How to deal with Jingxiang refugees in the middle of Ming Dynasty?

Thousands of refugees and their wives flocked to Yunyang from all directions and into the mountainous areas of Jingxiang area. The Ming government encountered a thorny problem. Forced deportation to the country of origin is no longer possible, and only local naturalization is the best policy. Millions of refugees have injected new vitality into the economic development of Jingxiang area.

Among the vernacular novels of the Ming Dynasty, the story of Jiang Xingge's beaded shirt in Feng Menglong's ancient and modern novels is the most popular. The protagonist Jiang Xingge is from Zaoyang County, Xiangyang Prefecture, Huguang. Another major figure, Shang Chen, was a Huizhou merchant in southern Anhui. The latter "collected two or three thousand dollars to come to Xiangyang to sell some Mi Dou and so on, and often went there once a year". At that time, Huguang was an important grain-producing area in China, and many Huizhou grain merchants came one after another. Trafficking Mi Dou from Xiangyang and other places to Jiangsu and Zhejiang for profit. The story of Jiang Xingge and He San (the wife of Jiang) written by Feng Menglong is unfolded under this background. It is worth noting that Zaoyang County, Xiangyang Prefecture mentioned in the story, is located in Jingxiang area.

Jingxiang is located at the junction of Hubei, Henan, Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces, with Yunyang (now Yunxian County, Hubei Province) as the center, starting from the eastern end of Zhong Nanshan in the west, Jingshan in the south, Funiu Mountain in the northeast and Tongbai Mountain and Dabie Mountain in the southeast. The mountains here are endless, the ancient forests are dense and green, and the Hanshui River and its tributaries meander through the green mountains and green waters. Although the Jingxiang area is mountainous, the fertile land has become a paradise for people suffering from war and famine. Many poor farmers fled here from other places to get rid of the slavery of their origin. These farmers who have left their homes are large in number, highly mobile and lack basic means and conditions to make a living, which often leads to social unrest. Especially after they gather in the mountains, "the sky is high and the emperor is far away", and they are often unruly and more likely to have the idea of rising up. As early as the end of Yuan Dynasty, the Red Scarf Army of Suonan and Beisuo was based in Xiangyang. Later, in the process of pacifying the world, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the general Deng Yu to lead an army to surround it. As a result, the local people were moved out, and this place was regarded as a restricted area, and refugees were forbidden to enter again. When the Ming Dynasty was founded, the government set up Xiangyang Forbidden Guard and Xiangyang Forbidden Guard to let the soldiers stationed here reclaim wasteland. However, the number of the two guards and their families gathered in the camp is very small, adding up to only 30,000 to 40,000. Therefore, in the Jingxiang area in the early Ming Dynasty, most areas were sparsely populated, and the aborigines were almost extinct.

Although the rulers of the Ming Dynasty took Jingxiang Mountain as a forbidden area, farmers were forbidden to enter it, but there were a lot of idle wasteland in the area, which made it an ideal place for refugees to gather and cultivate. There are not only wasteland for reclamation, but also inexhaustible forestry and mineral resources. In addition, hiding here can avoid taxes and corvee, and you don't have to be a policeman or get food. Compared with other areas, it has become a paradise, attracting many farmers drifting from cultivated land. Especially in the famine years, they even introduced themselves into this relatively weak feudal rule to find opportunities to make a living. According to historical records, there were refugees sneaking into Jingxiang area during Yongle period. During the reign of Xuande, the number of refugees entering this area increased sharply. They come from areas with relatively developed agricultural economy, narrow land and dense people, and Jingxiang area provides them with a large area of virgin land that can be reclaimed. As more and more people gathered, it gradually attracted the attention of the Ming government. In order to deal with these refugees, in the first year of orthodoxy (1436), the Ministry of Housing decided to check the Dingkou here, allowing the refugees to be naturalized, assigned to the abandoned fields for farming and paid for food. This actually recognized the legitimacy of refugees entering Jingxiang area, making the previous prohibition in Jingxiang mountain area a dead letter. But at that time, it was a turning point in the social, political and economic development of the Ming Dynasty. On the one hand, the vicious development of land annexation in various places has broken the traditional economic structure dominated by yeomen since the early Ming Dynasty. On the other hand, the political control of the country has also declined, and many farmers are eager to get rid of the shackles of household registration. For example, people in various counties in the south of the Yangtze River heard that fleeing households can attach their credentials everywhere, so they took the opportunity to follow suit: military, artisans, stoves and other households also immigrated to apply for naturalization. All these have aroused the anxiety and anxiety of the ruling class. It was suggested that the local governor should investigate the people who ran away from their families and stipulate that at least five out of every ten people should be sent back to their original places to take charge of food affairs. At that time, Jingxiang mountain area was the largest refugee gathering area, and bankrupt farmers followed, and the number of refugees soared to1500,000. They gathered in the mountains and were regarded as a worry by the government. In order to strengthen the control of this area, in the eighth year of Tianshun (1464), the Ming government appointed a chief secretary, Hu Guang, to take charge of the affairs of refugees in Jingzhou, Xiangyang and Nanyang. At that time, the starting point of government policy was basically to do everything possible to prevent refugees from entering the mountains, and to suppress them in a planned way, even resorting to force to drive them back to their places of origin. This made the already tense situation in Jingxiang area more severe, and finally led to the magnificent Jingxiang refugee uprising.

