Emperor Wanli is the emperor. At that time, the whole world was his treasure, and he was not ready to use it. But Emperor Wanli seems to think otherwise. He must fill his personal money Ku with real money to feel at ease. In order to achieve the goal of collecting money, he did everything he could and came up with many absurd ideas. For example, he often tries his best to find various excuses to order government departments to pay tribute to him. His concubine gave birth to a daughter, and the Ministry of Family Affairs and Guangci Temple offered him 100,000 taels of silver to celebrate. When the princess gets married, she will ask for hundreds of thousands of taels of silver as a dowry, and when the prince gets married, she will give more.
However, he is not completely non-negotiable. The official committed a crime. If they offer him money, they will be "generous", but if they are stubborn, don't blame him for being impolite. There was a eunuch named Zhang Whale who committed the great crime of deceiving the monarch and should be beheaded according to law. But because he is very clever, it is actually a trivial matter to present a large amount of gold and silver treasures to Wanli in time. He was not convicted, but was promoted to an official position. At that time, a courtier wrote directly to the emperor on this matter, saying that he accepted bribes from the minister of the interior with the respect of the son of heaven, which was really indecent. The emperor was very angry and immediately punished the official.
Emperor Wanli's "open source and reduce expenditure" later developed to the extreme. By the end of Wanli, two-thirds of local officials in counties and counties across the country were vacant. Some people are old, dead or just officials, and that position has been vacant since then, and no new officials have been sent to take office. The six ministries of North Korea are actually the highest administrative organs of the country, but only three ministries are headed by ministers, and only one person holds a post in the highest decision-making organ of the country at a time. The emperor refused to send new officials to these vacant positions, so that he could save a lot of money. However, this method has almost paralyzed state institutions and reduced the number of officials in the country by more than half. This is a way of "cutting expenses". As for "open source", the way that Emperor Wanli came up with was to send a large number of eunuchs to act as "mine supervisors" and "tax collectors" and wantonly search for the people's wealth. This is the famous "monopoly disaster" in history.
These mines are extremely fierce. They nominally mine to increase taxes, but in fact they don't explore or mine at all, but call the land mines at will. The disaster of the defendant's family can only be solved by offering gold, silver and jewels, otherwise it will be torn down, dug up, turned over, even robbed of property, insulted by women and killed at will.
Others use the excuse of looking for mines, digging graves and finding funerary objects. This is an open flame, worse than a robber. At that time, there was a mine supervisor named Chen Feng, one of the most notorious mine supervisors in Wan Li. When he was in Jingzhou and Xingguo, he often beat officials and robbed pedestrians on the pretext of patrolling everywhere, causing public outrage. Once he was surrounded by thousands of people on his patrol. After he fled back to Jingzhou, he went to the emperor, framed the local government and incited rebellion. After all, he immediately sent someone to investigate.
Later, mine supervisors spread all over Shanxi, Shandong, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Yunnan, Fujian, Guangdong, Hubei and other places, and the people of the whole country suffered greatly.
In the thirty years of Wanli, Emperor Wanli was very ill, thinking that he was going to die, and wanted to leave a good reputation after his death, so he made a testament and stopped levying mining tax. Unexpectedly, he miraculously came back to life a few hours later. The first thing he did when he opened his eyes was to send someone to the cabinet to retrieve the testamentary edict. More than twenty people conveyed the news of the emperor back and forth, saying that the mining tax must not stop. As a result, the "tax curse" has not been abolished.
In the forty-eighth year of Wanli, in the suicide note of Wanli, the matter of stopping tax collection was mentioned again. However, it is too late. The Ming dynasty was extremely weak. Although the Ming Dynasty ruled for more than 20 years after his death, many scholars believe that the decline and fall of the Ming Dynasty actually began in the Wanli period.