.
The bandits in the cave don't often rebel, so they must be careful when letting the tiger return to the mountain to avoid trouble in the future."
Zhu Dingguo was young, but he had fought in the Western Army for many years and had seen many rebel leaders who broke their promises. That kind of stabbing in the back was too common in the peasant army, and even Zhang Xianzhong was a capricious representative.
Cave thieves were actually a very special group in the Ming Dynasty.
The imperial court also called them Dong Man. Zhang An and his Longwu New Army were actually Southern Jiangxi bandits. The imperial court called them Dong bandits, but they were not Dong people.
In his early years, Wang Yangming was the governor of southern Jiangxi and suppressed bandits, and it was this group of people that he suppressed.
The composition of this group of people is relatively complex. They are a group of people active in the mountainous areas at the junction of the four provinces of Jiangnan, Fujian, Guangdong, and Hunan. They include She people, Yi people, Hakkas, Han people, etc.
In the mid-Ming Dynasty, the Jiangxi and Gannan areas were vast and sparsely populated. In some places, there were no homes for dozens of miles. It was similar to Yunyang in Hubei Province at that time.
In the middle of the Ming Dynasty, famines continued, government corruption, various exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous taxes, and the local poor people made many people bankrupt. In order to avoid taxes and servitude, many people fled and became refugees.
Millions of refugees from Shaanxi, Henan and Hubei poured into the Yunyang area, while a large number of refugees from Jiangxi and Guangdong entered the southern Jiangxi area.
They entered the mountains to reclaim wasteland and cultivate land, and even went into the mountains to slash and burn farming like the She people. They lived a life of nomadic farming and hunting in the mountains, evading taxes and evading labor, and were called refugees by the court.
In order to collect taxes, local officials went into the mountains to collect taxes, and even recruited people to serve. When refugees moved into the mountains, their lives were not easy. The people could not bear the various taxes and servitude imposed by the court.
So they continued to resist taxes, and the government called them bandits, sent troops to suppress them, burned their houses on the mountain, and arrested their people. So these people united to resist the government.
Robbery of business travellers.
The entire mountainous area at the junction of the four provinces of southern Jiangxi has become a lawless place.
The more vigorous the imperial court's suppression, the more serious the bandit rebellion became.
Later, Wang Yangming became the governor of southern Jiangxi and put the military and political affairs of these four provinces under his control. Wang Yangming did not simply suppress, but used both suppression and appeasement, lowered taxes, implemented the Ten Family Card Law, and concluded township contracts and other means.
They successfully appeased many bandits in southern Jiangxi and established many new counties and villages to calm down the unrest.
But it doesn't really solve the problem.
Because treating the symptoms does not cure the root cause.
The burden on many people is too heavy and they cannot survive.
By the end of the Ming Dynasty, the people in the Central Plains could no longer survive, and countless peasants rebelled, and the South Gansu Mountains were certainly no exception.
This chapter is not over yet, please click on the next page to continue reading! Many early immigrants of the Han people, also known as Hakkas, as well as people from the mainland who fled in the late Ming Dynasty, plus local minority tribes such as She people and Yi people, in order to survive
, so they all started to steal again.
Of course, they generally call themselves volunteers, but looting the countryside and robbing wealthy merchants certainly cannot be called volunteers.
When the Tatars sent Jin Shenghuan and others to send troops to Jiangxi, there were local gentry in Jiangxi who raised troops under the banner of the Ming dynasty. They had appointed officials and knighted them and recruited four groups of bandits.
Zhang An was one of the four battalions at that time, and his battalion was called the Qianzuo Camp.
Later, his battalion grew in numbers, with tens of thousands of men and horses, and even controlled many counties and villages in the south. Wan Yuanji, Yang Tinglin and others appointed by Zhu Yihai also recruited righteous gentry and gentry everywhere in Jiangxi, and also won over Zhang An.
Because Zhang An had strong soldiers and horses, he was also given the title of Longwu New Army.
Zhang An later led the Longwu New Army northward, and assigned Guangxin, Raozhou, to garrison him, and gave him 5,000 formal troops. However, in his Longwu New Army, only a minority were native barbarians, and the vast majority were Han Chinese.
