I

The four townships occupied by Zhao Han were quickly abolished. Anyway, "township" is just a geographical concept.

All territories were changed to eight towns.

Each town has a central village and four natural villages. Zhao Han rules a total of forty villages.

These villages have also been redefined and their areas have been expanded. One big surname is mixed with many small surnames to prevent one surname from having an absolute advantage in a certain village.

Try to break the clan influence as much as possible!

Although the big landowners were either killed or forced to separate their families. However, the same surname has dominated the village for a long time, and new clan forces will inevitably form over time. Zhao Han cannot prevent this from happening, but he can work hard to delay its emergence!

There were not enough officials at the grassroots level, and they were busy clearing land and allocating land, as well as making administrative divisions. Chaos reigned throughout the winter.

The candidate provided by Mr. Xiao was not willing to become a thief in the first place, and suffered from high-intensity work, so he gave up the job. He felt that he was overqualified for his talents, and that he was a high-ranking official, but he had to deal with mud-legged people all day long, and even had to deal with women. This was simply an insult to him.

Li Banghua and Ouyang Zhan walked around in various villages and towns every day, accompanied by a few soldiers.

"Stop it quickly, you have something to say!"

Several preachers ran quickly and passed by Li Banghua and Ouyang Zhan, because there was a fight in the fields ahead.

During the period of dividing the fields, there would be fights every now and then.

Sometimes villagers beat public officials because they suspected there was something wrong with the allocation of land.

Sometimes due to disputes over farm boundaries, villagers fight against each other.

Ouyang Zheng gloated and sneered: "Zhao Thief is just messing around. Many villages and towns have been messed up these days."

Li Banghua had been just watching and talking, but at this moment he finally couldn't help himself: "Xianwen, you are a child prodigy, do you really think that Zhao Thief is carrying out chaos?"

Ouyang Zheng was dejected, buried his head in silence for a long time, and sighed: "Oh, I can only think like this when I am a late student, why should I still clap my hands and cheer?"

The two continued to move forward and soon came to the place where the trouble was taking place.

However, the villagers suspected that there was something wrong with the land allocation, so the preacher led the villagers to reorganize the land, and it turned out that it was the landowners who were messing around.

One of the two people in charge of the land is from the Xiao family and the other is from the Liu family. The two cheated together, giving more points to their respective tribesmen and less points to other villagers, bullying the villagers for not knowing how to count.

"take away!"

The propaganda officer directly arrested the person and handed him over to the Criminal Division officials for processing.

"Good catch!"

"Catch him and chop his head off!"

The villagers clapped their hands and cheered, no longer watching the division of fields, and escorted people back to review.

The preacher couldn't stop him at all. After only a few dozen steps, some villagers started beating him. When they returned to the town hall, the two cheaters in the field allocation had been beaten with bruises on their noses and faces.

Li Banghua was tired from walking and sat cross-legged on the field ridge: "Xianwen, are you a thief?"

"I would rather die than obey," Ouyang Zong said.

Li Banghua smiled bitterly: "I have been observing politics for many days, and I feel like becoming a thief."

Ouyang Zheng was shocked and said: "Sir, you can't think like this, how can you help the tyrants to commit evil?"

Li Banghua looked at the boundless fields with a bit of resentment in his tone: "The affairs here are fair and selfless, and vigorous, which makes people want to join in. If you have been an official in the imperial court, and if you have been hampered in politics, you will know the feeling of doing things. How wonderful.”

Ouyang Zheng suddenly had tears in his eyes: "What happened to the Ming Dynasty? Are the Lord Gonggun worse than rebels?"

"well!"

Li Banghua sighed: "It's hard to get back, and the building will collapse. The old house will collapse, and no one living in the house is innocent. Including me, the house has been demolished."

"Sir, he served the country uprightly and was even dismissed from office because of it. How could he feel so sorry for himself?" Ouyang Zheng was really afraid that Li Banghua was a thief.

Li Banghua pulled out a piece of dead grass from the field ridge, held it in his hand and played with it: "Before I passed the Jinshi examination, my family sold land for many years, and only six acres of land were left. When my grandmother passed away, there was no coffin, so she was buried secretly wrapped in straw. . Now, my family has thousands of acres of fertile land. How did I get all this? I resigned from office and returned to my hometown, and took the initiative to hand over the land tax. I was shocked to learn that the county personally sent the grain back to my home."

Ouyang Zhan couldn't help but smile, and then put away his smile: "Even if Mr. is dismissed from office, he is still a first-class official. How can the county magistrate dare to accept the grain tax from Mr.'s family?"

"I've made inquiries in the past few days," Li Banghua said, "that Thief Zhao donated tens of thousands of acres of land to the Wuxing Town Office, but left one hundred acres behind. Is he reluctant to part with that one hundred acres of land? No. Yes. He must keep a hundred acres of land and pay the land tax to the town office on time, so that other officials will not dare to evade taxes."