Liu Tong, one of the leaders of the uprising, was born in Xihua, Henan (now a county). It is said that he once held up a stone sister-in-law who was placed in the population office of the yamen in Xihua County, so he was called "Liu Qianjin". During the orthodox period, Liu Tongliu died in Huguangfang County (now Hubei County). In the first year of Chenghua (1465), he and Shi Long (also known as Stone Monk), Feng Zilong and others, taking advantage of the dissatisfaction of refugees, erected a yellow flag in Fangxian County, gathered people to rebel, and occupied Meixi Temple, which was called "Hanwang" and the title was "Desheng". Shi Long is a military adviser, including marshal, general, company commander and pioneer. For a time, the refugees responded one after another, and the number reached more than 40,000. They were divided into seven villages in the mountains to plow the fields and fight. The Ming government quickly sent troops and sent Bai Gui, the minister of the Ministry of Industry, and Li Zhen, the company commander of Huguang, to suppress it. Because the rebels are mostly unarmed rabble, without strict organization and few weapons. As a result, the uprising was suppressed by the official army. In addition to Shi Long leading some people to break through into Sichuan, more than 10,000 rebels and their families were brutally killed. 1 1 All men over the age of one were spared. In the second year of Chenghua (1466), the rebel army led by Shi Long moved to Dachang, Wushan and other places in Sichuan, and was besieged by government forces and failed. Subsequently, Bai Gui put forward suggestions to the court on the disposal of Jingxiang refugees, thinking that we should take this opportunity to deal with Jingxiang refugees, so as to avoid a resurgence and endless legacy. He put forward a plan to deal with Jingxiang refugees-a policy of combining attachment with returning to their original places among refugees to eliminate hidden dangers. The specific measures are: those who are willing to attach their credentials for a long time are allowed to attach their credentials as a note and an editor; Those who refuse to attach their membership will be sent back to their original place of residence to pay for their meals. The policy of returning to the country of origin is the most economical and convenient way to deal with refugees. However, these refugees were originally forced to leave their homes because of the imbalance between the population and cultivated land in their places of origin, and the policy of sending them back to their places of origin will naturally be fully resisted by them. For the former scheme, the local government must spend a lot of energy to register the land and arrange Li Jia, so local officials do not seriously implement it. This made the previous contradictions not be properly resolved, which eventually led to the refugees launching a larger-scale resistance again a few years later.

