The last few months of the Tian-Song Dynasty will undoubtedly leave a mark on history.

Since September, when Yingzhou suddenly rebelled against Zhao and surrendered to Song, a war began. On a thousand-mile battlefield, Jiangning, Xin Song, Zhao and Qi launched a war that lasted for several months.

In the end, the Song Dynasty achieved a brilliant victory.

The central battlefield defeated the heavily guarded Nanyang area of ​​the Zhao State, captured the choke point of Nanyang in one fell swoop, and took the Nanyang Basin into his pocket. Soon after, Huang Chun of Shangqiu, Songcheng and other places surrendered to the Song State due to the situation, making the Central Plains entrenched.

The Quzhen regime of Zhao State was on the verge of collapse.

In the east, Liu Yu's puppet Qi was also defeated by Gao Yingxiang, the general of the Eastern Song Dynasty in Xuzhou. Prime Minister Yelu Dashu and his 3,000 Liao cavalry were beheaded, and their heads were even made into Jingguan. Liu Yu wanted to revisit

The idea of ​​seizing Xuzhou, a strategically important place, not only failed to be realized, but the Song State took advantage of its victory to counterattack and lost the lands of Peixian County. As Weishan Lake and other Nansi Lakes fell into the control of the Song Army, the Song State's power continued to rise.

Insert into the hinterland of Qi State.

Qu Zhen, Liu Yu is really having a hard time this New Year.

Jiangning New Song Dynasty also took advantage of this victory to start a series of internal adjustments.

From the perspective of outsiders, the New Song Dynasty regime in Jiangning was divided into two obvious factions.

One is the Southwest faction headed by Xiao Cheng. This faction has strong soldiers and horses, and has the emperor as its big name. After the founding of the New Song Dynasty, it won several consecutive battles in Xiangyang, Xuzhou and other places, which completely established this faction's strong position.

The other one is the Jiangnan faction headed by Cifu Si Junchao. This faction can be regarded as a local snake. It is powerful in the local area and extremely wealthy. It almost controls the money bag of the new imperial court.

Others, such as Li Shilong from Yizhou and Li Chunfeng from Qinfeng Road, although they are quite powerful, are obviously far behind the above two factions.

In the last month of the Tiansong Dynasty, the huge adjustments made by the Jiangning court gave everyone the impression that the Southwest faction headed by Xiao Cheng had a complete victory.

The adjustment of administrative divisions contains the adjustment of power.

Jiangnan East Road and Jiangnan West Road, the two areas with the strongest local faction strength, were completely wiped out. They were merged into Liangjiang, Fujian and Zhejiang, Lianghu and other places respectively.

As a result, the Jiangnan Party's local control will inevitably gradually weaken, and their influence will naturally gradually decrease.

You know, what the Jiangnan faction used to fight against the Southwest faction earlier were the tens of thousands of local people who were tied to them.

So what if you send strong troops to the southwest? Do you want to massacre the people with your sword? Do you want to bring disaster to the place?

But now, these foundations were pulled apart by Xiao Cheng and then torn to pieces.

Ordinary people don't care.

They don't even know the changes in their area, because they still work at sunrise and rest at sunset. When it's time to pay taxes, they still have to get money, and when it's time to do corvee work, they still have to prepare dry food and carry the quilt on their backs.

Go. And those who manage them are still the same ones as in the past.

But the further up you go, the more obvious the changes become.

A large number of officials were laid off.

With the redrawing of administrative areas and the massive streamlining of institutions, there are only so many seats, and many people are bound to lose their seats.

The court gave them two choices.

One is to continue to be an official in another place. The level will remain the same, but the position will definitely not be as high as before.

In short, it is a high-level job but a low-level job.

The salary and benefits remain unchanged, but the power is greatly reduced.

Moreover, the place I want to go to is definitely not a good place.

Compared to where they stayed in the past, the new choice given to them by the court was simply a barbaric land and unsightly.

In such places, there are territories that the Song army has just conquered, such as Nanyang, Shangqiu, Songcheng, Xiayi, Peixian and other places. The former officials of these places either fled with the defeated armies of Zhao and Qi, or

So he stayed at home and waited for people from the Song Dynasty to deal with them. Who asked him to become a thief?

Although they are not qualified to be on the list of traitors, the fact that they are thieves cannot be changed. The court in Jiangning has not yet come up with an explanation on how to deal with them. It is obvious that they have not taken care of these people yet.

Anyway, these people are just fish on a felt board and can be disposed of at any time.

Naturally, you have to finish the urgent things at hand first.

Of course, if you don’t want to go to these places, there are other places, such as Guizhou, Yunnan, and even Leizhou in Guangdong and Guangxi, which also need a large number of officials with culture, knowledge and etiquette to enrich the places.

Although these places have been worked hard by Xiao Cheng, Luo Gang and others for more than ten years, compared with Jiangnan, they are really not even a little bit worse. If these people are willing to go, not to mention anything else, on top of culture and education, they can make people

There's a big leap forward in these places.

The second option is to resign and go home to become a rich man!