Ouyang Zheng lamented: "Wan Sheng keeps scolding that thief Zhao, but in my heart I still admire him."

Li Banghua said: "In the imperial land of Gyeonggi, when Emperor Chengzu was in power, he had to pay land taxes every year. Chengzu set an example, and the emperor also had to pay taxes, so naturally the officials in the world also had to pay taxes. But after Chengzu died, the emperor's fields never paid taxes again. . Who is willing to pay for the good deeds and the deeds? "

"So there should be reforms. The Ming Dynasty needs a Zhang Taiyue (Zhang Juzheng)." Ouyang Zheng said.

"You don't understand. Zhang Taiyue's reform was mainly aimed at the south of the Yangtze River, and the people were destroyed and the government ceased." Li Banghua shook his head and said, "The people in the northwest and the people in the south of the Yangtze River are now suffering from a whip. If there is no whip, the thieves from the northwest may have been killed. We can't cause such a big mess. As for Jiangxi, there are too many gentry. If my family doesn't pay for food, how can other families pay for it? If the gentry doesn't pay for food, how can the treasury not be empty?"

Ouyang Zong said: "So we still have to change, completely change."

"It's impossible to change things from the top down," Li Banghua pointed to the land that was cleared away. "It has to be from the bottom up, so that we can reverse the situation. If Zhao Thief can persist for two or three years, half of Jiangxi will be his." Yes, by then it will become a powerful force that cannot be lost!"

Ouyang Zheng said: "Zhao thieves kill landlords indiscriminately, and they will never succeed."

Li Banghua said with a smile: "The landowner who was willing to donate his land did not kill indiscriminately. If he really killed indiscriminately, I wouldn't have to worry."

Li Zicheng has never been able to recruit scholars because, as a bandit, he has no base to speak of. Everywhere he went, he would extort wages, kill landlords and steal food, and coerce the people into fleeing.

How can scholars take refuge in this?

Are you going to abandon your own business and run away with Li Zicheng?

Zhao Han is different. He has a base and he won't leave.

The landlord's property is all on Zhao Han's territory. Anyone who doesn't want to die can only bite the bullet and become a thief.

Ouyang Zheng looked back at the soldiers behind him and asked in a low voice: "Why doesn't the imperial court send a large army to conquer the Zhao thieves?"

Li Banghua said: "There is no money and no soldiers. The food and salary of the soldiers in the imperial court are either used to deal with the bandits or the Tatars. Jiangxi bandits can only be suppressed by local officials. Which local official do you think can defeat the Zhao thieves?" Suppressed?"

Ouyang Zhan had a flash of inspiration: "We can ask the gentry to organize the team training!"

"That's also a way," Li Banghua immediately shook his head, "Firstly, the court will not allow the gentry to organize group training; secondly, if local group training is allowed, the Ming Dynasty will exist in name only."

Ouyang Zheng was silent.

Li Banghua didn't know what to say. The more he saw the anti-thief policy, the more he had the urge to surrender to the thieves. But he cannot surrender to the thieves. He is the former Minister of War, and his father and brother are still under the rule of the Ming Dynasty.

The two walked around the countryside and returned to Yongyang Town together.

Zhao Han's ruling center has moved from Wuxing Town, and Yongyang Town is now the core base.

Above the Eighth Town Office is Zhao Han's General Military Mansion, which handles military and political affairs, somewhat similar to Zhu Yuanzhang in the Yingtian period.

Pang Chunlai was the chief civil servant, Fei Ruhe was the chief military officer, Xiao Huan was in charge of military logistics, Zuo Xiaoliang was in charge of civil affairs, Fei Chun was in charge of money and food affairs, Chen Maosheng was in charge of missionary work, and Huang Shunfu was transferred to the mayor of Yongyang Town.

The above seven people are the core team.

The talents contributed by the big families of the Xiao family are still in the probation period. The only Juren could no longer bear the heavy workload and did not want to deal with the weak-legged people, so he resigned and went home to study.

Only the children of wealthy families who have endured this difficult stage and performed well can truly gain Zhao Han's recognition.

Can a scholar or a scholar surrender to a thief and be reused immediately?

Beautiful thought!

When passing by the town public school, he heard the sound of reading aloud in the school. Li Banghua couldn't help but stop and listen for a while.

Ouyang Zheng said: "This Zhao thief is really hard to describe. He actually knows how to run a large school."

More than just a big school, Li Banghua didn't know how to describe it.

Although Zhao Han stole a lot of money and grain, he still had to resettle the bandits who were returning home one after another, and the homeless people who joined the army in the city. He also bought a lot of corn and sweet potato seeds.

