Chapter 040 The road to relief station is sparse (Part 1)
On May 19th, the fifth year of Longqing's reign, the prince, accompanied by Gao Pragmatic, returned to Beijing to take off his vacation.
Facts have proved that when going on a long journey, not only is it necessary to take two hundred cavalry with you, but your own status is also very important. Gao Pragmatic returned all the way, thanks to Gao Gong's blessing, even if he brought as many as two hundred servants, there were many inns along the way.
He also received them respectfully and did not dare to neglect at all.
Of course, although the inns are willing to do their best, Gao Pingshi's team is too big to handle. Most inns cannot accommodate so many people and horses, so they can only find ways to relocate them nearby.
Fortunately, Gao Pragmatic Travel has enough travel expenses. Every time he goes to a post station, he will take the initiative to pay for it, and he is also relatively generous. He only needs to make errand arrangements for the post station. Not only will he not lose money, but he can also make a small amount of money, which can be regarded as a win-win situation.
Gained a lot of popularity from passers-by.
Of course, Gao Pragmatic was so generous not only for the sake of popularity, but more importantly, through these means to build friendship with the staff at the post station, and then use his spare time to learn from them about the real situation of the post station.
A well-known thing in history is that at the end of the Ming Dynasty, Emperor Chongzhen, who was working hard to govern, ordered the abolition of the original post station system across the country. Li Zicheng, who was originally working as a post guard in Shaanxi, suddenly lost his job. After losing his livelihood, he eventually overthrew the Ming Dynasty.
Chongzhen lost the world just to save a few hundred thousand taels of silver.
But the process of history has never been that simple, because Chongzhen was not the first to try something new. Before him, as far as Gao Pangshi knew, the Ming Dynasty had abolished the post system at least twice.
The emperor and the future Wanli Emperor have done or will do so.
The problem is that both Jiajing and Wanli have cut off surplus grain, but only Chongzhen has cut off Li Zicheng. Why exactly is this? Gao Pragmatic also knows that the post system costs a lot and is a major part of the court's expenditure. Gao Gong will not be able to do it in the future.
Actually, he definitely wanted to attack the inn system - maybe he was already thinking about it now. Therefore, Gao pragmatic felt that he needed to get to the bottom of this matter before returning to Beijing.
To understand the Ming Dynasty emperor's attitude towards local post stations, we must first understand the operating model of this system. The fact is, if you just look at it as a simple and plain government-run hotel, you would be totally wrong!
Because in the Ming Dynasty, the real post station was actually a kind of luxurious official guest house. In addition to the postal and military intelligence transmission purposes that we usually know, it also performed many other functions.
According to Gao Pangshi's understanding from the staff at the inns along the way, according to the regulations at this time, most inns had two or even three-entry courtyards. On major transportation thoroughfares, the imperial court often had inns serving officials, and their living conditions
It's not even worse than the residence of the local magistrate - many of the officials passing by are of higher rank and more powerful than the local officials, so how can they live in such a bad place?
A Ming Dynasty post station had at least the main gate, drum tower, middle gate, front and rear halls, left and right wing rooms, kitchen, warehouse, stable, postmaster's house and other facilities. Most standard post stations had 10 upper rooms and 20 upper rooms for officials to live.
The side rooms or side rooms used for the residence of officers and soldiers can accommodate dozens of guests at the same time.
At the same time, these stations also have their own residences and offices. Of course, they must also have supporting kitchens and stables. They must also be equipped with grooms, donkey drivers, footmen, taverns, kufus, buckets, and housemen.
Cooks and other management and service personnel. There must be large bungalows for them to live in the post station, and there are even spare warehouses and temporary prisons for various officials to use.
Therefore, the Ming Dynasty’s inns at this time were just like the highway service areas of later generations, all over the country’s traffic routes. They provided free services to “people within the system” across the country! And their service items were far more comprehensive than those of later generations of highways.
The service area is also more comprehensive.
The service responsibilities of Ming Dynasty Station can be divided into three major categories:
The first and most basic thing is the accommodation service. As mentioned above, it not only provides the supporting facilities for the users, but also provides all the service personnel.
The second is the supply of carriages and horses. Take the situation of the Shaanxi Station where Li Zicheng was born later as an example: Xi'an Station has 27 standing horses, 10 donkeys, a number of oxen to pull the carts, and a number of carts. If these are not enough, you can call
Hundreds of postmen are waiting to offer their shoulders. After all, these low-level officials are more able to endure hardships and stand hard work than mules and horses.
