He Shen’s property is so amazing, why is the first major corruption case in the Qing Dynasty in Baidu Encyclopedia Gansu rice case? The nature of the
Gansu rice case is too bad.
If you think about it, Gansu Province, from the governor and the governor, down to the seven-grade county magistrate and ordinary officials, colluded with each other, and no one was not greedy, scaring Qianlong round and round.
This should be the largest case of obtaining state special funds in history.
In the end, the exiles were killed and exiled, and the officialdom in Gansu was almost empty. The
incident occurred during the reign of Emperor Qianlong.
A donation act accidentally uncovered a shocking corruption case that had been covered up for seven or eight years. In the 46th year of
Emperor Qianlong’s reign (1781), after Wang Tingzan, the governor of Gansu Province, personally donated 40,000 taels of silver to support the country’s war, Emperor Qianlong, who had always been very sensitive to figures, not only failed to praise Wang Tingzan, but also sent someone to investigate his source of income.
As soon as they investigated, they discovered “strange and strange things that had never happened before.” Even Qianlong himself said that he was shocked. The biggest group corruption case in the
Qing Dynasty gradually surfaced. In March of
that year, the Su-43 Uprising broke out in Gansu. There were eight hundred defenders in the city of
Lanzhou, and they lost three hundred in the first World War.
Qianlong was furious and directly removed the governor of Shaanxi and Gansu from his post. As soon as the
news spread, the local officials in Gansu were trembling and in a constant state of anxiety. Wang Tingzan, the governor of
Gansu Province, was equivalent to the executive vice governor in charge of civil affairs and finance, and he was afraid that he would suffer.
He went to Qianlong’s trusted followers and Heshen, who was sent to Gansu to supervise the battle with Agui, to seek countermeasures.
Wang Tingzan had a good personal relationship with Heshen, and every time he went to the capital, he had to send silver to Heshen.
He Shen advised Wang Tingzan to “destroy wealth and eliminate disasters,” and asked him to hand over some silver to subsidize the soldiers’ salaries in order to win the favor of the emperor.
Wang Tingzan then took the initiative to present a memorial to Qianlong, the gist of which was as follows: The country was at the time of war, and the expenses were huge. I was willing to donate the 40,000 taels of salary I had saved over the years to pay for the army.
Unexpectedly, Qianlong himself was a very shrewd and data-sensitive emperor. When he
saw Wang Tingzan’s sincerity, he threw away the memorial to the throne and asked directly, “Wang Tingzan was only the governor of Gansu, so why did he have enough money?”?
The plot is always not well understood.
It means that Gansu is a very poor place, and a governor has such a rich family fortune that he can sell 40,000 taels. The water is very deep, and we must thoroughly investigate it.
Qianlong immediately ordered a Gui, a university scholar in Gansu, and Li Shiyao, the acting governor of Shaanxi and Gansu, to investigate Wang Tingzan together and report back according to the facts.
Qianlong reacted so quickly because he thought of another person: the former governor of Gansu Province and the current governor of Zhejiang Province.
Last year, in the forty-fifth year of Qianlong (1780), Qianlong made his fifth southern tour.
Wang Kuiwang welcomed the emperor and arranged the Zhejiang line in a luxurious way, which was reprimanded by Qianlong.
Who would have thought that after the southern tour, the officials of several provinces and prefectures in Zhejiang broke out the case of corruption by taking advantage of the emperor’s southern tour. Qianlong seriously suspected that Wang Kuiwang, as the chief official of Zhejiang, was also involved in corruption.
Wang Kuiwang knew that Qianlong suspected himself, and in order to express his sincerity, he quickly donated 500,000 taels of silver to the Zhejiang seawall project.
Things are so coincidental, how can two governors of Gansu be so rich?
This aroused deep suspicion in Qianlong.
At this time, a Gui, who was in the front line to suppress the rebellion, mentioned many times in his military newspaper to Qianlong that it was rainy in Gansu, which made it difficult to March.
After Qianlong got the report, he recalled that in the past few years, both Wang Kuiwang and Wang Tingzan said in their memorials that there was no rain in Gansu and that there was often severe drought, which required local and imperial governments to allocate food for disaster relief.
