Chapter 80 Section 4 Foreign Language Inquisition

At this point, we might as well take a break and introduce a very interesting type of literary inquisition in the history of Chinese literary inquisition: foreign literary inquisition. Zhu Yuanzhang not only paid deep attention to the notes of his own courtiers, but also the notes from foreign countries.Therefore, for the first time in Chinese history, the literary inquisition went out of the country and into the world. In the twenty-fifth year of Hongwu, Li Chenggui deposed the king of Goryeo and stood on his own. He respectfully went to the court and asked Zhu Yuanzhang to give him a country title.Zhu Yuanzhang approved him to use the "North Korea" national title, and Li Chenggui quickly sent Li Tian, ​​a civil servant, as an envoy to thank him for changing the national title.In the thank you table, in order to show respect, Li Chenggui did not dare to use the name of the king of North Korea, but used the title of "power to know state affairs". Li Tian was pressed to the ground and beaten severely, "Bang Tian almost died." When he returned to North Korea, he was not given a horse to ride, and he was asked to bear the pain and walk home.

Li Chenggui was even more frightened when he learned of this, so he sent someone to apologize. He explained in the "Apology Form": "The small country is remote and remote, and I can't speak, I don't know much, and I have a rough handwriting. , It’s just about things. It’s not well-versed in production, so it makes mistakes, so I dare to be arrogant.” That is to say, the cultural level of the Korean country is not high, and they are not familiar with the document format of the Ming Dynasty. This mistake was definitely not intentional.Only then did Zhu Yuanzhang spare him.

Not long after this incident, the Korean New Year's note in the 29th year of Hongwu was in trouble again.Zhu Yuanzhang believed that there were "insulting words", "frivolous insults" and "a lot of inappropriate words" in the form, so he detained the North Korean envoys and refused to return to China, and ordered North Korea to immediately bring the person who drafted the form to interrogate him.North Korea immediately honestly sent the author Jin Ruoheng to Nanjing, and said in a letter to the Ministry of Rites of the Ming Dynasty: Xiaobang lived in seclusion overseas, and his voice and language were not similar to Chinese, so he had to rely on general translation, learned the meaning of the text, learned superficially, and his wording was crude.How dare you pretend to be a playful insult to cause provocation.

That is to say, due to the language barrier, translation is necessary, so the mistake of "frivolous words" was not intentional, please forgive me. This turmoil has not been dealt with yet, and then another note caused trouble.In the first month of the twenty-ninth year of Hongwu, Li Chenggui sent Mr. Zheng to China to ask Daming to grant them imperial orders and seals.The allusions of King Zhou of the Shang Dynasty were quoted in the table. After reading it, Zhu Yuanzhang thought it was satirizing him, so he said: "Recently, it is very rude to quote Zhou's events in the letter of request for seals and orders. Return. If you send all the writers and correctors, the envoy will return." Order North Korea to escort the author and proofreaders of the note to China for questioning.The envoy Zheng Zong also had bad luck. Zhu Yuanzhang not only detained him, but also "sent people to take his family" and ordered people to go to North Korea to escort his family to China.

As a result of these two literary inquisitions, Mr. Zheng and the authors of the table, Jin Ruoheng and Lu Rendu, were all beheaded by Zhu Yuanzhang.Zhu Yuanzhang also taught Li Chenggui this way in the imperial decree: "Nowadays, between the two countries, scholars are always teasing, and they are not upright or upright. If small things are big, everything must be sincere. Upright and upright, where the sun rises and where it sets, the world is just one sun. head." Li Chenggui usurped the throne as a powerful minister, and desperately hoped to be recognized by Zhu Yuanzhang, so he always respected Zhu Yuanzhang, swallowed his anger, and tried his best to please him.No matter from which point of view, it is impossible for him to deliberately satirize Zhu Yuanzhang in the expression.Zhu Yuanzhang's serious criticism of foreign essays can only show that his psychopathy has reached a very extreme level.