Why did emperors prefer to use eunuchs?

Because eunuchs could not form powerful families, their interests were generally aligned with those of the emperor.

In fact, most eunuchs during the Ming Dynasty were capable individuals, and their actions often surpassed those of the scholar-officials of the Ming Dynasty. For example, Wang Zhi achieved significant military accomplishments, and even Wei Zhongxian helped the emperor fill financial gaps.

Ultimately, the lack of an IT system in ancient times meant that data was entirely reliant on people (the scholar-officials) to manage numbers. As the saying goes: "Whoever controls the data controls the world." 😂

Thus, the Ming Dynasty had a very developed supervisory system: the Censorate. The problem was that the selection of censors was also based on the same system, and censors exchanged talents with other government offices, so in the end, they were all part of the same group.

The consequence of the emperor not having access to real data is that the redundancy and elasticity of the entire system are very high. For example, if the treasury received 1 tael of silver, it might reach the common people as 10 taels or even more.

This problem is almost unsolvable. You can't outsource it; outsourcing would be similar to the Yuan Dynasty's tax farming system, which effectively led to fragmentation, repeating the issues of the late Han and Tang Dynasties.

If I were to travel back to the Ming Dynasty, I would probably adopt a state-owned enterprise model to generate revenue for the court, almost exempting the common people from taxes and only collecting from wealthy households. Let's keep it simple: one household pays 100 taels of silver a year, and we just set a threshold.

The bureaucratic system can delegate to local authorities, but they have no power to collect taxes. Local military forces operate independently…

That's about it; knowing the difficulty is easier than taking action. 😂

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