Finally, there is the supply of travel expenses, which is probably the most incomprehensible service to modern people. Not only does it cost no money for officials to live in the inn, they can also get money from the inn. At this time, many official officials came to the inn to stay.
, you have to ask for money in various names when you leave. After all, the post station cannot cover all areas, but the messengers can't stop eating, drinking, sleeping, sleeping for a moment. If you don't give it, then the postman or even the postman will be beaten.
Very common thing.
If it were just being blackmailed continuously, the post station system might not be the target of several dismantlings. But what's more terrible is that these dotted inns are not only not operated in a market-oriented manner, nor are they supported by state funding.
Each inn mainly depends on the local government's direct allocation to the people, and uses the local people's extra tribute to support it!
In other words, the daily operation and maintenance of the post station are all carried out between grassroots officials and grassroots people. There is no supervision from the upper and lower levels of government, and there are no agreed-upon market regulations. Therefore, in reality, we have to charge more and less from the people, which is what the post station officials said
Have the final say.
As far as the horses that each post station must be equipped with, the horses in the post station eat not grass, but food. As early as the Zhu Yuanzhang period, each horse in the post station required a local supply of 80 shi of food every year. However, by the middle of the Ming Dynasty,
In the later period, a horse in Huazhou, Shaanxi actually required 422 shi of grain every year! At that time, a hectare of cultivated land in Shaanxi could only produce 7 shi of grain. Therefore, raising a stagecoach horse required the hard-earned income of more than ten farmers throughout the year.
.
In view of the really poor breeding technology of the Ming Dynasty, it was impossible to breed horses into the size of African elephants, so it is even more impossible for their food intake to increase more than five times in more than one hundred years and less than two hundred years. These are too many
The grain collected was actually eaten by the "system personnel" and the staff of the post station who traveled to and from the post station.
After the mid-Ming Dynasty, the collapse of officialdom accelerated greatly. Anyone who had some relationship with the system could write a letter of introduction to stay at the post station and use carriages and horses. The advantage was not only that it was free, but they could even ask for travel expenses from the post station. So in order
As the cost of supporting the post becomes more and more expensive, the officials in the system have no choice but to apportion more and more expenses to the private sector. As for whether to apportion more or to apportion less, it all depends on the official's personal conscience. Among them, there are post officials who are filial to their superiors and cater to their errands.
You can still accumulate thousands of wealth.
Anyone with a discerning eye can see that if the inns are not abolished, the farmers who will eventually be forced to survive by the inns will rebel sooner or later.
At that time, many court officials actually saw this problem. When Emperor Jiajing was in power, the court planned to reduce the size of post stations across the country by 30%-50%, and half of the money and food saved would be used for military expenses.
The idea is actually not bad, but there are still problems in its implementation. The local government has indeed reduced the funding for the post station, but the burden on the post station has not been reduced. Officials who come and go still eat and drink in the post station and use cars.
Horses were used. As a result, the staff of post stations across the country began to go on strike or simply abandoned their posts and ran away. Since the post stations themselves were also responsible for the message transmission function, the consequences were more serious.
For example, when Japanese pirates attacked Xinghua City in Fujian Province, it took more than a month for the urgent news to be sent to the capital. As a last resort, the abolition and reform failed five years later, and everything returned to its original track.
By the Wanli period, Zhang Juzheng had taken over the power and began to take control of the Yi government. However, he did not impose reduction ratios from the perspective of cost-saving, but started by limiting the privileges of officials. He presided over the promulgation of strict regulations and punished violations
There were dozens of officials, and many officials were demoted or dismissed. Among them were descendants of Confucius and relatives of the emperor.
In addition, Zhang Juzheng did not set a rigid target for cutting funds, but instead seized on the key point of "official privileges". He also directly included the reform of post offices into the assessment content of provincial top leaders. This idea is quite correct.
, successfully reduced the national post office expenses by more than 30%, which is said to have saved nearly one million taels of silver, reducing the huge financial burden on the people.
However, as mentioned before, Zhang Juzheng's method may have benefited the country and the people, but if he uses administrative means to suppress officials all over the world, there will be no way for the people and the government to escape.
The reason why Gao pragmatic went deep into the station to understand the situation was because he wanted to carefully find a breakthrough - he has always agreed that "politics is the art of compromise", so although it doesn't mean that force will never work, it will definitely not work just by force. If you close a door, at least you can still
It is necessary to leave a window for people. This principle is similar to the "encirclement of three and missing of one" in siege warfare in the art of war - block them all. It is better to leave a small gap as an outlet to prevent the trapped beasts from fighting and the fish to die and the net to break.
