Yongle immigrants among Hong Tong immigrants

After the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, officials from all over the country reported to the Ming government the barren situation in various places. The Central Plains region is full of "shortage of manpower, which has been barren for a long time" (Records of Ming Taizu, Volume 148), with few residents (Records of Ming Taizu, Volume 176) and "most of them are uninhabited" (Gu Rilu, Volume 10), and taxes are not paid for years. It directly threatened the rule of the Ming Dynasty, and even Zhu Yuanzhang knew: "After the chaos, the original place was sparsely populated, so it was urgent for the Central Plains to open up land and increase household registration" (Record of Ming Taizu, Volume 25), so Su Qi of Zhou Tao (Record of Ming Taizu, Volume 50), family doctor Liu Jiugao (Record of Food and Loan in the Ming Dynasty) and Song Na of imperial academy were adopted. During the Hongwu period of the Ming Dynasty, a large number of immigrants began, agricultural production just resumed, and the "Jingnan War" happened again. The four-year war aggravated the desolation of the Central Plains, so there was still a move to move people from Yongle.

After Zhu Yuanzhang died, Wen Jian succeeded to the throne. In order to consolidate centralization, he took the measure of "cutting vassal". Judy, the prince of Yan, marched from Beijing to Nanjing in the name of going to Beijing to punish traitors, and visited Hebei, Henan, Shandong, northern Anhui, Huaibei and other places, and fought repeatedly with government forces for four years. This is the so-called "prince sweeping the north" widely circulated in the Central Plains. At that time, people in some areas organized their own armed forces and refused to resist the army of the Prince of Yan, which reflected the people's desire to live and work in peace and contentment and resume production. According to the Ming History, during the war, the Yan army plundered and slaughtered very seriously, such as "the Yan army plundered Zhen, Shunde, Guangping and Daming". (Biography of Ming Taizu Gongmin) In the battle of Baigou River, the prince "beheaded tens of thousands and set fire to more than 100,000". (Ming history. After Judy's victory, the people of the Central Plains automatically helped the government troops against the Yan army, and they killed the troops and people loyal to the emperor Wen Jian. According to some genealogy records in Hebei and Shandong, the village town became a market as soon as Yan Bing arrived. When the prince of Yan hit the junction of Hebei and Henan, he was resisted by the local armed "Eighteen Villages Friendship Association". The prince turned to Nanjing without a standard and was taken by the Yan people. Li's Genealogy, written in Guangxu, Zhai Village, Linqing County, Shandong Province, recorded that King Gai Yan could not fight. When he was writing, he organized the North and South armies, the South army pursued him, and the North army was defeated, committing crimes from north to south. When you miss him, you either kill, scrape or run away. Six or seven hundred miles from east to west and nearly a thousand miles from north to south are just a few hills.

Therefore, the "Battle of Jingnan" aggravated the desolate situation of the Central Plains, and the people either killed or fled, which is another reason for Yongle immigrants. At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, there was famine and chaos in the Central Plains, but Shanxi was a different scene. The chaos in the Central Plains and various disasters and epidemics rarely spread to Shanxi, and no major floods, droughts and pests occurred in most parts of Shanxi. Compared with neighboring provinces, it enjoys social stability, economic prosperity and affluent population. Yuan Man Zhong You said in "The Story of Building a City in the River (Zhou Pu)": There is a fire today, and the river is empty. Although it was a compliment from feudal literati, it also showed that the eastern part of Shanxi was relatively stable, and refugees from neighboring provinces flowed into Shanxi, which made the population of southern Shanxi dense for fourteen years. The population of Henan is 189. 1 10,000, that of Hebei is1893,000, and that of Shanxi is 4,030,450, which is equal to the total population of Hebei and Henan. (Record of Ming Taizu, Volume 140)

Compared with the population of Central Plains, the population of Shanxi is extremely unbalanced. According to land records, in the fourteenth year of Hongwu (138 1), the population of Henan was 189 1000, and the population of Hebei was 1893, while the population of Shanxi was as high as 4,030,400, 250,000 more than that of Henan and Hebei combined. In terms of population density, it was also the fourteenth year of Hongwu (138 1), with an average of 27.52 people per square kilometer in Shanxi and 2.85 people per square kilometer in Henan, and the population density in Henan was less than half that in Shanxi. In this way, the problem of "the land is narrow and the people are thick, and it is difficult to make a living" in Shanxi is becoming more and more prominent. Even Zhu Yuanzhang realized that "the people in Shanxi are narrow and narrow". At this time, the DPRK ministers repeatedly proposed to immigrate from Shanxi to the Central Plains. For example, in the third year of Hongwu (1370), Su Qi, the magistrate of Zhengzhou, put forward "three things in good times", one of which was to emigrate to the Central Plains. In the fifteenth year of Hongwu (1382), Shi Yanliang, an official of the Jin Dynasty, published twenty articles in The Rule of Taiping. In the twenty-first year of Hongwu (1388), Liu Jiugao, assistant minister of the Ministry of Finance, invited Shanxi people to move to the Central Plains, which was finally recognized by Zhu Yuanzhang. So the prelude of a vigorous immigration activity was opened.