Even the weather doesn’t match. There must be something fishy about it. As soon as
several key details were connected, Qianlong ordered people to thoroughly investigate the disaster relief situation in Gansu. Headed
by Wang Kuiwang, the two governors of Gansu colluded with officials of the whole province to form an alliance of interests in the name of disaster relief, conspired to cheat, and wantonly engaged in corruption, involving more than 100 governors, governors, and officials of provinces, prefectures, prefectures, and counties, and the amount of money involved was as high as more than 10 million taels.
With regard to “the first major corruption case of the Qing Dynasty,” Qianlong once commented helplessly: “No one knows that the king of Gansu Province wanted to violate the grain supervision system, but the matter was not exposed, and no one was the first to discover it. It can be seen that the provincial officials protected each other and were unbreakable, which was really chilling.
Second, the Dawo case began in the 39th year of the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1774), and the truth was hidden for seven or eight years. During this period, many officials were transferred or promoted to leave Gansu, but no one reported it from beginning to end.
The matter originated from the “donation prison.”.
The imperial examination was the main channel for people to become officials in the Qing Dynasty, but it was not the only channel.
Some people failed to pass the imperial examination and were unable to pass the imperial examination to enter the official career. They could also obtain the qualification of Jiansheng (students of the Imperial College) by donating money or food, which was called “donation to the Imperial College.”. After
becoming a supervisor, he enjoyed the same rights as a scholar. He could directly take part in the provincial examination and enter the officialdom. He could also rely on the qualification of a supervisor to further increase his official position. He could become an official without even taking the examination.
In this way, we all know that the donation of prison is a shortcut for wealthy children to enter the official career.
This not only affects the normal official selection system of the country and creates social injustice, but also easily breeds corruption and corrupts the officialdom and social atmosphere.
Therefore, the Qing Dynasty, like the former Dynasty, had many restrictions on donation and supervision, which were usually only implemented on a small scale.
Even so, after Qianlong ascended the pole, he still felt that the influence was not good and ordered the whole country to stop the implementation of donation.
However, for a poor province like Gansu, after stopping the donation, the local finance has lost a large part of its income.
In order to solve the local famine and the problem of food for the army and the people, the Ministry of the Interior allocated more than 1 million taels of silver to Gansu every year.
In the thirty-ninth year of the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1774), the governor of Shaanxi and Gansu, Leerjin, requested the emperor to restore the system of donation and supervision in some of the poorest prefectures and counties in Gansu. The reason was that the people in Gansu were poor and often suffered from famine, and the people had to rely on the government’s assistance to survive, while the grain reserves in the official warehouses of Gansu had always been insufficient. The grain reserve of the official granary was not a problem, and the court could save more than 1 million taels of financial transfer expenditure a year.
At that time, Yu Minzhong, a university scholar, was in charge of the Ministry of the Interior.
Yu Minzhong thinks it is feasible.
Qianlong then followed Yu Minzhong’s advice and agreed to resume the donation in some areas of Gansu.
But because the trick of donating prison is too big, Qianlong especially told Le’erjin: first, silver is relatively more likely to breed corruption, so donating prison can only donate food, not silver; second, if there is a problem in the process, you must ask Le’erjin.
In order to ensure that the donation of Gansu became a good thing for the country and the people, and did not deteriorate, Qianlong personally selected a person to take charge of this matter in Gansu.
This man was Wang Kuiwang, the governor of Zhejiang and acting governor of Zhejiang.
Wang Qiangwang’s roots are red.
His father, Wang Shi, was a model of honest and clean government set up by Qianlong. He was the governor of Jiangsu Province and was well-known in the officialdom and among the people.
Wang Kuiwang himself was born in Juren, but failed to pass the Jinshi examination, so he entered the official career by donating money. The starting point of
his official career was when he was a county magistrate in Gansu Province, and he was praised for his honesty, diligence and donation of funds to set up schools.
All the way from Shandan (now under the jurisdiction of Zhangye City, Gansu Province) to Gaolan (now under the jurisdiction of Lanzhou City, Gansu Province), he worked as the prefect of Lanzhou, and was promoted to the governor of Zhejiang Province, acting as the governor of Zhejiang Province, with a prosperous official career.