Don't say that the imperial court did not arrange for you to have a partner, but arranged for you not to go, so you can't blame the imperial court.

It would be magnanimous not to hold you accountable for your crime of not sharing the country's worries and relieving the king's worries.

After this order was issued, only 12 out of 10 officials were willing to go to new places to perform their duties. A large number of officials who had been streamlined would rather stay home than go to places they considered dangerous.

Yunnan and Guizhou are a land of smog, Guangxi and Guangxi are a place of exile. As for the areas in the Central Plains that were just conquered, they were originally good, but now, the war has just subsided, the people are in dire straits, and bandits are infested. If you go there, you will be afraid day and night.

We all have to worry about our safety. Those places are also border areas where we are in confrontation with the enemy. Maybe the enemy will attack us at any time, and we may accidentally become the enemy's prisoner.

Anyway, my family is not short of money, so I can go home and be a rich man and wait for the opportunity.

Compared with these officials, there are more officials, which is a more troublesome thing for the court.

The running government and the iron-clad officials.

Almost all officials are held by local people, and many officials are even passed down from generation to generation, from father to son, and from son to grandson. Over a long period of time, it is not uncommon for officials to manipulate officials and control local affairs.

Regarding this situation, Zhou Wei, the newly appointed official minister, came up with an idea.

As an old bureaucrat who has worked in grassroots positions for decades, Zhou Wei is well aware of this situation.

Create an opening for officials to be promoted to officials.

From the official to the official, it is a natural chasm.

Many people will never be able to cross this hurdle in their lifetime.

Of course, there is another group of people who don't want to cross this hurdle at all. They just want to stay where they are, stay in this comfort zone and control everything.

Zhou Wei suggested using a recommendation system for outstanding officials.

Local officials recommend outstanding officials as officials.

Once you become an official, you cannot stay in the local area. It is common sense to be an official in a different place.

In this way, it will open the door for promotion for those veteran officials who have worked hard, and on the other hand, it can also tear a hole in the families of those officials who are entrenched in the local area.

As long as you leave this place, as long as you no longer stay in this position, then you can naturally check whether you have violated the law or discipline.

In this world, there are always people who add insult to injury.

Xiao Cheng's third sword was aimed at Hu Bu.

To be precise, it refers to the taxation of the Song Dynasty.

In Jiangning and the New Song Dynasty, the income from agricultural taxes could be said to be negligible in the court's income. Statistics from the second year of the Tiansong Dynasty showed that agricultural taxes only accounted for 20% of the court's total tax revenue, and the remaining 80% came from non-agricultural taxes.

Commercial tax is the biggest one.

Commercial taxes in the Song Dynasty have been quite institutionalized and standardized.

Residential tax and overtax are the main types of commercial taxes in the Song Dynasty. Residential tax is a transaction tax with a tax rate of 3%. Overtax is a commodity circulation tax with a tax rate of 2%. As early as the first year of Taizu in the Song Dynasty, the tax rate was 2%.

There are clear regulations: the tax rules for merchants are listed in Wumen. This means that tax items must be posted on the outer walls of government offices and yamen to demonstrate openness and transparency and facilitate mutual supervision. If it is not a public tax item, merchants can

If you refuse to pay, you can appeal to the next level.

Of course, the penalties for tax evasion are also extremely serious. Once discovered, one-third or even more than half of the tax-evaded products will be confiscated, or even worse, you will be sent to jail.

In the Song Dynasty, the Song Dynasty was exempted from taxes on peddlers and foot soldiers. This provision was quite close to the people. There were even clear regulations that allowed rural people to sell some of their own chickens, ducks, fish, vegetables, melons and fruits.

, all tax-free.

These policies of the Song Dynasty greatly encouraged the circulation of goods and the prosperity of commerce, and also facilitated the circulation of goods across the country. As a result, prices were effectively controlled and people's interest in doing business greatly increased.

How can you keep your profits at home?

Because of these policies, the number of people doing business has greatly increased, and the scope of national taxation has been expanded. It seems that there is a lot of scope for tax reduction, but national taxation has greatly increased.

Of course, the bulk of the Song Dynasty's commercial taxes mainly came from prohibited goods and bulk goods.

Industries with high profits and simple processes, such as tobacco, wine, tea, salt, iron, media, spices, etc., have been included in the scope of national operations. They only need to invest minimal resources to obtain high profits.

And foreign trade is also one of them.

In addition to the large-scale foreign trade under the auspices of the imperial court, powerful merchants were also encouraged to engage in foreign trade. The profits from these trades were also extremely astonishing.

Compared with commercial tax, agricultural tax is quite simple.

It's a dou tax per mu.

This tax rate is quite low.

If you grow one stone per mu, it is considered as one tax per ten, but if you produce three stones per mu, it is one tax per thirty.

In places like Guizhou, as the grain yield per mu increases, the taxes paid by farmers are getting lower and lower.

In the Song Dynasty, urban residents had another kind of tax to pay, which was the house tax.

For example, in Jiangning Stone Town, the previous house tax was about 300 cents per year, which was not high.
To be continued...