Autumn had come, and the summer heat gradually receded. The bamboo blinds in Xuanzheng Hall's West Warm Pavilion had been replaced with finely woven mottled bamboo blinds that let in light but kept out the wind. Qi Xiao had De'an set another small desk beside the Imperial Desk, furnished with the four treasures of the study and a freshly copied set of excerpts from the Zizhi Tongjian. Every day after his lessons in the Imperial Study, Qi Yu had to spend another two hours at this small desk when he returned. He slumped over it, poking his brush into the ink in the inkstone, and said the Grand Tutor had already taught him during the day, so why did he have to study it again at night? Qi Xiao sat behind the Imperial Desk reviewing memorials without looking up and said the Grand Tutor taught the meaning of the classics, while he taught practical affairs. Qi Yu said, "Oh," lifted his brush and dipped it in ink, wrote two lines on the paper, then put it down again.
"Father, what does 'remitting fire consumption to the public treasury' mean?" he suddenly asked.
Qi Xiao set down his brush and leaned back in his chair to look at him. This child always managed to get to the heart of things without even trying. Fire consumption was the extra silver local officials collected as "wastage" when levying taxes. How much they collected depended entirely on their conscience; those with little conscience could take an extra twenty or thirty percent. He said that during the Late Emperor's reign, they had tried remitting fire consumption to the public treasury, requiring all the extra silver to be paid into the national treasury before distributing it back to local officials as stipends to encourage integrity.
"And