The Qingzhou case was immediately turned into a tragic story and began to circulate in Jingji Road, Jingxi Road, and Jingdong Road.
Besides the Qingzhou case, the Song Dynasty Gazette also had a major report: In the Song-Xia War, the Song army won a great victory and drove the Tanguts out of the Song territory.
These past six months have been a turbulent time, with shocking events happening every month.
From the Confucius Mansion case to the Confucian scholar case, and then to the Luoyang case, countless interests were involved in just one month. The emperor also used the butcher's knife to tell the whole world that this world belongs to the emperor, and the emperor firmly stands on the side of the people. No matter who it is, anyone who dares to stop the emperor should die!
The emperor had killed so many people, he should take a break, and many people thought so. But with the Qingzhou case, it was destined that the entire Qingzhou would be filled with heads again.
The Xu family's corvée and tax case implicated thirteen wealthy merchant families, affecting a total of more than seven hundred people. In Liu Yanzong's words, after the court promulgated the corvée and tax laws, the emperor had long wanted to find an opportunity to start killing people, just waiting to see who would come first.
Sure enough, the Qingzhou Chamber of Commerce was almost completely wiped out. All the wealthy merchants' homes had their doors kicked down and were imprisoned by the Imperial City Guard. Subsequently, all their crimes were made public, causing an uproar on Jingdong Road.
People then discovered that He Liren, the prefect of Qingzhou, was extremely wealthy. Not only did he receive a generous annual salary from the imperial court, but he also joined forces with the Qingzhou Chamber of Commerce to monopolize business in Qingzhou and all the counties within its territory, amassing a vast fortune. Furthermore, he privately and forcibly purchased large amounts of land, turning hundreds of thousands of people in Qingzhou into tenant farmers.
They were called tenant farmers, but in reality, they were serfs!
Once the imperial court promulgated its corvée and tax laws, it was bound to harm the interests of these people. So they simply did not implement them and collectively deceived their superiors. It was not that they did not implement them at all; the taxes and corvée of the farmers were still collected as usual. When they handed them over to the imperial court, they could get reductions or exemptions from taxes and corvée, thus paying much less.
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