The money and food are gradually running out, and they can only last until next summer's grain harvest.

Even so, Zhao Han still squeezed out money and food to set up official schools in every town, equivalent to two public schools in one township in the Ming Dynasty.

Not only tuition fees are waived, but all school-age children are also provided with a free lunch.

Parents who do not send their children to study will be fined if found out!

Zhao Han even recruited a group of old-style schoolchildren, that is, scholars who could not even pass the college entrance examination, and personally taught these people "Western arithmetic". It is estimated that in a few months, these old-style schoolchildren will be able to master the four arithmetic operations proficiently and be assigned to work as mathematics teachers in public schools in various towns.

When we returned to our residence, it was already noon, and the soldiers brought us food.

It was all mediocre food, but Li Banghua could still accept it. After all, he didn't even have enough to eat when he was young.

Ouyang Zhan was fed up with the food. He was a member of a wealthy family and had lived in fine clothes since he was a child. He was suffering from sour water these days and nights.

Sometimes, Ouyang Zhan even thought that if the Zhao thieves treated him with more respect, he would probably be willing to join the thieves.

"Can't eat it?" Li Banghua said with a smile.

"I'll get used to it soon." Ouyang Zhan could only say, and then he had to eat hard.

Li Banghua chewed the multi-grain bran cake, swallowed it with difficulty with the vegetable soup, and said with emotion: "I heard people say that even Zhao Thief himself eats this kind of thing every day. He doesn't even eat cakes in the morning, only porridge. Pickles. Now that money and food are in short supply, all officials have to tighten their belts before the summer grain harvest."

Ouyang Zheng laughed and said, "It's just a trick to deceive the common people."

"I do believe it," Li Banghua said, "This thief has great ambitions and is not a person who is greedy for enjoyment. There is only one maid in his house to serve... well, he said she is a maid, and she is also a maid with poor appearance. In addition, there is There is a woman who washes and cooks rice. She has been revolting for almost a year, but she is still not a womanizer. What's so strange about her daily meager diet?"

Ouyang Zheng put away his smile and took a hard bite of the bran cake: "This thief has great ambitions and strategies. If he can serve as an official in the court, he will definitely become a minister of the country."

Li Banghua shook his head and said: "The current Chief Minister Wen is also very incorruptible. He does not live in a big house, does not like women, has few slaves, and is simple in food and clothing. In terms of personal ethics, Wen Tiren can be called a great sage."

"This is a blessing for the imperial court." Ouyang Zheng said.

But Li Banghua said: "Wen Tiren not only has noble personal ethics, but also has a photographic memory. He can easily handle no matter how complicated the official affairs are. He can remember the name and place of birth of a minor official whom he has only met once. In terms of personal ethics, I am not as good as me. Wen Tiren; in terms of ability, I am not as good as Wen Tiren. If Wen Tiren had been born in the early years of the country, he would have been a wise prime minister! However, since the new king came to the throne, Wen Tiren has not done anything serious."

Ouyang Zheng was stunned and said in disbelief: "How could this be?"

"When you do good things, you will definitely make mistakes," Li Banghua said. "It was because of what I did that I was dismissed from office and returned home."

Ouyang Zhan used to look down on local officials, but after hearing what Li Banghua said, he felt that the Ming Dynasty was hopeless.

He ate the pancakes seriously and went for a walk in the village in the afternoon. Ouyang Zong couldn't sleep at night.

Early the next morning, Ouyang Zheng ran to find Li Banghua: "Sir, I want to be a thief."

Li Banghua said: "It's up to you."

Ouyang Zheng was afraid that Li Banghua would be angry, so he explained: "When a man is alive, he must do something. I heard from my husband about the situation in the court, and I really can't see a future for late students. Even if they are named on the gold list for late students, they are just making wood in the court. It is better to follow the Zhao family." Where’s the thief?”

"Go, go." Li Banghua did not stop him.

Ouyang Zheng cupped his hands and said, "Sir, farewell!"

The rebels all had to give themselves a false name. Zhao Han changed his name to Zhao Yan, and Ouyang Zheng changed his name directly to Ou Zhen.

After this guy became a thief, he was never reused. He was just thrown to Yongfu Town to help divide the fields.

Ouyang Zheng did not feel disappointed because he had watched politics for many years and knew that as long as he did well, he would be promoted quickly.

Seeing that the New Year was coming, Li Banghua couldn't help it.

He was really idle. He couldn't find a good book to read here and had nothing to do all day long. The neighboring villages and towns were in full swing, and Li Banghua wanted to join in.

Because Zhao Han was doing serious things, things that Li Banghua had always wanted to do but couldn't do.

On the twenty-eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, Li Banghua went to see Zhao Han and wanted to have a heart-to-heart debate.