The fall of the Ming Dynasty has left many modern people wondering why a great empire with a population of tens of millions of people and millions of armor was destroyed by a small group of roving bandits and Manchurians. Some people through the climate theory, the cause of the fall of the Ming Dynasty will be attributed to a small glacier; some people are blamed on the ruling party of the Donglin Party, that this group of infighting insiders destroyed the Ming Empire; some people will be blamed on the annexation of the land and the tax is too little, think that it is the landlords and capitalists are unpatriotic, leading to the court has no money to use. However, no matter which interpretation is made, it is only a planing and milling of the ""cause"" of the Ming Dynasty's demise. For the Ming dynasty's demise of the "" symptoms ", both academic and civil science have reached **** knowledge - fiscal deficit. In short, the Ming dynasty perished because there was no money. Because there was no money, the army refused to use its life; because there was no money, there was no money to relieve the victims; because there was no money, it was impossible to manufacture qualified weaponry. However, the Ming Dynasty was not ""poor"" from the very beginning, but went through a series of complicated changes before it became ""poor"". Everything was inseparable from money Gradually tightening revenue To understand the financial problems of the Ming Dynasty, we need to first briefly understand the income and expenditure of the treasury. There were many reasons for the expenditure of finance, so I will not repeat them here. There were usually only two types of revenues: taxes and state bonds. At the same time, the Ming Dynasty did not give birth to the European financial system, not to mention the mature banking system and the concept of faith. The only reliable source of finance in the Ming Dynasty was taxation. The entire military system was totally dependent on the taxes of the people. However, the Ming Dynasty adopted an extremely wrong policy on the root of taxation, i.e. the tax system. Ming Dynasty Treasury Silver After Zhang Juzheng's reforms, the Ming Dynasty shifted its taxation from physical objects to precious metals. Gold and silver were officially popularized and used as money in China. This should have been a kind of progress. However, any progress is bound to be accompanied by pain. Opposition to Zhang Juzheng's people, not all the old vested interests. First of all, silver was never minted into coins before the end of the Qing Dynasty. This means that whether it is the government, private, all things circulating silver are raw silver. Raw silver itself did not have a fixed silver content, and even the silver ingots minted by the government did not have a standardized silver content. When peasants and citizens went forward to exchange their gains for silver to pay taxes, they needed to bear the consumption of the exchange. This was called "folding color" at that time. As a result, many peasants found that the amount of tax they had to pay after bearing the expense of "exchange color" became more. Differences in climate and humanity from place to place resulted in completely different outputs as well, and the prices of the outputs were also different. In the process of "folding" physical goods into silver, officials could do a lot of tricks to make themselves and their families live a rich life. On top of that, the broken silver commonly used by the common people needed to be melted down into silver ingots in order to be surrendered as taxes. The broken silver of the common people usually had a low silver content, and it was inevitable that there was some depletion when it was melted down into official silver with a higher silver content. The Ming Dynasty referred to this depletion as ""fire consumption"". If it is a normal removal of impurities, the people buy a single would not hurt. However, the officials do not take advantage of this loophole, the use of their own refereeing power to enrich themselves, it will be in vain for "two mouths". The Ming Dynasty has been entangled in the corruption problem of fire consumption. If the standard of fire consumption is standardized so that the officials can make no profit, they are moving the cheese of a large group of people. The officials naturally knew that there was nothing the court could do about them, so they naturally became more unscrupulous. By the end of the Ming Dynasty, they simply added the transportation and labor costs of the canal to the people's heads, and called it "adding consumption". According to Gu Yanwu's projection, the Wanli years of the increase in consumption may be about 20%. To Chongzhen years, it rose to a deranged 30%. That is, the people have to pay ten two silver taxes, at least three two fell into the pockets of officials by their "discretionary". As to how much is spent on the blade, only the officials themselves know clearly. Faced with the ferocious exploitation by the officials, the common people fought against it by evasion. The revenue of the Taicang of the Ming Dynasty shrunk to half of its original size in just a few decades. As a result, the common people became criminals one after another, and the revenue of the imperial court was gone, only the officials in the middle earned a lot of money. Bottomless Pit of Corruption Some people may wonder why the Ming Dynasty knew that there were fatal problems in the administrative system and did not do anything to solve them. The answer is that it was tried early and it didn't work. Although they did not have the force to overthrow the dynasty, but the negative office, or bring their own colleagues to resign, will bring devastating blows to the administrative system. The criminal laws used by Zhu Yuanzhang in the early days of the founding of the country could not be described as cruel, nor could it be said that they did not have the slightest deterrent effect. Nay, the salaries and working hours of Ming officials were simply too