Wang Kuiwang had an audience with the emperor twice, and Qianlong spoke highly of him. For
the first time, he said, “This man is promising.” For the second time, Zhu criticized, “The son of Wang Shi will be promising in the future.”.
Therefore, when Gansu resumed the practice of donating to prison, Qianlong immediately thought of this “promising” Wang Kui-wang.
Wang Kuiwang was transferred from Zhejiang to Gansu as governor.
Third, there may be some misunderstandings between the monarch and his subjects in this personnel appointment.
Qianlong’s original intention was that such an important position, which was related to the experimental field for the restoration of the donation and supervision system, must be sent to reliable and capable officials. This appointment reflects my important position for Wang Kuiwang.
But Wang Kuiwang didn’t understand it that way. Obviously, he was already the acting head of one of the richest provinces in the country. Suddenly, he was transferred to a poor province. Is this because he is not satisfied with my governing ability or what?
So after Wang Jianwang took office in Gansu, he tried his best to show his ability. In October of the 39th year of the reign of
Emperor Qianlong, only half a year after Wang Jianwang took office, Qianlong received a report from this “promising” official. According to
the report, Gansu donated 1,901.7 supervisors in six months and received 827,500 stone of grain (one stone is equivalent to about 120 Jin).
This figure startled Qianlong.
You know, in the whole year, the number of people who reported donations from the Ministry of the Interior was only 11739, and in Gansu, a poor place, there were 19017 people who donated in half a year, which was amazing.
Qianlong then asked Leerjin, the governor of Shaanxi and Gansu, the following questions, and asked him to answer them and explain them clearly.
Gansu is so poor, many people do not even have enough to eat, how can nearly 20,000 people donate to prison in half a year?
Gansu’s local grain production is not enough for local people to eat, how can there be more than 800000 stone surplus grain to donate?
If more than 800000 stone grains are collected in half a year, according to this trend, year after year, more and more official grain reserves will be stored, and then what will happen if they deteriorate?
…… Leerjin had already blended with Wang Jianwang before. In fact, these two data are both exaggerated data that Wang Jianwang has seriously injected water into. In order to prove his ability,
Wang Kuiwang wanted to claim credit through his political achievements and win promotion as soon as possible, so he exaggerated two or three times on the data of donation.
In fact, in the thirty-ninth year of Qianlong, the number of donors in Gansu was only 7455, and the income of donors was only more than 300000 stone converted into grain.
Not only did Wang Kui-wang exaggerate and make false reports, but he also persuaded Le’erjin to break through the bottom line of “donating grain but not silver,” and arbitrarily changed the donation prison to accept only silver.
Originally, each person could get the qualification of supervisor by donating 43 stones of grain, but Wang Kuiwang changed 43 stones of grain to 47 taels of silver, and charged 8 taels of silver for various management fees, totaling 55 taels of silver per person.
Wang Kuiwang did so, which showed that he had made up his mind to invade corruption.
Le Erjin did not agree at first, Wang Kuiwang said to him, instead of collecting silver, the number of donors must be greatly increased, and after collecting silver, it will be used to purchase grain and put it into the official warehouse, which is fully in line with the above requirements, no problem.
Le Erjin no longer objected.
In the face of Qianlong’s inquiry, Leer had a chance to reveal the truth, but he was afraid that he would be held accountable, so he covered up for Wang in turn.
Le’erjin reported to Qianlong that since the pacification of Xinjiang, Gansu had become the gateway for business exchanges between Xinjiang and the mainland. Businessmen had bought grain and donated it to the prison nearby for convenience. As for why there was so much surplus grain in Gansu, it was because of the protection of the emperor and the recent successive bumper harvests, so the local rich families had surplus grain for people to buy and donate to the prison. Anyway, it’s just a flicker, trying to make Qianlong limp.
Next, what Wang Kuiwang and Le’erjin wanted to solve was the third question raised by Qianlong: What should we do if we donate so much food and it goes bad after a long time?
We know that after Wang Kuiwang changed to collect silver, the donation supervisor in Gansu actually did not receive a grain of rice, only white silver.
But they need to report the lies of Qianlong, to pretend that Gansu has a lot of grain, and, in order not to reveal, they also need to digest these fictitious grain as soon as possible.
