"Zhao Dezhang, the prefect of Songjiang, brought a family to thank the prince for saving his life." Soon, Zhao Dezhang's family was led to the courtyard by Lin Xin, and Zhao Dezhang quickly knelt down after seeing Li Yuntian, who was instructing Li Shan to practice swords.

According to the custom, Zhao Dezhang, who has recovered his official body, does not need to kneel to Li Yuntian, but Zhao Dezhang came to thank Li Yuntian for saving his whole family this time, so he knelt and saluted Li Yuntian.

As Zhao Dezhang knelt, the family members behind him knelt down one after another, and kowtowed to Li Yuntian firmly, to be honest, if it wasn't for Li Yuntian, they would still be suffering, so they were very grateful to Li Yuntian in their hearts.

"Governor Zhao, please get up, this is the duty of this king, Governor Zhao doesn't need to mind." Li Yuntian smiled and stretched out his hand to Zhao Dezhang's void and lifted it up, signaling him to get up.

"I've seen the little prince." Zhao Dezhang got up and bowed to Li Shan, who was standing next to Li Yuntian, and saluted respectfully, he didn't know Li Shan's identity, seeing that Li Shanmeiyu was quite similar to Li Yuntian, so he naturally thought that he was Li Yuntian's son.

"Haha......" Li Yuntian laughed when he heard this, reached out and touched Li Shan's head and explained to Zhao Dezhang, "This is the child of an old man, temporarily living here in this king." ”

"My name is Li Shan, please advise." Hearing this, Li Shan put away the sword in his hand and bowed to Zhao Dezhang and said.

"Li Gongzi." Zhao Dezhang never expected that the child in front of him was not Li Yuntian's son, and when he heard this, an embarrassed look suddenly appeared on his face, and he hurriedly bowed to Li Shan in return.

"Governor Zhao, you came just in time, this king has something to tell you." Li Yuntian saw Zhao Dezhang's crampedness, smiled and walked towards the living room.

Zhao Dezhang didn't dare to slack off, and immediately bowed down and followed, Lin Xin took the people of the Zhao family down and led them to walk around the city, it was obvious that it would take a lot of time for Li Yuntian and Zhao Dezhang to talk about something.

Li Yuntian had two things to explain to Zhao Dezhang, one was the post-disaster reconstruction of Linyun County, and the other was to streamline the administration of the elite army, and take advantage of this opportunity to slim down the bloated government and county government.

In Li Yuntian's view, the local yamen of the Ming Dynasty was too bloated, and the yamen of only a few officials was equipped with a large number of officials and servants, which not only wasted a lot of funds, but also worked inefficiently and was overstaffed.

What is particularly important is that the servants in the yamen are mixed, their quality is low, and they often oppress the good, because the yamen is not responsible for the servants of the servants, so they often use taxes to extort money and extort money, which seriously endangers local public order.

Taking an ordinary county office as an example, the official establishment and office staff of the county office are divided into two officials, subordinate officials, miscellaneous officers, three shifts and six rooms, and staff such as friends and long-term followers.

These people have a clear division of labor and a unified whole to maintain the normal operation of the county government.

According to the custom, the number of officials in a county has a strict customization, generally speaking, there is one county order of the seventh grade, one person of the county of the eighth grade, and the number of the chief bookkeeper of the ninth grade is uncertain, and he is in charge of grain and horses, household registration, taxation, and arrest.

Among them, the county clerk and the main bookkeeper have their own office locations, called the county clerk and the chief bookkeeper.

The county government also has a Confucian exhortation of the eighth grade and a discipline instructor of the ninth grade, who is in charge of training the students and the administration of the school.

From the inspection department of Jiupin, one person was inspected, and he was set up in a remote and critical place in the county, in charge of arresting thieves and interrogating traitors.

The rest are miscellaneous officials, such as the chief officials of the Department of Medicine, the Department of Yin-Yang Studies, the Department of the Sangha Society, and the Department of the Taoist Society.

In addition, the post officials who are in charge of the postal service, the gate officials who are in charge of the opening and closing of the river gates, the tax ambassadors who are in charge of the commercial tax, the county warehouse ambassadors who are in charge of the cangyu, and the officials of the river office who are in charge of the fishing tax are set up according to the local situation, and they are miscellaneous officials who do not enter the stream.

Officials, second-level officials and miscellaneous officials belong to the imperial court officials, and they are out-and-out officials who enjoy the benefits of the imperial court.

From the above introduction, it can be seen that there are not many officials in the county government, and what really makes the county government appear to be many people are the officials and errands below, to put it bluntly, the clerks of the sixth room of the county government and the third class of officials.

According to the different responsibilities, the officials of the six rooms of the county government have four titles, namely, scribes, bearers, wardens and collectors, although there are four names, but the officials of Fuzhou County can be called "wardens", and the heads of each house are called "officials".

Among them, the officials assigned to the heads of prefectures and counties, the second officials, and the subordinate officials are called the canons.

In addition to being called the officials, the leaders of the county officials can also be called Jingcheng, or they are crowned with the names of each house, and they are called the official book, the household book, the ritual book, the military book, the torture book, and the work book, which is a symbol of identity and status.

Generally speaking, there are more than 10 scribes in each room of the county government, that is, officials, and generally no more than 20 people, and the configuration of each room is one secretary and two scribes.

It must be pointed out that officials are not officials and therefore have no rank, according to the ancient rules or "choose from the people and fill up", or "serve for five years and change".

Since the officials were usually people from the yamen, who held real power and had a lot of money, many people obtained the position of officials through allows or bribes.

