My life skills in Daming Liver - Chapter 657

c647 palace expenses

The New Year is approaching, but Li Chengliang is not in any good mood for the New Year.

This year, he lost Henan and Shaanxi in a row, failed to support the Korean War, and failed to reform the currency system. This series of events greatly damaged Li Chengliang’s prestige.

Although the Yushi and the Metropolitan Procuratorate were disbanded, Li Chengliang could still feel the emotions in the eyes of the civil officials.

The situation in the capital is gradually changing.

Li Chengliang was helpless about this.

Since the last time he failed to give advice, Shanhao got sick and rarely gave advice to Li Chengliang anymore.

The remaining combat staff are arguing in a quarrel, and so far there is no effective plan.

Today Li Chengliang received another letter from King Su of Lanzhou, requesting the imperial court to send troops to reinforce Lanzhou.

Li Chengliang also hesitated.

Being a general is often just a matter of choice.

Lanzhou is far away from the capital. Although it is very valuable, the troops transferred to Lanzhou will not be counted on in future wars.

You can’t expect this army to be able to cross half of the country to participate in the war in the Gyeonggi region.

The benefits that Lanzhou can bring to the capital Mingting are also extremely limited. From the perspective of costs and benefits, this account is a loss that cannot be lost anymore.

However, governance cannot only focus on these. The successive defeats of the Ming Dynasty’s army caused a great shake in the morale of the military and the people. If there cannot be a battle to calm the people’s hearts, it will also greatly shake the legitimacy of Li Chengliang’s rule.

So after thinking about it, Li Chengliang decided to send Dai Bailu, who had just gone to Shanxi, to lead his army to Lanzhou.

After finishing the matter in Lanzhou, Li Chengliang had another headache.

Seeing the bill sent from the palace, Li Chengliang felt very headache again.

In fact, since the Jiajing period, the quarrels between courtiers and the palace about expenditures have never stopped.

How much did the palace cost?

When Li Chengliang was young, he couldn’t understand why the civil servants were quarreling over the emperor’s expenses. The world clearly belonged to the Ming Emperor, so what happened to the emperor’s use of some money?

These civil servants tried every day to find ways to prevent the emperor from spending money, and also reduced the rewards that the emperor gave to these border generals. At that time, Li Chengliang had no good impression of the civil servants who restricted the emperor’s use of money.

But when he came to power, Li Chengliang discovered that maintaining a royal family was too expensive!

You know, the royal family in the Forbidden City today may be the weakest royal family in the history of the Ming Dynasty, and it is also the royal family with the best number of servants in the history of the Ming Dynasty.

The influence of Jiajing’s hunting in the west caused many eunuchs and maids to take the opportunity to leave the palace, and some died outside like Chen Hong. Therefore, when Jiajing returned to Luan, the palace officials’ consultation was far from sufficient.

But the “good news” is that there are far fewer masters to serve.

The Jiajing Western Hunt and several turmoils left the already shabby Jiajing harem almost empty. After Longqing ascended the throne, although some harems were expanded, they were not given any status. After Longqing was paralyzed, they were all kicked out by the current Empress Dowager Li. In the palace.

Wanli was not married yet and had no queen or concubines.

The palace’s ceremonial supervisors and dongchang were all deprived, and the number of senior eunuchs was also the lowest in history.

But even so, the annual expenses required to maintain such a palace still gave Li Chengliang a headache.

The expenses listed on the list seem to be necessary.

When Jiajing died, a large sum of money was spent on the funeral.

Jiajing’s mausoleum began to be built when he was in power, and it is almost complete now. However, it costs money to bury Jiajing. After the burial, it also costs money to build an ancestral temple according to tradition. It also costs money to worship these late emperors.

As a result, the cost of this funeral has reached the order of hundreds of thousands of silver dollars. This is a funeral held by the Ministry of Rites using the etiquette of the Supreme Emperor instead of the etiquette of the emperor.

This also included the silver coins donated by Qingyuan Bo Li Wei. Without this donation, I am afraid that the Ming Dynasty’s finances would have gone bankrupt at that time.

Since the beginning of winter, many people in the capital have frozen to death because there is no firewood to burn. There are also eunuchs and maids in the palace who have frozen to death.

Therefore, in this report, Empress Dowager Li requested to increase the supply of charcoal for the harem, which was another huge amount.

Li Chengliang felt a headache when he saw the bill sent by the royal family.

In a normal feudal country, the annual income is about 20 million taels, of which daily royal expenses account for 10 to 20%.

This is already a quite huge number. You must know that in the feudal era, all agricultural taxes were collected. The characteristic of agricultural taxes is that the collection process is extremely opaque and extremely watery. Many taxes are withheld by the bureaucracy. It takes 20 million taels. Regarding taxes, the figures below may be greedy several times.

Therefore, no matter how much the emperor claims to be frivolous in corvee and insignificant in taxes, in the end the people’s lives will be difficult to live by.

But 10% to 20% is just a theoretical normal expenditure. There are really too many places where the royal family needs to spend money.

It costs money to reward clan relatives, there is a funeral when the old emperor dies, a grand ceremony when the new emperor ascends the throne, the emperor’s wedding costs money, and the emperor spends money on eating, drinking and having sex.

When encountering bad luck, for example, Jiajing encountered a fire in the palace and needed to build a main hall, and he himself wanted to practice Taoism and needed to build various Taoist temples.

At times like this, when the royal family’s expenses are insufficient, they naturally have to worry about the money collected by the court.

In the feudal era, the cost of supporting the royal family was extremely high, and each item required a large number of people’s flesh and blood.

Today’s Ming Dynasty, after learning a series of reforms from the Southeast, is no longer a completely traditional feudal country.

At least with the efforts of Gao Gong and Zhang Juzheng, a system for collecting commercial taxes was established. The two also set up many profitable public workshops, which made the Ming Dynasty more comfortable.

But even so, these two imperial papermakers were still troubled by royal expenses. For example, the Aoshan Lantern Festival that Emperor Longqing had to organize after he ascended the throne cost the Ming court, which was not rich, a million taels of silver. Gao Gong was almost furious because of this matter.

Li Chengliang could only grit his teeth and approved these expenditures, but Li Chengliang wrote back to the Empress Dowager, stating that he would need to use troops in the southeast next year, and hoped that the royal family could take the lead in reducing some expenditures.

The Ming court is settling accounts, and the Southeast side is also settling accounts.

In contrast, the financial pressure in Southeast, which is not burdened by the clan and royal family, is much better.

The Governor’s Mansion is the private residence of Su Ze’s father-in-law, and the expenses of the Governor’s Mansion come from the copyright fees for the books Su Ze published in his early years, and do not even require the Southeast Cabinet to spend money.

The Southeast Cabinet is also very stingy about itself, and the house they live in is not repaired.

Moreover, the main commercial taxes collected in the southeast were much larger than those of the Ming Dynasty, and their income was ten times that of the Ming Dynasty.

But looking at last year’s expenditures, Finance Minister Fang Wanghai also has a headache.