Just as it is not difficult for imperial bureaucrats to weave lies, the same is true of round lies. At the same time
as the false report of grain income, from the autumn of the 39th year of Qianlong, Wang Kuiwang began to fabricate disasters to the court, falsely reporting at least two droughts in spring and autumn every year, and asking the court for permission to release grain for disaster relief. After the incident,
according to the statement of Funing, who was the inspector of Gansu at that time, in the process of fabricating the disaster situation and releasing grain for relief, Wang Kuiwang’s brilliant move was to let Jiang Quandi, his confidant and prefect of Lanzhou, handle the matter with full authority. The severity of the disaster, the number of people who need relief, and the amount of “food” that needs to be distributed in the prefectures and counties of the
whole province are all decided by Wang Kui-wang alone behind the scenes, and no one else has any say in it. The officials of
the prefectures and counties received the silver according to the “disaster situation” determined by Wang Kui-wang. Of course, the silver was not bought as grain. It was nominally “relief,” but in fact it was divided up by the officials of the prefectures and counties.
Small disaster report big disaster, no disaster report disaster, has become the way of making money in Gansu officialdom. In order to publicize the “disaster,”
some prefectural and county officials went all out to curry favor with and bribe Wang Kuiwang, so much so that there is a popular saying in Gansu officialdom: “One thousand taels to meet, two thousand taels to eat, and three thousand taels to shoot arrows.”.
Wang Kuiwang used the method of benefit sharing to establish a whole set of strict collective corruption system in Gansu. From the governor Le’erjin down to the principal officials of the prefectures and counties, they all participated in the sharing of the spoils. In the name of disaster relief and grain release, they put the money collected by the donation prison into the pockets of the officials.
Because everyone in officialdom is profitable, no one ever reports it.
During the three years when Wang Jianwang served as the governor of Gansu Province, he spent more than 6 million stones of grain in the name of disaster relief.
The grain sold is actually silver that falls into the pockets of corrupt officials. During
this period, in order to lie, Wang Kuiwang even dared to cheat the money of the central government.
First of all, when the amount of grain donated increased, the granaries needed also increased accordingly, so the court was asked to allocate funds to build new granaries; secondly, when the amount of grain increased, the expenditure on transportation and supervision would also increase accordingly, so the court was asked to allocate funds to meet the needs. The
details of these lies are not only reasonable, but also necessary in the logic of this corruption game.
Through these two items, Wang Kuiwang defrauded two or three hundred thousand taels of funds from the Ministry of the Interior.
Eventually, the so-called new granary only existed in the memorial, and the appropriation was also divided up by corrupt officials.
Fourth, in the forty-second year of Qianlong (1777), the third year when Wang Kuiwang was in charge of Gansu’s donation and supervision, Emperor Qianlong once had doubts because of the huge amount of grain reported. At the beginning of
this year, he specially sent yuan Shoudong, Minister of the Ministry of Punishment, who had been out of Beijing many times to handle cases, to Gansu to open granaries and inspect grain. The visit of
the imperial envoys was originally an opportunity to uncover Wang Kuiwang’s fraud.
However, Wang Kuiwang received a tip in advance that officials from various prefectures and counties in Gansu had colluded to cheat, laying wooden boards under the granary and sprinkling grain on the boards, creating a false impression that the granary was full.
Not knowing whether yuan Shou-tung had really been fooled, or whether he had received benefits to cooperate with the deception, he returned to Beijing and reported that Gansu’s “granary grain was actually stored.” Now Qianlong completely believed it. In May of
the same year, Qianlong, who had been kept in the dark, issued a decree that Wang Kuiwang should be transferred to Zhejiang to be promoted to governor because of his meritorious service in grain supervision.
Wang Kuiwang “succeeded.” During his three years in Gansu, he earned 3 million taels of silver, and finally got the coveted position of governor of Zhejiang. He was simply a template for a winner in life during the reign of Emperor Qianlong.
In Qianlong’s eyes, Wang Kuiwang was a capable official chosen by himself, and it was impossible for the emperor to be wrong.
He even decreed that Wang Kui-wang’s mother, Teng, be rewarded with “an imperial plaque, two bolts of satin, and four mink skins.”.
In fact, Wang Kuiwang is a two-faced man in officialdom.