exaggerated. There were only a few days off a month, and the salary was only enough to feed the family. If an official had more concubines, his children would starve. The famous Hai Rui, a typical example, starved his daughter to death on his salary. Under such extreme conditions, officials could not afford not to be corrupt. The criminal law of the Ming Dynasty was very cruel, and the slightest act of corruption was punishable by death. Since embezzling one tael was also a death sentence, and embezzling ten thousand taels was also a death sentence, then why not embezzle ten thousand taels and then use it to dredge up relations? Thus, the local embezzlement of a large amount of silver, officials around the world to keep a part of themselves, the big head to the umbrella of the higher-ups, the higher-ups in the give to hand over to the central government of the bigwigs, and finally to their respective party leaders. After one layer of exploitation, only a small part of the money and grain can really enter the Taicang. Similarly, the court issued to the victims of the money and grain, but also as a method of layer by layer exploitation. Chongzhen years, there have been a lot of victims flooded into the capital. Chongzhen ordered to use their own private money to relieve the victims. As a result, the accounts allocated 100,000 taels of gold and silver, but only relief of thousands of victims. 10 two silver can not save 1 person, know that an elite frontiersman January is only two two monthly money. The emperor's private money, or at the foot of the emperor, have dared to take at least 90%. Those real public money, and far away from the frontier "high mountains and the emperor is far away", can be imagined how much will be embezzled. Many soldiers said that they did not get one or two pieces of silver for several years Constantly increasing military expenses If corrupt officials and unreasonable tax system made the Ming Dynasty's financial income precarious. If the corrupt officials and irrational tax system made the Ming Dynasty's financial income precarious, then the war with the eight banners and the roving bandits was the one that drained the Ming Dynasty's blood. Around Salhu, the Ming Dynasty started to collect "Liao Rates" on a large scale to cope with the rising Hou Jin regime. The first large-scale collection of Liao's wages was in the forty-sixth year of the Wanli reign. With the outbreak of the Battle of Salhu, the Ming Dynasty's border military expenditure skyrocketed to 3.81 million taels of silver. However, the revenue of the Taicang that year was only 3.89 million taels. In desperation, Wanli issued 100,000 taels of private money and borrowed 500,000 taels from Nanjing for military expenses. However, compared to the bottomless pit of Liaodong battlefield, this amount of military pay is like a drop in the bucket. Therefore, the Ming Dynasty ordered a tax increase and spread the military expenses to the lower class people. Discounting the provinces of Sichuan, Hunan and Guizhou, which were held back by the Miao uprising, more than a dozen other provinces had their taxes increased. In one fell swoop, the Ming Dynasty raided more than two million taels of military expenses and sent them to the Liaodong battlefield. With the battle of Salhu, it ended with the defeat of the Ming army. The money naturally went down the drain. The newly appointed Liaodong Secretary General still needed large sums of money for military expenses. The Ministry of Revenue requested Emperor Wanli to release private money to rescue the military in Liaodong. Unfortunately, Emperor Wanli was famous for his miserliness and refused to release the money. In desperation, the Ministry of Revenue had to order a second tax increase, adding "three and a half percent" per mu of land on top of the original tax, and the first tax increase. A **** raised four million taels, plus the original tax increase, the annual expenditure of the Liaodong Ming Army increased to eight million taels of silver. The Liaodong Ming army was purely an army that was staggered out with money By the 48th year of the Wanli reign, the Ministry of Public Works requested the court to release the settling-in fee, horse-raising fee, and equipment fee for the soldiers at the front line. This forced the Ming Dynasty to make a third tax increase and received 5.2 million taels of silver. The common people received a tax increase of "nine percent" per mu. According to the estimation of later scholars, the Ming Dynasty spent more than 40 million taels in Liaodong before and after ****. This figure is equivalent to the sum of the total financial revenue of the Ming Dynasty for 12 years, or the best years. If you use Zhang Juzheng reforms before the annual income measure, then the Ming Dynasty in the premise of no other expenditure, but also to 20 years to come up with this military pay. Considered solely from a financial point of view, Manchuria is really right to destroy the Ming In addition to the "Liao pay" for the female Zhenren, Chongzhen years also for the elimination of roving bandits taxed heavily. Such as in Chongzhen ten years, in order to meet the strategic intent of Yang Sichang. Ming dynasty ordered, levy suppression pay, a **** increase in taxes collected 2.8 million taels of silver. After that, Yang Sichang also proposed to let each place to train their own troops, the court subsidized part of the cost. In order to pay for this army training, the Ming Dynasty once again increased the tax and called it "practice pay". The suppression of pay + practice pay a **** cost the Ming Dynasty 7.3 million taels of silver, greatly accelerating the demise of the Ming Dynasty. And the large amount of assessed taxes also intensified social conflicts. The farmers at the bottom could not afford to pay the tax, and had to sell their land to the tax-avoiding scholar, or simply abandoned their land and fled with their families. The latter continued to gather, and eventually set off a force strong enough to destroy the Ming Dynasty.