, there are both Hakka Han people and new people from the mainland. Most of them joined the Longwu New Army not because they were loyal or loyal, but simply because life was difficult in the mountains and they were fighting everywhere, so they joined the army to plunder together.
You must know that the farming method of the Dong barbarians at that time, including the Han refugees, in the southern Jiangxi area was the same as that of the She people and the Yi people. It was slash-and-burn farming, burning the mountains, and using the firewood ash as fertilizer.
In the burned-out mountains, sticks were dug into holes, and mountain rice was planted. Some also planted mountain sugar cane, and then built shacks to live in the mountains, and they also hunted and so on.
When a hilltop lost its fertility, he would continue slash-and-burn farming on another hilltop. He kept moving like this, and would usually go down the mountain to trade salt, iron, etc. with Han merchants.
In fact, this kind of life was still practiced hundreds of years later in the mountainous areas of Laos and Myanmar, but most of them had settled down and rarely traveled from mountain to mountain.
The difficult environment also created a tough character. They were aggressive and contentious. When faced with natural disasters such as drought and heavy rain, they would go down the mountain to plunder.
In the chaos of the late Ming Dynasty, the Dongman refugees in various places became more and more active.
In essence, Zhang An and his Longwu Army are not much different from Zhang Xianzhong, Li Zicheng and their Xiying and Shunying camps. They are just poor people who cannot survive.
The difference is that the complex environment has created a more tough character among the cave thieves like Zhang An, and they may not have any legal or moral constraints in their hearts.
More abiding by the law of the jungle, the law of the jungle.
In recent years, they have not only occupied two prefectures in northern Jiangxi, but the remaining bandits that Wan Yuanji and his group had previously sent to Ganzhou, Ningdu, Jianchang, Fuzhou and other places still occupy a lot of territory, and they still claim to be righteous and brave.
Wan Yuanji was unable to rectify the situation at that time, so he only awarded them the title of group training.
Zhang Anfan used the imperial banner to recruit and organize many Dong bandits, set up camp names and spread them everywhere.
It was originally said to be 40,000 people, but now it is far more than that.
Zhu Dingguo was born in the peasant army, and he knew that although the peasant army was indeed forced to rebel, most of the peasant army's structure was limited, short-sighted, and had no overall perspective. Especially once they rebelled, it would be difficult to get them to disband and return to farming.
Besides, the world has been in such turmoil in recent years, and it is difficult for ordinary people to live a stable life. How can the life of slash-and-burn farming in the mountains with tents and nomadic farming be as good as occupying the prefecture and county?
At the beginning, Zhang Xianzhong was in dire straits many times, and the court also recruited him several times, but when was Zhang Xianzhong really willing to accept the surrender? Not only did he not trust the court, but he was also a bandit and rebel, so it was difficult to go back and live such a hard life again.
Zhu Yihai cut off a piece of roasted deer breast, put it in his mouth and chewed it. It was tender and juicy, very delicious and just right.
"What do you mean, do you want me to kill Zhang An, and then kill all the five thousand dragon warriors he had outside the city?"
Zhu Dingguo couldn't answer the call.
Zhu Yihai shook his head, "This is not possible. It is easy to kill Zhang An now, and it is also easy to kill the five thousand Longwu Army, but what will be the consequences? How many Sheyang, how many Hakkas, and how many refugees are there in the border areas of the four provinces of southern Jiangxi? How many refugees are there with this knife?
If we cut them down, five thousand people will fall, and I'm afraid half a million people will rise up to rebel."
"But even if Your Majesty can keep Zhang An in court, if his five thousand men go back, it will be like letting the tiger return to the mountains. There will still be no less than one hundred thousand Dong bandits in Southern Jiangxi!"
"Mr. Yangming summed up what he said when he was the governor of southern Jiangxi and suppressed bandits, which is very reasonable.
People are not born thieves and bandits, and rebels are forced to survive. Therefore, the court cannot only think about how to encircle and kill those thieves, bandits, and rebels, but also think about why they become thieves and rebel. How can they survive?
Go on, why? Is it because the taxes are too high, or is there too little land, or is it a natural disaster or a man-made disaster?