According to the unofficial history of the Qing Dynasty, Wang Kuiwang’s life was extremely extravagant and dissipated.
He was fond of women, and kept “four-legged trousers” and “Mandarin duck trousers” with embroidered characters on them. After he became governor of Zhejiang, he built a private glass room to store beautiful girls.
In terms of food, he likes to eat shredded donkey meat. There is a special person in the kitchen who raises donkeys. If he sends a message that he wants to eat shredded donkey meat, the cook will cut a piece of meat from the fat part of the donkey and serve it after cooking. The place where the meat was cut on the
donkey was dripping with blood, so it was burned with a red-hot iron to stop bleeding on the spot, which was quite cruel.
When Wang Jian left in the hope of getting rich and promoted, the governor of Gansu Province welcomed his successor, Wang Tingzan.
Wang Tingzan is almost a copy of Wang Kuiwang.
He was originally a good official, but after he took over as governor, he discovered the fraud of Gansu Donation Prison and was frightened at first.
He ran to find the governor of Shaanxi and Gansu Le Er Jin, Le Er Jin let him calm down, said the provincial officials do so, change is not to change. The most difficult thing for
an official to resist may be his own selfishness or the officialdom ecology. As a result,
Wang Ting-tsan was “corrupted” on the spot, and continued the same set of operations as Wang Kui-wang did when he was in office. In the end,
his “political achievements” were comparable to those of Wang Jianwang. During his more than three years in office, he completed the “grain supervision” of more than 5 million stone in figures, and then fabricated disasters of all sizes to digest these “grain supervision.”. According to
statistics, the two governors of Gansu, Wang Kuiwang and Wang Tingzan, received more than 13 million taels of donations in six years, of which, except for a small part that was indeed used to purchase grain for disaster relief, the remaining was about 10 million taels, equivalent to 1 & # x2F to 1 & # x2F of the total annual financial revenue of the country at that time. Eventually, it flowed into the pockets of officials in Gansu Province.
To the surprise of Wang Tingzan and Wang Kuiwang, their generous donations to the court afterwards exposed the problem that their assets were totally unequal to their legitimate income.
In addition, when a Gui went to Gansu to put down the Su-43 Uprising, there were continuous heavy rains in Gansu, which aroused the suspicion of Qianlong that the area had suffered from severe drought in successive years.
This case of corruption, which was considered to be a seamless one, was finally exposed by Qianlong himself when the imperial supervisory mechanism was completely out of order. Finally, the lid was lifted: In this case in Gansu, the upper and lower levels colluded, embezzled money, and exploited the people. It was a strange and strange thing that had never happened before. All the criminals in the
case belong to the law. As a result of the
final handling, the matter of Gansu’s donation to the prison was immediately stopped. Leerjin, the governor of
Shaanxi and Gansu, committed suicide, and more than 50 officials, including Wang Kuiwang and Wang Tingzan, the two governors of Gansu, and Jiang Quandi, the prefect of Lanzhou, were executed.
According to the law, those who embezzle more than 1000 taels are to be beheaded.
As a result, almost all officials in Gansu Province should be killed, and the government affairs of a province should be suspended. In the end, Qianlong had to deal with it lightly, raising the standard of beheading and waiting to embezzle more than 10,000 taels.
Because the case was so extensive, Qianlong was lenient in his instructions for conviction. Except for more than 50 people who were executed, most of the officials sentenced to death were eventually sentenced to exile as drudgery, but not executed.
In spite of this, people at that time still lamented that the entire officialdom in Gansu was “empty.”.
This scale of involvement is extremely rare in the whole history of China.
In the 59th year of the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1794), 13 years after the execution of Wang Kuiwang, the principal criminal in this case, the National Museum of History presented the Biography of Wang Shi.
When Qianlong recalled Wang Shi’s political achievements and public praise, he suddenly felt a sense of compassion and said, “Don’t make (Wang) Shi have no heir.”.
As a result, Wang Kuiwang’s son was pardoned from his exile in Ili and returned to his hometown in Linfen, Shanxi, to inherit the Wang family’s incense.
However, after a bunch of officials were executed and exiled, the big case did not come to an end.
It also led to a case within a case, at least two high officials of the empire, or the reputation, or the official career and life, planted on it.
