Li Zicheng's slogan is "Don't accept food to welcome the king", so what does his million-strong army eat?

At the beginning of the Li Zicheng Uprising, the policy of "equal farmland tax exemption" was put forward. I also made a special song: "I opened the city gate to meet the king. When the king came, I didn't accept food." Eat your mother, love your mother, and food is not enough to be king. "Li Zicheng, a pioneer, played this slogan, which is tantamount to saving the world for ordinary people who have suffered from famine and dying all the year round.

Therefore, when Li Zicheng "entered Henan, tens of thousands of hungry people immediately followed him, and his momentum was restored", more and more people came to Li Zicheng's side, so that there was a grand scene of "following the source, day and night". In this way, Li Zicheng soon gathered millions of people, so the question came, if you don't receive food to meet the king, what will millions of people eat?

In fact, from the very beginning, Gigi Lai's way of raising commissary money was very simple, that is, directly plundering the property of local tyrants and evil gentry to pay for military expenses. At first, due to the small number of rebels gathered, the cost of building ordnance uniforms, grain and grass and army salaries would not be much, and basically it was more than enough to plunder a few local tyrants. Then you can take out some money to help the victims.

By the time the insurgents developed to the middle stage, there were already hundreds of thousands of people under Li Zicheng. If we still use the old methods at this time, it is obviously impossible to meet the expenses of so many people by plundering the wealth of the rich gentry. Therefore, Li Zicheng had to send people to places where he had never been to plunder the property of the rich gentry, which made the rebels survive for a while. Later, Li Zicheng realized that "not accepting grain" brought great difficulties to the development of the rebel army, so he began to implement the policy of "comforting exile, connecting merchants, raising the people to farm and collecting their seeds to pay the army" in Luoyang and other places.

When Li Zicheng led millions of people into the capital, it meant that the rebels gained state power and marked the official demise of the Ming Dynasty. But at the same time, a series of more serious problems have also been exposed. The number of troops is as high as one million, officials at all levels need salaries, thousands of victims need relief, and productive labor needs to be resumed ... But Li Zicheng has always been under the slogan of "not eating fireworks", so where does this huge expense come from?

Li Zicheng once counted on the huge wealth of Emperor Chongzhen to solve this financial problem. But what I didn't expect was that Chongzhen was a poor emperor. He cleaned the palace from top to bottom, and its total value was less than100000 silver dollars, which was not as rich as a local vassal. Finally, in order to maintain the smooth operation of Dashun regime, Li Zicheng adopted the method of "asking for money to help pay", which changed the function of the former Jinyiwei Town Office and made them ask for money to help pay for the old bureaucrats and rich gentry.

At that time, the method of "pursuing salary" was graded, stipulating that officials: "Nine Qing 50 thousand, Zhong Cheng 30 thousand, supervisor 22 thousand, and state and county governors half." If the old bureaucrats can help pay according to the prescribed amount, they only need to accept a lighter punishment. If they really can't come up with that much money, they will inevitably be tortured by the Royal Guards. You know, the well-trained Royal Guards in the Ming Dynasty were their specialty in punishment. As a result, many people were tortured to death.

On the other hand, because Li Zicheng has no money, he can't give his soldiers enough money. When the rebels occupied the capital, countless soldiers began to do evil, burning and looting, making innocent people live in fear all day. Li Zicheng, who was so unpopular, finally went to the road of self-destruction.

What ultimately hurt Li Zicheng was his slogan "Welcome to the King, Don't Accept Food". Although Li Zicheng's original intention of exempting the people from all taxes was good, in the long run, people's illusions were shattered when they found that Chuang Wang could not fulfill his promise of "not having enough to eat". Facts have proved that breaking the king cannot lead them to fundamentally improve their lives. As the saying goes, the greater the hope, the greater the disappointment. Li Zicheng, who lost the strength of the masses, can only go to failure in the end!