The Collapse of Ming Dynasty Finances

Liu Shan possessed not only political wisdom but also decent personal morals. After ascending the throne, he followed the age-old corrupt tradition of emperors and wanted to expand his harem, only to be flatly overruled by Dong Yun, one of the four chief ministers.

Dong Yun's reasoning was that in ancient times, the Son of Heaven had no more than twelve consorts. The harem was already full, so no more should be added. He held firm and would not listen.

A dignified emperor could have only twelve women in his harem, and a new one could be admitted only when someone died. Even so, Liu Shan obeyed and did not break the rule until Dong Yun died.

The emperors in history who could manage that were few enough to count on one hand. Liu Shan's greatest blemishes were still his surrender without a fight and his saying he was too happy to think of Shu.

But all of that was turned upside down when a secret letter from Jiang Wei came to light. It contained only twenty-three characters: "I beg Your Majesty to endure a few days of humiliation. I intend to bring the realm from peril back to safety, and the sun and moon from darkness back to light."

At that moment, Liu Shan was no longer clinging to a wretched life, but bearing humiliation for a greater burden. Jiang Wei was no longer betraying his lord for glory, but a model of loyalty.

Jiang Wei wanted to persuade Zhong Hui to rebel, eliminate the powerful minister Sima Zhao, and restore Cao Wei. As long as he succeeded, he could seize the opportunity to revive Shu Han.

But man proposes, heaven disposes. In the end, the undertaking failed on the verge of success, and Jiang Wei slit his own throat.

That Liu Shan kept a secret letter from an old minister for decades was enough to show his character.

If you only looked at the Three Kingdoms, you might think Liu Shan was nothing special, because the brilliance of Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Sun Quan was too dazzling. But after Sun Quan died, the minister Sun Jun seized control of the Kingdom of Wu's power. After Cao Cao died, the Sima Household openly shat and pissed on the emperor's head, and the Oath of the Luo River became a joke. Shu Han alone was different. After Liu Bei died, Liu Shan sat securely on the throne for forty years. He also forcibly prolonged the life of the ravaged Shu Han and mediated the infighting between civil and military officials, while the common people were able to rest and recover. On that point alone, he ranked among the better emperors.

[Someone's actually praising Liu Shan!]

[He was emperor for decades, after all. He had to have at least some brains.]

[Liu Shan really had it hard. His territory consisted of just Yi Province, and he had few soldiers and generals, while talented people grew scarcer and scarcer.]

[If Liu Shan was that clever, maybe someone was advising him, or Zhuge Liang left him a brocade pouch of ingenious plans.]

"Liu Shan wasn't like that in Romance of the Three Kingdoms!"

"Romance means it's fiction! You didn't take the novel for official history, did you?"

"The people of later generations are right. Liu Shan was emperor for decades, after all. How could he not have had any brains?"

Those who knew Liu Shan through Romance of the Three Kingdoms came to see the last ruler of Later Han in a new light after watching the video on the sky screen.

Liu Bei: My son had the makings of an enlightened ruler! In the end, I was the one who failed to give him a united realm.

[Promoting agriculture and suppressing commerce: the conflict between taxation and commercial development #Ming Dynasty #finance]

"The Ming Dynasty again!"

"Isn't it perfectly normal to promote agriculture and suppress commerce?"

"Open a history of the late Ming, and you'll find brutal torture and savage killing everywhere. Government soldiers killed, Li Zicheng killed, Zhang Xianzhong killed, and the Qing Dynasty killed, until all of Huaxia ran scarlet."

Seeing this, the people of the late Ming and those living through other turbulent eras felt a wave of sorrow.

"And the source of all this was simply the collapse of state finances."

"Did the Ministry of Revenue run out of money?"

"Once a state runs out of money, its fall isn't far off!"

"The Great Ming Dynasty was founded in 1368. Its first major task was to stabilize its finances and consolidate its revenue sources. It began collecting taxes nationwide, chiefly agricultural taxes."