First, he was Yu Minzhong, the first favorite minister of Qianlong, the official of the Hall of Literary Brilliance, the Minister of the Ministry of the Interior and the Chief Minister of Military Aircraft. Yu Minzhong had died of illness for more than a year when the
Gansu emergency relief case broke out, but he was still remembered by Qianlong during the trial of the case. According
to Qianlong, Yu Minzhong served as Minister of the Ministry of the Interior for more than ten years. “At that time, Wang Kuiwang was the governor of Gansu, and he relied on Yu Minzhong to protect him.”. The implication is
that Yu Minzhong is the culprit of this huge corruption case.
However, after killing the last group of embezzlers in the Gansu case, Qianlong issued an imperial edict, saying that Yu Minzhong had “passed away for a long time, and I cannot bear to punish him for his crime.” He covered up Yu Minzhong’s crime.
In the 51st year of the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1786), when he was playing with the utensils of the reign of Emperor Jiajing, he thought of Yan Song, a treacherous court official of the reign of Emperor Jiajing. He also thought of Yu Minzhong, whom he had trusted for many years and whose family had not declined. He said that Yu Minzhong pretended to be incorruptible on the surface, but in fact he had a lot of money. “He would ask for a reward from the king.”.
The more he thought about it, the more angry he became, so he ordered Yu Minzhong to withdraw from Xianliang Temple.
Later, Qianlong also took back the hereditary position of Yu Minzhong’s descendants.
No one would have thought that a generation of minion Yu Minzhong would take the name behind him because of the Gansu nest case.
No one would have thought that Chen Huizu, the governor of Fujian and Zhejiang, dared to be greedy when he was ordered to confiscate Wang Kuiwang’s family property. He switched the good things of the Wang family and sent them to Beijing for some cheap goods.
He may think that Wang has amassed so many good things that no one will really read the contents of the copy list, and a few small changes will not attract any attention.
But Chen Hui-tsu never expected that Chien Lung himself would be a collector, and that he would “covet” the good things he confiscated.
One theory is that Qianlong was obsessed with a pair of jade vases that Wang Jianwang had given to him in a certain year, but that he had returned them against his will. Another theory is that Qianlong knew that Wang Jianwang had a collection of stone inscriptions of rice (the copybook of Mi Fu, a great calligrapher of the Northern Song Dynasty), and always wanted to get it.
In short, when the confiscated items were transported to the capital, Qianlong discovered that everything he knew and wanted was missing, and that the items that arrived were “all ordinary” and “mostly unsightly.”.
Gan Long is angry.
After three months of investigation, the case finally came to light: Chen Huizu, the governor of Fujian and Zhejiang, who was in charge of the house raid, took the opportunity to exchange some of Wang Kuiwang’s antique paintings and calligraphy, while several officials responsible for affixing seals followed suit and exchanged several leather coats, python robes, and fine silks and satins.
Immediately afterwards, some officials duly participated in the performance of Chen Huizu’s corpse during his reign, which led to a big case of gathering people to make trouble in Tongxiang.
Eventually, Chen Huizu was granted to commit suicide, and like Wang Kuiwang, his family property was confiscated.
At this point, around the Gansu relief case, from the incident to the handling, the shortcomings of the entire imperial officialdom were exposed.
For the sake of the national system and face, Qianlong did not dare to check again. Let’s stop here. Who knows what moths will be found out if we check again! According to the statistics of historians, during the reign of Emperor Qianlong, there were more than 30 cases in which the governors and officials were placed on file for investigation and punishment for corruption, of which more than 20 were sentenced or ordered to commit suicide in the Ming Dynasty. On average, one provincial military and political official was executed for bribery in one or two years, which was rare in the previous generation and only seen in the Qing Dynasty.
But ironically, the corruption of officials throughout the Qing Dynasty also began in the Qianlong Dynasty.
Perhaps, when the emperor monopolized power, deceiving his superiors and deceiving his subordinates had become rampant. People
in officialdom were more likely to form a community of interests against the emperor and his imperial envoys.
Because, as long as you hide from the emperor, everything else is easy to handle.
As the historian said when he commented on the Gansu case, Qianlong hated Wang Kuiwang more than corruption, so he had to kill him.
. Focus on not getting lost ~
