Chapter Thirty-Five: The People of the Realm Have Long Deemed Your Majesty in the Wrong!
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[Under your knife-sharp pen, the Great Ming, outwardly flourishing and prosperous, has been brutally torn open, exposing the festering wounds beneath its painted façade. From there, you have gradually arrived at one central question...]
[Why did the Ming dynasty of history perish?]
[Viewed from the perspective of later generations, there were many reasons, but the main ones were these: first, the so-called “Little Ice Age,” endlessly debated by later generations!]
[The Little Ice Age refers to the fact that the Ming happened to coincide with a cyclical shift in climate, and that climatic change brought with it all manner of natural disasters: locust plagues, droughts, floods, hailstorms, and so on...]
[There is certainly some truth to this. The natural disasters that struck the middle and late Ming were indeed innumerable, and those disasters led to masses of refugees and severe food shortages, ultimately causing rebellions to erupt without end.]
[Some extremists even claim that the Ming dynasty fell entirely because of the disasters caused by the Little Ice Age!]
[It sounds quite persuasive to those who view the Ming through rose-tinted glasses. There is a certain helplessness of fate in the notion that “man proposes, but Heaven disposes,” perfectly suited to the tear-jerking plot of a heroic tale in which the invincible male protagonist exhausts every trick in his arsenal, yet still cannot escape being crushed beneath the power of an unmatched world boss, allowing the despicable villain known as “the Qing” to snatch the prize from his hands—an outrage so tragic and infuriating that it brings one to tears...]
[But what if I told you that the most severe period of the Little Ice Age did not occur during the dreadful middle and late Ming at all, but rather during the High Qing golden age of the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns?]
[The invincible hero “the Great Ming” could not even withstand a casual strike from the boss before exploding on the spot and dropping all its gold... Meanwhile, the despicable prize-snatcher “the Qing” picked up the equipment and gold from its corpse, not only weathered the boss’s most violent phase, but even founded the High Qing golden age, which lasted for a full one hundred and twenty years. Its population soared from fewer than one hundred million at the end of the Ming to four hundred million...]
[The Great Ming: We encountered the Little Ice Age! The vicious Little Ice Age was as powerful as a monster, and no matter how hard we fought, we could not defeat it!]
[The Qing: It was not a monster...]
[Anyone who is not an extremist partisan can surely see that the Little Ice Age was nowhere near as miraculous as people claim. It was merely one relatively important factor among the many causes of the Ming’s collapse.]
[And so we come to the second major factor: the distribution of resources!]
[Resource distribution at the end of the Ming was a textbook example of extreme inequality: the poor were desperately poor, while the rich were obscenely rich!]
[Take Li Zicheng, for example. He was so poor as a child that he became a monk. To fill his belly, he even worked as a shepherd for a landlord’s family. His parents and other relatives died amid poverty and illness... He was practically a second Zhu Yuanzhang!]
[Then there was Prince Fu of Luoyang, Zhu Changxun. His father, the Wanli Emperor, loved him dearly and granted him several million mu of fertile Central Plains farmland as his fief. He ate so well that he grew into an enormous fat man weighing several hundred jin!]
[And the divide between rich and poor was reflected not only in class, but also in geography. The northern regions, represented by Shaanxi and the Central Plains, were typical poor areas, where people could work themselves to the bone all year and still rarely eat their fill.]
[By contrast, Jiangnan was so prosperous that a Ming loyalist later wrote in a book: “By the time of the Wanli reign, setting aside all other advantages, let us speak only of firewood, rice, oil, salt, chicken, goose, fish, meat, and other foods. Which of these was not cheap? A household of several people could eat great quantities of meat and fish every day, and spend no more than two or three qian...”]
[Just look at that! Is that even human language?]
[Clearly, the gap between rich and poor among the various classes and regions of late-Ming society was not merely a little wide... It would have been stranger if the impoverished had not rebelled!]
[Next comes the third cause: the total decay and collapse of the bureaucratic system and tax structure!]
[The guiding principle of late-Ming officials was simply this: “As long as greed does not kill you, then keep being greedy to the death!” The most emblematic incident occurred when the Chongzhen Emperor was besieged in the capital by the rebel army. He asked his ministers to contribute funds to help defend the city, and every one of them claimed to be penniless.]