"Take the financial figures for the sixth year of the Wanli reign as an example. Total state revenue that year was 26.527 million taels, of which agricultural taxes accounted for 20.802 million, industrial and commercial taxes 2.238 million, and miscellaneous revenue 3.487 million. Agricultural taxes were the most important to the state, accounting for 78.4 percent of total national revenue."

"Nowadays, anyone with even a little education understands that life in agriculture is hard, risky, and unprofitable. To collect taxes, you have to invigorate industry and commerce. Collecting taxes from them is the key. In the sixth year of the Wanli reign, industrial and commercial taxes accounted for only 10.7 percent of national tax revenue. By the early Chongzhen reign, the proportion of agricultural taxes had risen to 81 percent, while industrial and commercial taxes still accounted for only 12 percent."

"Then why did the Ming Dynasty collect so little in industrial and commercial taxes?"

"The problem originated with Zhu Yuanzhang."

"Zhu Yuanzhang promoted agriculture and suppressed commerce. Any farmer who left home and took up trade instead of farming was to be treated as an idle vagrant, and the authorities had to catch him and send him back to farm. He also strictly banned overseas trade and replaced it with a tribute system."

"This tribute system was a little like poor relatives such as Japan, Chenla, Ryukyu, and Annam coming to a wealthy household to beg for food. They brought a watermelon on their visit, and we had to give them a cartload of grapes in return. It was a money-losing deal."

An emperor said with a smile, "The people of later generations aren't looking far enough ahead. We are the celestial empire, and when the small states around us come to offer tribute, naturally we must reward them with some fine things."

"To discourage more people from going into trade, Zhu Yuanzhang also decreed that the social hierarchy was scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants. Merchants were normal society. The descendants of those at the bottom were not allowed to take the imperial examinations."

"In 1381, he decreed that farming families could wear silk, gauze, and plain silk cloth, while merchant households could wear only plain silk cloth. But if one member of a farming family engaged in trade, the entire family was forbidden to wear silk or gauze."

"Zhu Yuanzhang did not suppress merchants blindly. He also introduced measures favorable to commerce. Overall, he promoted agriculture and suppressed commerce because too many people had died in the founding wars, too much land in the country needed to be cultivated, and he had no energy to deal with Japanese piracy along the coast."

"Under the circumstances at the time, restoring production came before everything else, and there was nothing wrong with promoting agriculture and suppressing commerce. Some historical sources say that because merchants were suppressed so harshly, Zhu Yuanzhang exempted them from taxes as compensation. That is incorrect."

"Zhu Yuanzhang did collect commercial taxes, but he set them very low. He did so not to compensate merchants, but because he feared heavy taxes would drive up commodity prices and increase the burden on the people."

"In 1369, Great Ming decreed that commodity transactions had to be taxed."

"In 1364, the Xuanke Office was established, and the Tongke Office was established in Fuzhou County, specifically to collect commercial taxes. In 1362, the commercial tax rate was one part in fifteen."

"Two years later, Zhu Yuanzhang believed that too many books affected prices and that the people could not bear the cost, so he changed the rate to one part in thirty and exempted some everyday goods altogether."

"All of Zhu Yuanzhang's measures suited the state of productive forces at the time. They were intended to expand the farming population, suppress the merchant class, and keep highly mobile merchants from dominating society."

Zhu Yuanzhang: That's exactly what I meant!

"Zhu Yuanzhang was not wrong. The mistake was that, even after circumstances changed, Great Ming's subjects in later generations continued to follow the ancestral system and were unwilling to change."

At this point, emperors and officials throughout the ages understood what the sky screen meant!

Those words meant that the system Zhu Yuanzhang had established was no longer suitable for use in later generations.

According to the experience of successive dynasties, this was when reforms were needed!

At the thought of reform, some people's faces darkened.