Chapter 81 Chapter 81: The Truth of the World’s Biggest Case

When we go to the store to buy things, go to restaurants to eat, and stay in hotels, we will see capitalized Chinese numbers when issuing invoices, such as "one, two, three, hundred, thousand, ten thousand" and so on.The capitalization of Chinese numerals is indeed an important measure at the technical level, plugging a loophole in the account book, so it is still used to this day.However, do you know how the capitalization of Chinese characters is produced?This is about the biggest case in the world—the Guo Huan case during the Hongwu period in the early Ming Dynasty. The capitalization of Chinese characters and numbers is an unexpected result of this major anti-corruption case.

The reason why the Guo Huan case is called the largest case in the world is because the amount involved in this case is huge, the scope involved is wide, the number of people involved is large, and the impact it has caused is the largest in the world.Although the world's largest case has long been settled, there are still some complicated and confusing things that need to be discussed by you and me. The iceberg is emerging It happened like this. In 1385 AD, that is, the eighteenth year of Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang Hongwu, Yu Min and Ding Tingju, the two ministers of the State Supervision Department (censors), sued the Deputy Minister of Finance (Household Minister) Guo Huan for colluding with the Beiping Provincial Government (called the Chief Secretary at the time) ) official Zhao Quande embezzled national tax and sold official food.The indictment listed Guo Huan's five major crimes:

The first article, Guo Huan and others colluded with local officials to privately divide the tax revenue and autumn grain of five prefectures (states) including Yingtian and Zhenjiang. Article 2, Guo Huan and others accepted 500,000 guan bribes from local officials and allowed them to privately distribute 1.9 million dans of autumn grain in western Zhejiang. Article 3: When the corrupt officials headed by Guo Huan collected imperial grain and national taxes, they set up clever names to disturb the people and harm the people. Custodian) money, money in cattail baskets, money in bamboo baskets, and money from gods and Buddhas along the river.

Article 4: Guo Huan and others received bribes from wealthy households such as Xu Tianqing in five prefectures (states) including Yingtian and Zhenjiang, and privately exempted them from their horse grass (fodder needed for war horses), and passed the burden on to those who had already paid for the horse grass. Anqing people. Article 5: Corrupt officials headed by Guo Huan mixed water into grains and beans to increase the amount of catties, causing a large amount of official grains to rot. . Within a few years, Guo Huan and others had embezzled, stolen and sold official grains that were mixed with water, causing a total of 24 million grain losses to the Ming Dynasty, which was equivalent to the annual income of the entire country at that time.As a result, Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang, who was born as a poor farmer and knew that "food is the first thing for the people", was furious. He immediately set up a Guo Huan case team headed by Wu Yong, the vice president of the State Procuratorate (right judge).

all damage Guo Huan and other principal criminals could not keep their heads. At the same time, the investigation of their accomplices was carried out across the country, and Zhu Yuanzhang's "iron-blooded emperor" momentum and methods were once again vividly displayed on the stage of history. Obviously, Zhu Yuanzhang believed that it might be unfair to pull the officials out to form a row and shoot them with machine guns, but if they were to be killed every other, there would definitely be fish that slipped through the net.Under the domination of this idea, in order to ensure that all evils are eradicated, he adopted the theory of the Kuomintang to kill the Communist Party beyond the times-it is better to kill a thousand by mistake than let one person slip through the net.

Under strict investigation, Zhu Yuanzhang found that almost all the officials of the six ministries had become Guo Huan's accomplices.Among them are Minister of Culture (Minister of Rites) Zhao Mao, Minister of Justice (Ministry of Punishment) Wang Huidi, Vice Minister of National Defense (Military Minister) Wang Zhi, Vice Minister of Construction (Ministry of Industry) Mai Zhide, and other ministerial-level dignitaries. There are countless rotten fish and shrimps below.After this case, there were only a few people left in a ministry, and the minister almost became a bare-bones commander. This is probably unprecedented in world history.

