The Ming Dynasty implemented the Tuntian system: military households served as soldiers and their status was hereditary, so they did not need to pay land tax like ordinary households.
In matters of taxation, both military households and artisan households enjoyed exemptions, but that did not mean their lives were easy.
Because military households paid no land tax while the taxes each province and prefecture had to submit every year were basically fixed, ordinary civilian households had to bear a heavier burden.
Yet during the Hongwu era, ordinary households did not find this burden heavy, because Hongwu's army could sustain itself.
That had been the original purpose of the Tuntian system.
Old Zhu had once proclaimed with great boldness, "I shall raise a million soldiers without costing the people a single grain of rice."
Leaving aside whether it had truly been achieved, at least in the early years, the Tuntian system had indeed greatly reduced the people's burdens. The million military households had basically been self-sufficient: soldiers in wartime, farmers during the planting season, and trainees in their spare time.
But only forty-eight years had passed since the end of the Hongwu era, and these military households had already become tenant farmers and hired laborers for certain people. They were called Tuntian fields, yet they cultivated private land—land that should originally have been public land, military land.
Pan Yun's gaze fell upon the muddy ditch whose bottom could not be seen. She said softly, "There are still too many leeches beneath the murky water."
The old man had just finished pointing out which plots belonged to which officials, and whether they had been bought or reclaimed. He had only just sat down when he heard her words.
He was unsure whether Pan Yun's words carried some deeper meaning. After a pause,