Wherever there is a problem, we need to find a way to solve it, rather than solving the problem for the person who raised it.
Zhu Yihai put down his knife and fork.
"You are all very brave in fighting and are excellent generals, but in the future you should also learn more about managing local civil affairs. Those people in Nangan who are called thieves are actually refugees. Most of them were not refugees in the first place, but no matter what they were in the past,
Immigrants, later refugees, or generations of indigenous people, they all lack an identity, a recognition from the court.
They have no identity, so they have no protection.
I give a decree to the Longwu Army and also to all the refugees, guests, and Sheyu in southern Jiangxi.
Exempting them from all the previous exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous taxes, they would not be able to afford farming in the mountains. If they are willing to go down to the mountains to reclaim wasteland and settle down, they can be granted ten acres of upper land, twenty acres of middle land, thirty acres of lower land, and generally forty acres of mountain land.
Fifty acres of lower-grade forest land will be exempted from land expropriation for ten years.
When they go to towns for general business, they are also exempted from entry tax, etc.
Organize households and people for them, organize and train Baojia, regiment training, open inns, establish inspections, social studies, etc., open markets, sell salt, oil, cloth, iron, etc. to them, and also purchase tea, rice, sugar cane, camellia oil, and herbal medicine from them
, tung oil, fur, dyes, etc.,
This chapter is not finished yet, please click on the next page to continue reading the exciting content! We also provide interest-free or low-interest loans to mountain residents in need.
Regardless of whether they are She, Yi, Ke, or Liu, they are all treated equally. If the barbarians marry, the survivors will be called barbarians. If the Chinese and barbarians marry, the survivors will be Xia.
The imperial court would establish counties and townships in those mountainous areas, organize households and people, and also station imperial camps, establish towns, and station stations.
We must also encourage businessmen and mountain people to open mines, develop industry and commerce, and drive the economy. Only when people have enough food and clothing can they understand etiquette and abide by laws and regulations, so that everyone will not steal or rebel.
The key to solving the problem of Nangandong thieves is not to suppress them, but to solve their problem of food, clothing and livelihood, so that they can live and work in peace and contentment again.
If the imperial court can do this, there will still be some people who want to plunder and rebel. If we suppress them forcefully at that time, we will be able to win the support of the people. This is an act of benevolence and justice, not tyranny."
"Those five thousand Longwu troops may be transferred to other military towns, or turned into garrison towns for regiment training. However, they must be given a reward of silver. It is best if they can immediately implement thirty acres of military land in their hometowns, and return
You can help them find wives, etc. Officers must also be properly arranged, even if they are not capable enough.
Although the Longwu Army was born as a bandit, they also played a role in our great cause of reviving the Ming Dynasty. They also contributed to the stability of Jiangxi. They even contributed to the suppression of the Huguang rebellion and the suppression of the Yunnan chieftain rebellion.
Those who have made meritorious deeds by sending troops.
It cannot be dealt with simply and crudely. The court must act with dignity and convince everyone.
If we have done our best to be benevolent and righteous, and there are still some of them who are ungrateful and rebel, then we are not to be blamed. I also believe that there are not many such ungrateful people."
The emperor's decision was something Zhu Dingguo never expected. He used to follow Zhang Xianzhong and would never be polite to those who dared to rebel against him, whether they were old brothers or others. Zhang Xianzhong had more than four adopted sons.
, he had many adopted sons, and many adopted generals who were highly regarded by him died in his hands.
But although the emperor wanted to withdraw his military power, his method of handling it was completely different.
"Your Majesty is kind and wise." After a long time, Zhu Dingguo also said sincerely, and the other four adopted sons also praised him.
Zhu Yihai smiled and said to the Zhu Hongjia brothers, "Did you understand what I just said? Study it carefully. In the future, you will also need to have this kind of thinking when you open a feudal vassal to guard one side."
"There are still five of you. When the great cause of Zhongxing is completed in the future, I will also grant you a vassal and a place to guard, and protect the vassal for the imperial court. You will inherit it hereditary, and the vassal will last from generation to generation, and you will be with the country!"