As civil servants of the yamen, according to the regulations, the officials should rely on the payment of pen and paper, copying, and food to make ends meet, but because they held the actual power of the county government, they took bribes and bribes to enrich their own pockets to make up for the shortfall in income.

Because the officials in the county government belonged to the liuguan of the imperial court, they would be transferred to other places every few years, and the officials who passed the imperial examination were good at writing but poor in governance, so they needed to rely on those officials who were familiar with the people's conditions, proficient in laws and regulations, knew the format of official documents and the tricks of officialdom, and were good at handling the internal affairs of the yamen.

This also made the officials in the yamen a special group, which can be called the actual rulers of the yamen, concealing and bullying the subordinates, and even setting up the officials in the yamen to control the power of the yamen, so that the county became a puppet.

It is precisely because they have too much power that the officials take advantage of their special advantages in the government to collect benefits, and they have nothing to do with their pens, so as to balance the psychology of being in the government but their political future is blocked and their economic treatment is low.

In the county ya, another large group is the three classes of officials, the so-called "three classes" refer to the soap class, the strong class and the fast class, which is the largest class of the local yamen, and at the same time has a low status, belongs to the ranks of the lower nine classes, and the three generations of children and grandchildren are not allowed to participate in the imperial examination.

Generally speaking, the soap squad is on duty, the fast squad is arrested, and the strong squad is poor, but in actual operation, the three shifts are not very clearly divided, and their responsibilities overlap with each other.

For example, the soap squad and the strong squad share the responsibilities of internal service, standing in the hall, execution, guarding, and harnessing, while the fast squad is divided into step and horse fast, and is in charge of arrest.

Moreover, it should be pointed out that the so-called "three-class servants" is only a general term, in fact, there are not only three classes of errand servants in the yamen, in addition to the three classes of soap, strong, and fast, there are also people's strong, archers, poor grain, menzi, forbidden sons, cooks, umbrella fan sedan chair drivers, etc., which also belong to this class, and belong to the envoys of the yamen, which can be called "servants".

In order to support the large number of officials and servants, the local yamen had to rely on the tax revenue of the yamen, which invisibly increased the burden on the people.

In fact, the reason why this situation occurred in the local yamen of the Ming Dynasty was closely related to the Ming Taizu, who was born poor and hoped to create a self-sufficient world, which can be seen from the cantonment system, which believed that after the implementation of the cantonment system, the imperial court would no longer need to bother the army's military salary.

I have to say that the original intention of Ming Taizu was good, the imperial court was only responsible for the income of the officials in the local yamen, and the officials and servants relied on the local yamen to feed, so it seemed that on the surface it reduced the national financial expenditure and reduced the tax burden of the people, but in fact, the people had to pay more taxes to support the officials and servants of the county government.

And it was those officials and servants who stirred up the local yamen, so Li Yuntian hoped that Zhao Dezhang could reform the government and county government in Songjiang Prefecture and clean up the redundant personnel of the government and county government.

Li Yuntian did not let Zhao Dezhang carry out this reform aimlessly, Daming already had a good template, that is, the local yamen institution of Jiaozhi.

Although the number of local yamen at all levels in Jiaozhi is not large, they have fulfilled their duties and have very high work efficiency, which has made Jiaozhi develop rapidly in the past ten years, which is Li Yuntian's ideal organizational form.

Different from the local yamen in other provinces of the Ming Dynasty, the staff of the local yamen in Jiaozhi all have the income of the imperial court and enjoy various welfare benefits, which is enough to make the lives of those people at a relatively high level.

The staff of the Jiaozhi local yamen are divided into two types: officials and officials, of which the officials are appointed by the Jiangwutang, while the officials are recruited locally and are responsible for carrying out the orders of the officials and being responsible for the daily operation of the local yamen.

It is worth mentioning that the officials of Jiaozhi include the errand servants of various departments, they are recruited from the local people, and they must be assessed every year, and they no longer belong to the lowly status, and their identity is the clerk of the local yamen, which is the biggest difference between Jiaozhi and the provinces of the Ming Dynasty.

Li Yuntian believes that in order to make those officials work with peace of mind, it is necessary not only to solve the problem of supporting their families, but also to deal with their identities, only in this way will those people cherish this errand and dare not violate the law and discipline.

Zhao Dezhang's life was saved by Li Yuntian, so he was naturally grateful to Li Yuntian, plus Li Yuntian was the mainstay of the imperial court, and the personnel structure of the local yamen in Jiaozhi was the most reasonable, so he was naturally willing to follow Li Yuntian.

In fact, not only Zhao Dezhang, but also the officials of the yamen in various places in the Ming Dynasty are aware of the dangers of the officials and servants, but because they have to rely on those people to maintain the daily operation of the yamen, they turn a blind eye to this, and the scheming officials beat those officials and servants, so that they dare not be too presumptuous, and those officials who have no scheming can only be led by the nose.

Zhao Dezhang was deeply affected by it, and it was the Linyun County Household Officials and others who made trouble in the case of the river embankment in Linyun County, so that the Songjiang Prefecture Government obtained the official document that he received the silver taels for repairing the embankment, which became the most important evidence for his conviction.

Therefore, Zhao Dezhang hated those bold and reckless officials and bullying servants, and decided to take this opportunity to get rid of these filths in the yamen.

In addition, in Zhao Dezhang's view, this is also a good opportunity to go down in history, and he will become the first official in the Ming Dynasty's two capitals and thirteen provinces to reform the local yamen.