Officials in the central government were the first to fall under the fast-moving anti-corruption hurricane, and local officials, of course, could not escape the high-quality fishing net woven by the emperor himself in the end.Zhu Yuanzhang asked to use the stolen money and bribery as a line to continue the strict investigation all the way, until the original briber was traced.The final result was shocking. Officials from all twelve provincial governments of the Ming Empire were involved in the Guo Huan case. Zhu Yuanzhang’s anger can be imagined, and he ordered that the province (chief secretary), city (government) involved in the case Officials at all levels, county (prefecture and county, the state was roughly equivalent to county-level cities at that time) and wealthy households who paid bribes were all shackled and sent to death row. What awaited them was the bloody ghost head held up high by the executioner on the execution ground Knife.

According to "History of Ming Dynasty Criminal Law Records", in Guo Huan's case, "From the left and right servants of the six departments, seven million stolen goods, Ci Lianzhi, and provincial officials, tens of thousands of dead... The home of the people in the people Mostly all broken."That is to say, tens of thousands of people from the left and right ministers of the six central departments, Zhili and other provinces were implicated in this case and were imprisoned and executed. rabbit dead dog cooking In the case of Guo Huan, tens of thousands of officials were killed. Most of them were convicted of crimes and deserved it, but there are also some who were wronged and died.Among them, the most wronged is the person who was finally pushed to the guillotine. Who is he?You can't guess it anyway, because the answer is too incredible and unexpected.

The "iron and blood policy" adopted by Zhu Yuanzhang in the case of Guo Huan caused great uneasiness and dissatisfaction among the scholar-official class and the rich people. , and the judiciary tortured to extract a confession, and as a result, the innocent were tortured into tricks, resulting in an unjust case.In order to calm people's hearts and quell public anger, Zhu Yuanzhang needed to find a "sheep" to take the responsibility for him. After many searches, this painful and deadly hat was finally worn on the head of Wu Yong, the chief prosecutor of the State Procuratorate who was in charge of the case. As a result, Wu Yong became the last official to be killed because of the Guo Huan case, and he died so badly that he was executed by Ling Chi (that is, as the folks call it, he was hacked to death by a thousand swords). "The king wants the minister to die, and the minister has to die." Wu Yong's ending is really sighing and thought-provoking.

After that, Zhu Yuanzhang issued an imperial decree to amnesty the world, announcing that the Guo Huan case was over and would not be pursued in the future.This is the end of the world's largest case, but Zhu Yuanzhang's anti-corruption storm did not end here. Severe law against corruption Zhu Yuanzhang's use of heavy codes is a somewhat excessive correction of the lax and corrupt habits of officialdom since the Yuan Dynasty.Zhu Yuanzhang often said that we live in troubled times and have to use heavy codes.In order to fight against corruption and punish corruption, Zhu Yuanzhang stipulated that if the stolen money reaches more than sixty taels of silver, the offender must be decapitated and skinned for public display.At that time, there was a land temple near the county seat, which was called the "pichang temple" as a place for skinning and execution.The stripped criminals' skins were stuffed with weeds and hung next to the seats in the government court as a warning.The subsequent officials working here are all shocking and heart-wrenching.

In fact, for the officials who were destined to die back then, beheading was already the best destination. There were countless punishments worse than beheading. Zhu Yuanzhang was quite talented in how to kill people.At that time, in addition to Ling Chi's execution, there were also death punishments such as washing, iron brushing, owl orders, weighing rods, and pumping intestines. The torture that makes life worse than death, for a while, the officialdom in the early Ming Dynasty was like a "living hell", so that Lu Xun still expressed emotion about it hundreds of years later: the punishment is so cruel, it makes people feel that it is not in the world. Zhu Yuanzhang was indeed too cruel to corrupt officials, evil gentry and local tyrants, but he was sympathetic to the people at the bottom of society.Under his anti-corruption storm, the atmosphere in the officialdom was new compared with that at the end of the Yuan Dynasty.