[Yet after Li Zicheng marched in, the rebel army subjected the capital’s officials to brutal torture, and the officials collectively coughed up more than seventy million taels of silver...]
[The key point is that they not only embezzled—they also did absolutely nothing useful. Their administrative governance was virtually nonexistent... They were the classic case of taking without working!]
[To say that late-Ming China was a grand stage for vermin is not wrong in the slightest. Calling every single person a pest might be an exaggeration, but if nine out of every ten officials were skinned, there would still certainly be a few vermin left undiscovered...]
[Then there was the collapse of the tax system. Since the bureaucratic system was a steaming heap of garbage, and the Ming tax structure had always been riddled with problems, the taxes that ought to have been collected could barely be collected at all. The merchant tax-resistance leagues of Yangzhou and Suzhou simply paid nothing. More than a million wealthy members of the imperial clan barely paid any taxes either. Landlords and gentry who possessed scholarly degrees still refused to pay!]
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[But the court still had to collect taxes. So when the Chongzhen Emperor realized that he truly could not afford to offend those wealthy grandees, he could only stretch out his visible hand toward the poor wretches of the north...]
[“Let the common people suffer a little more. Whoever wants to bear the infamy may bear it. In any case, I will not!”]
[With that single sweep of his visible hand, countless starving and freezing northerners were beaten into ruin, their families destroyed. Several million furious men from Shaanxi and the Central Plains immediately rose up against that bastard regime known as the Great Ming!]
[And so the Yongchang Emperor of the Great Shun was formally brought forth by the times!]
[Besides the internal causes listed above—the natural disasters, the extreme gap between rich and poor, the corruption of the bureaucratic system, and the collapse of the tax structure—there was also an external cause of the Ming’s fall that cannot be ignored.]
[That cause was... the Aisin Gioro clan of the Qing!]
[The Wild Boar Hide was a humanoid mobile suit, Huang Taiji a model sage ruler, and every prince and beile a small boss with tactics maxed out... Perhaps the Later Jin of the Wild Boar Hide’s era could still have been subdued by the Ming, but after Huang Taiji’s feudal reforms, the Qing had become something that the late Ming was simply incapable of dealing with!]
[Many people say that the Qing entered the Central Plains only because it took advantage of Li Zicheng. In truth, Li Zicheng was the one who benefited from the Qing’s efforts. Had the Aisin Gioro clan not successively annihilated nearly every elite Ming army over the course of several decades, Li Zicheng would have been finished long ago...]
[Therefore, even if Li Zicheng had not destroyed the Ming, the Qing would sooner or later have marched south and overthrown it. The transition from Ming to Qing was inevitable; Li Zicheng merely stepped on the accelerator.]
[In summary, these were all the principal reasons for the historical collapse of the Ming dynasty.]
[And although the Divine Emperor’s heaven-defying emergence extended the life of the Great Ming through sheer godlike force, those problems were, in fact, only two and a half of the issues He solved!]
[The first was the Aisin Gioro clan. This greatest external threat was ruthlessly plowed under by the Divine Emperor, who slaughtered Liaodong until scarcely a living soul remained. In a purely physical sense, the problem was solved completely...]
[The second was the tax system. After He massacred the tax-resisting spearheads of Yangzhou and Suzhou, no one dared refuse to pay taxes anymore. Wealthy merchants had to pay, landlords had to pay, and anyone who refused would have their entire clan exterminated—even ten degrees of kinship, or at the very least nine...]
[The remaining half was the problem of resource distribution.]
[Why say that He solved only half of it?]
[Because His solution was to launch a massive slaughter in those years!]
[Why were resources distributed so unevenly? Because there were too many people! Therefore, as long as enough people died, a certain degree of redistribution could be achieved...]
[The Divine Emperor slaughtered more than ten million “troublesome commoners” outright and indirectly caused the deaths of tens of millions more. This created vast tracts of ownerless land. The poor people of northern Shaanxi, such as your family, suddenly received more than a hundred mu of good farmland for free. They did not achieve a leap across the class divide, but at least they acquired some property.]