In the sixth year of Chenghua (1470), Liu Tong's subordinates (Li) and Wang Hong revolted again. After the Yuan Lee Uprising, he claimed to be the "King of Peace" and moved to the border areas of Huguang Nanzhang, Henan Neixiang and Weinan, Shaanxi, with millions of refugees. The Ming government appointed Xiang Zhong, the governor of Henan Province and Jing Xiang, the governor of Huguang, to cooperate with Li Zhen, the commander-in-chief of Huguang, to suppress it. On the one hand, Zhongxiang assembled 250,000 elite troops and attacked in eight ways. On the other hand, he sent people into the mountains to lure refugees out of the mountains to resume their business. Under Xiang Zhong's policy of carrot and stick, hundreds of thousands of refugees came out one after another, which greatly weakened the strength of the insurgents. In the seventh year of Chenghua (147 1), he and Xiao successively defeated each other. Xiang Zhong promised to support the refugees at its own expense, which led to the brutal slaughter of the uprising farmers and the expulsion of ordinary refugees in mountainous areas. During the Hongwu period, refugees lived here and attached books, but Xiang Zhong was indiscriminately wiped out, giving the deceased an opportunity, which was terrible. Some refugees who participated in the uprising were exiled to Huguang, Guizhou and other places by boat, and a plague occurred on the way. Many people died of illness and were abandoned in rivers and lakes, stinking. Xiang Zhong also forced refugees who had been cheated out of the mountain to return home. At that time, it was the summer heat, and many people died of hunger or thirst, or died of epidemics, with a large number of deaths. According to records, hundreds of thousands of millions of refugees who returned home to "return to work" were tortured to death along the way. After the massacre, Zhong Xiang stood on the bones of the refugees, full of ambition, and erected a "Pingjing Township Monument". However, many people are extremely indignant at his indiscriminate killing of innocent people. They called "Pingjing Xiangbei" a "monument to tears".

The bloody massacre in Xiang Zhong actually failed to solve the problem of Jingxiang refugees once and for all. Since then, the Ming government has built castles on 12 traffic arteries, divided troops and deployed troops, and set up inspection offices at eight passing checkpoints. It is stipulated that after that, anyone who enters Jingxiang Mountain again will be displayed in the mountain pass for one month after being arrested, and his family will be stationed at the border. However, severe punishment and building castles cannot prevent refugees from re-entering Jingxiang area. In the twelfth year of Chenghua (1476), the harvest in Henan was poor and the famine was serious. Hungry and cold farmers broke through the government's system of closing hillsides to grazing and Tianjin, and people rushed to the mountains to feed. At that time, hundreds of thousands of refugees gathered in Jingxiang area. If it is banned again, it will inevitably arouse resistance again. Faced with this situation, Zhou Hongmo, a wine-worshipper, wrote "On Refugees" and put forward a solution to the refugee problem. In view of the fact that the Eastern Jin Dynasty used overseas Chinese to resettle Jingxiang refugees in counties and counties and achieved remarkable results. He argues that if the refugees near counties are registered, counties are established in refugee areas far away from counties, officials are set up, and the corvee is relaxed, so that they can live and work in peace and contentment, then refugees will be transformed into compiled households and compiled people. The Ming government had no choice but to adopt Zhou Hongyi's suggestion. In the 12th year of Chenghua (1476), Jie Yuan, the former imperial governor, went to Yunyang to settle the refugees. As soon as Jie Yuan arrived in Jingxiang area, he went out to investigate the situation thoroughly, and sent officials from Huguang, Henan, Shaanxi and other places across the valley to explain the new policy to the refugees. The refugees were told that they could get the vacant land they had cultivated for several years and they could register as legal residents in this area. Officials assured them that the new land could be reduced in tax before production. Under the temptation of such favorable conditions. At that time, the number of refugees surveyed reached 1 133 17, with 438,644 men and women. Among them, 96,654 households, accounting for 85%; There are 392,752 men and women, accounting for 89%. At the same time, in order to strengthen local public security and management, Yunyang Prefecture and Huguang Aviation Department were set up, and Zhuxi and Yunxi counties were analyzed. Since then, the government has continued to implement the policy of attaching associations with remarkable results. In the eighteenth year of Hongzhi (1505) and the first year of Zhengde (1506), a large number of Jingxiang refugees were attached to the local area. The problem of refugees in Jingxiang area has been temporarily solved.

