Guo Huan case, a major corruption case in the early Ming Dynasty: Guo Huan was an assistant minister of the Ministry of Finance in the period of Zhu Yuanzhang in the Ming Dynasty. Judging from his rank, he is only a second-class official. Although the official position was not big, Zhu Yuanzhang was deeply concerned about the post of prime minister after the Hu case, so the Ming Dynasty did not set up a prime minister from Zhu Yuanzhang, but changed to six governing officials, and six ministers were in charge of various departments in the Ming Dynasty and became important officials in the current dynasty. Although Zhu Yuanzhang did this, there will be no more powerful ministers of the previous dynasty, and no one will carve up his imperial power, but there is also a drawback. That is, the emperors of the Ming Dynasty asked about every detail. Even a diligent emperor will be exhausted. For example, Emperor Injong died of illness within one year of his reign. There is a saying that he is exhausted.
Zhu Yuanzhang was a diligent emperor during his reign, but with the growth of Zhu Yuanzhang's age, his energy was much less than before, and he could no longer take care of all the affairs of the previous dynasty. At this time, some officials of the previous dynasty began to practice favoritism, and Guo Huan was one of them. Of course, at the beginning, these officials were also cautious and took bribes. After all, Zhu Yuanzhang is a murderous emperor, especially a corrupt official, but Zhu Yuanzhang is determined to kill people. On one occasion, an official was beheaded by Zhu Yuanzhang just because he embezzled dozens of taels of silver, so Ming officials dared not openly and wantonly embezzle.
Only after a long time, the ranks of corrupt officials grew stronger and stronger, and Guo Huan became more and more courageous. Since then, Guo Huan has not only embezzled taxes and autumn grain from Yingtian and Zhenjiang, but also accepted bribes from hundreds of thousands of local officials. Worst of all, corrupt officials in Guo Huan tried their best to collect various fees when collecting the national imperial grain tax, which made the people miserable. Guo Huan is a diligent and corrupt person, and he is the second in command of the national finance. He almost embezzled the fiscal revenue of the Ming Dynasty in the past year. In the eighteenth year of Hongwu, Yu Min and Ding Ting reported Guo Huan to Zhu Yuanzhang, and finally this shocking corruption case surfaced.
I would rather kill by mistake than let Zhu Yuanzhang know that he was furious after the corruption case in Guo Huan. He can't believe that someone dares to corrupt under his nose. He was even more angry when he sent someone to find out. Guo Huan's case is not only a huge corruption case, but also involves almost all officials of six power departments. Among the six ministries, there are four ministers involved, namely Zhao Xie, minister of war, assistant minister of war, Mai Zhide and minister of justice Wang. Zhu Yuanzhang has no soft heart. Most of the people involved were beheaded, which was tens of thousands, and all the officials involved in the power were killed. For a time, the Ming dynasty officialdom became a high-risk industry, and everyone turned pale when talking about officials.
Although Guo Huan and his corrupt clique deserved it, it was not worth dying for. However, at that time, there were not so many officials involved in the Guo Huan case, and according to the development of the Guo Huan case, there was a great intention of never giving up. The reason why Zhu Yuanzhang killed so many people with great fanfare was to deter officials from corruption. Zhu Yuanzhang's idea is really good, but he just killed his head and cut off tens of thousands of people's heads as soon as he killed it. Let's not say that these officials are innocent to death. Let's start with the bureaucratic system of the Ming Dynasty. How can we fill so many vacancies at once? Without officials, who will do these state affairs?
Moreover, if the investigation is endless, it is very likely that the whole court officials will be blamed, leaving only Zhu Yuanzhang, the naked emperor. Finally, Zhu Yuanzhang accused Wu, the official who presided over the Guo Huan case, of extorting a confession by torture, which implicated many innocent officials, and the Guo Huan case was finally solved.