[With such a material foundation, your parents were able to move from their old home to the county seat, support your studies at a government-run school, and even keep you fed while you spent twenty-four years preparing for the provincial examinations without working.]
[The Divine Emperor’s grace can never be repaid!]
[But this method treated only the symptoms, not the disease. As long as living conditions were suitable, the population would grow rapidly... Nearly sixty years have now passed. The population lost back then has long since recovered, and the conflict between people and land is once again growing acute.]
[Although everyone is terrified of the Divine Emperor, as the saying goes: “When the people do not fear death, how can death be used to frighten them?” They are already unable to survive. Rebelling means death, but so does remaining obedient... Given enough time, the world will once again boil over. It is only a matter of days!]
[That is why we say the Divine Emperor solved only two and a half problems—and that half a problem will soon rise again.]
[As for the great heap of problems that remained, even with supreme divine power, the Divine Emperor was still powerless to solve them...]
[The Little Ice Age continues to wreak havoc, growing ever more severe as it moves step by step toward the worst conditions of the original Kangxi and Qianlong era. Natural disasters are killing countless people!]
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[Resources remain unevenly distributed. Jiangnan is prosperous enough to resemble a paradise on earth, while the Central Plains and the north remain locked in hunger and cold! The imperial princes and kings, landlords, and wealthy merchants still squander their lives in drunken revelry, while the vast masses of propertyless commoners can scarcely fill their stomachs!]
[The bureaucratic system remains rotten and dark—indeed, it is even more absurd than before. Countless incompetent sycophants who know only how to shout their loyalty occupy the highest offices, and the corruption is worse than ever!]
[And at a time like this, what is our great Divine Emperor doing?]
[Oh, He has done nothing good at all. He has even tolerated corruption on one hand, while on the other using overwhelming force to oppress hundreds of millions of “troublesome commoners,” crushing them so thoroughly that they would rather stay home and obediently starve to death than raise a banner and rebel...]
[A corpse that should have been buried long ago has been forcibly kept alive by Him. And the price of preserving that corpse is the blood and tears of countless millions beneath Heaven!]
[And so...]
[“...The people of this world have long ceased to approve of Your Majesty!”]
[You bring your brush down with a final vicious stroke, then set aside your fine writing brush with a satisfied sigh. As you gaze upon this unprecedented remonstrance, which has cursed the Divine Emperor and the Great Ming from top to bottom, you can barely restrain yourself from laughing aloud—not because you lack the courage, but because you have no desire to spill blood meaninglessly on the spot.]
[This is how a true man ought to be!]
[Exhilarating! Exhilarating!]
[Next, all you have to do is wait until the appointed time, hand in your paper along with everyone else, and then return to the dormitory to await the brocade-clad guards shouting, “JYW! Open the door!”]
[Your heart is utterly at ease. You are not afraid in the slightest of the calamity about to follow.]
[However, an unexpected development occurred...]
[“You there, candidate! Have you finished writing?”]
[A shrill eunuch’s voice made you turn in astonishment. On the jade steps, you saw an old eunuch staring directly at you!]
[Then, seeing your stunned expression, he simply walked over. Just as your heartbeat seemed to skip half a beat, he snatched up your examination paper, whose ink had not yet fully dried, and strode straight toward the Divine Emperor in the hall. As he walked, he muttered, “This candidate writes rather quickly, but why does he look so dazed? I asked him a question and he did not even answer...”]
[“Long live Your Majesty! A candidate has finished writing!”]
[“Oh... What a coincidence! He is the very fellow townsman of the Traitor Li... The Metropolitan Graduate from Mizhi County in northern Shaanxi, Zhou Liang!”]
[The old eunuch’s shrill voice drifted over from afar, and you instantly felt as though you had fallen into an icy abyss...]
[You had long since prepared yourself for storming the tower and being killed by the tower in return. But you had hoped to be arrested and tortured by the brocade-clad guards afterward, because then you would still have had the chance to leave behind a final poem like the heroes in the storybooks, dying with maximum dramatic flair.]
[But now, it seemed you would not even have the chance to recite a poem, laugh maniacally, and die like a hero...]
[You were about to spray blood across the Golden Bell Hall on the spot!]
[...]
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