The emergence of the problem of refugees in Jingxiang is a manifestation of the serious imbalance between population and cultivated land in Ming Dynasty. In terms of population, the population of the Ming Dynasty (the statistical range is roughly the Great Wall in the north, Jiayuguan in the Hexi Corridor in the west and the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the Liaodong Bay in the east, the Liaodong Peninsula in the southwest and the eastern bank of the lower reaches of the Liaohe River, slightly exceeding the present boundary, and the south and southeast are the same as the present boundary, excluding Taiwan Province Province) was about 70 million in the twenty-six years of Hongwu (1393). By the fourth year of Hongzhi (149 1), the officially registered population was only over 50 million. After nearly 100 years of recuperation, the population is 20 million less than before. Obviously, many of them have become refugees. It is generally believed that the population of Ming Dynasty grew at an average annual rate of 5‰, so there should be no doubt that the population of Hongzhi period grew more than that of Hongwu period. However, during the Hongzhi period, the cultivated land area was only 622 million mu. If we compare it with the historical period, as early as the second year of Emperor Pingdi in the Western Han Dynasty (AD 2), the population of the whole country was only 59 million, and the cultivated land had reached 827 million mu. Although these data may not be completely accurate, it reflects that although the population is increasing, the cultivated land area has been stagnant for a long time, and the ratio of population to cultivated land in Ming Dynasty is seriously unbalanced. In this context, the refugee problem has evolved into a national problem, and it has increasingly become an intractable social problem. Most of the mountainous areas in the Ming Dynasty were still empty and desolate, so it is natural for refugees to take mountainous areas as their main migration targets. Especially after the mid-Ming Dynasty, with the increasingly fierce land annexation, taxes and collection became more and more onerous, and it became more and more fashionable for refugees to go to mountainous areas. This spontaneous action of refugees has objectively become a special way to solve the relative surplus of agricultural population in plain areas.

From the government's point of view, the existence of a large number of refugees makes the government's tax service unfunded. The gathering of refugees is also very easy to cause social unrest, which directly threatens the rule of the dynasty and must be properly handled. However, how to deal with the problem of Jingxiang refugees, the policy of the Ming government has been wavering. Zhou Hongyi once pointed out: "Refugees, like running water, should be guided according to their nature, otherwise they will flood or even collapse." Judging from historical facts, several Jingxiang refugee uprisings in Tianshun and Chenghua years were all caused by the rulers' improper handling of refugees. The Ming government initially took measures to curb the problem of refugees. We have successively promulgated decrees such as "Escape from Households", "Search for Refugees" and "No Changing Households Every Second", urging refugees to return to their hometowns to pay taxes and serve. In order to carry out these policies, in the fourth year of Zhengtong (1439), the Ming government added officials to take care of refugees in Shandong, Shanxi, Henan, Shaanxi, Huguang and Shuntian. However, since most of these measures are temporary measures, they have not weakened the momentum of the refugee tide at all. The rulers of the Ming dynasty then forcibly closed the mountainous areas in an attempt to solve the problem of refugees once and for all. However, Jingxiang area is vast and sparsely populated, and the gathering of refugees is mainly to escape the unbearable burden of labor and find land reclamation, which is a very realistic survival instinct, and developing mountainous areas is also an inevitable trend of social and economic development in Ming Dynasty. Therefore, although the Ming government repeatedly banned Jingxiang area, the effect was extremely limited. Xiang Zhong and others expelled Jingxiang refugees by bloody slaughter, but the result backfired. Because in the country of origin of refugees. Traditional agriculture is relatively developed, land annexation is intensified, and the ratio of population to cultivated land is seriously unbalanced. As long as these problems are not solved, farmers who are squeezed out of cultivated land will suffer from famine. It will inevitably flow to Jingxiang area to find a living opportunity. Therefore, people who return to their places of origin will soon try to escape and become refugees again. After the failure of Xiang Zhong's extermination policy, Zhou Hongyi, Jie Yuan and others' new method of "governing refugees" was obviously superior to the previous military suppression strategy. Wang Shixing, a late Ming Dynasty man, once commented on the different suppression policies before and after the Ming Dynasty: "The stability is a temporary achievement, and the original surprising experience is the benefit of eternal life." On the whole, after Jie Yuan's appeasement, more than 80% of the refugees have been attached to the register, which constitutes the basic residents of the local area, thus transforming the refugees into well-established people, laying the social order in Jingxiang area and promoting the local economic development. Since then, many wasteland in Jingxiang area, through the further development of refugees, has quickly become fertile and fertile fields. The development of Jingxiang mountain area made the agricultural economy in Huguang area develop rapidly, thus improving the status of Huguang in the social and economic history of Ming Dynasty. The proverb "the lake is wide and ripe, and the world is full" has been widely known since then.