Yuan Shao, the father of Fanghua in the Three Kingdoms

Chapter 1146 Currency
When Mi Tai learned what Mi Fang had done, he quickly sent someone to send a letter back to Huang County, Qingzhou, where the Mi family business was located.

At that time, Mrs. Mi, under Yuan Xi's order, was reorganizing merchant ships in Huangxian, purchasing goods, and sending ships to Mi Tai to transport soldiers and weapons, preparing to negotiate with Himiko with a tough attitude.

As a result, after the news came, Mrs. Mi's eyes went dark. She knew that Mi Fang had caused a big mess this time, and his secret establishment of a country had destroyed Yuan Xi's overseas expansion plan. Yuan Xi was afraid that he would send troops to attack him!
Thinking of this, Mrs. Mi became anxious. When she learned that Yuan Xi was now in Guangling, she came here in person by boat to apologize.

Yuan Xi had not expected Madam Mi to come. Seeing Madam Mi's anxious and dusty face, he thought something serious had happened. But after listening to Madam Mi's story, he could not help but burst out laughing. "What kind of thing is this that makes you so worried?"

"Isn't this nice?"

When Madam Mi saw this, she immediately felt relieved, but she still said anxiously, "Husband... don't you blame my brother?"

Yuan Xi smiled and said, "What are you blaming me for?"

"What he is robbing is not Chinese territory, but the real expansion of territory."

"If this happened in peacetime, he would have been granted a title of nobility. But now that the world is in chaos, it's no big deal for him to declare himself king."

"But he became king overnight, and I am now on equal footing with him."

Madam Mi said with shame: "What do you mean by equal status? My brother is ignorant. The people in Wa are all barbarians who refuse to be civilized. How can they compare with my husband who occupies half of the country?"

"And if he does this, won't it affect your husband's plans?"

Yuan Xi nodded and said, "A little bit."

"Wa Nu Kingdom... Oh no, Mi Kingdom," everyone present couldn't help laughing when they heard the name. Yuan Xi held back his laughter and said, "There are some things I need over there."

"Most of the gold and silver mines in China are difficult to mine now, but many of these minerals in Mi Country are on the surface, and the mining cost is only a few tenths of that here."

“So even if we don’t smelt it on site but transport the ore back, it’s still cost-effective, it’s just a waste of manpower.”

"My original plan was to let Mi Tai and Himiko trade mining rights, smelt gold and silver on site, and then transport them back to serve as an important support for the currency reform in my territory."

He turned to Bu Zhi and asked, "Didn't Zishan say that the practice of dividing the land has some unavoidable hidden dangers?"

After Bu Zhi heard this, he quickly told Yuan Xi the suggestions made by the officials of Xuzhou that he thought were useful. Yuan Xi nodded and said, "The people who raised these questions are talented. Please write them down and let them help you as your assistants."

"There is a very good question here. After the land is divided, the people will have land, but how to pay taxes and how to distribute labor will inevitably undergo great changes. If we continue to use the old methods, there will definitely be big problems."

"This involves one of the most troublesome problems in history."

“The balance between taxes, currency, and means of payment.”

“Before the three reach a delicate balance, there will inevitably be a vicious cycle such as uneven taxation between the rich and the poor, monetary tightening, and finally rising prices, heavier taxes, and landlords using the common people to force the emperor to power.”

The people present seemed to understand what he said, Bu Zhi and Madam Mi were still thinking about it, but Lu Lingqi almost had a brain short circuit. She stood up and said, "You guys talk slowly, I'm going to go out and clear my mind."

She casually pulled Bu Lianshi out, and Yuan Xi asked in surprise, "What are you doing?"

Lu Ling smiled and said, "Don't worry, my husband. I have corrected my bad habits and will not eat her anymore."

Master Bu Lian was confused. What did this mean?
Instead, a blush appeared on Mrs. Mi's face. She bit her lip and secretly glanced at Yuan Xi. She found that the other party didn't care and she couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief.

He thought that Lu Lingqi was bold and reckless, but she got along very well with her husband. The two people with different personalities got along so well. Was it because her husband was so open-minded?

Yuan Xi's mind was not on this. He was trying hard to search for words, trying to explain this problem that was beyond his time in words that Bu Zhi could understand.

He thought of the Tang Dynasty's policy of issuing both money and silk, the failure of Jiaozi issued by the Song Dynasty, and the success and failure of Zhang Juzheng's "One Whip Policy" in the late Ming Dynasty. In the end, all these things came down to one problem.

The scarcity of precious monetary metals means that they cannot support a normal monetary circulation system.

This is the so-called money shortage, that is, the phenomenon of money being expensive and goods being cheap.

The earliest money shortage recorded in history books occurred in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. At that time, with the development of production, the goods traded on the market increased exponentially, but the corresponding circulating currency was limited to production and decision makers lacked awareness and prevention of this phenomenon, resulting in a decrease in production instead of an increase, thus causing a series of chain reactions.

At this time, the price of goods dropped and the purchasing power of the entire society increased, but the currency was not issued in time, so the value of precious metals used in currency increased.

These precious metals are mostly gold, silver and copper. Not to mention gold and silver, China's copper output was limited at that time, and the large mines were all in the south. Therefore, the rich families who had currency began to hoard currency after meeting their daily purchasing needs.

This further led to a tightening of circulation in the market, and the currency became scarce, so the goods depreciated again and the precious metals appreciated again, and the vicious cycle began. In fact, solving this problem is a relatively easy method in modern society. As long as there is a national credit endorsement, the corresponding currency can be issued.

But in ancient times, when precious metals were needed as underlying physical objects, all of this would not work. This was an almost unsolvable problem for the monetary system in feudal society.

The Tang Dynasty's policy of using both money and silk was also proposed by people of great talent and wisdom. They could vaguely see the hidden dangers in it, so they wanted to use silk, the common currency of the Jin Dynasty, to replace money in circulation. This was a brand new attempt.

However, there was a hidden danger in this regulation, that is, silk was not easy to store in the national treasury, so the Tang Dynasty stipulated that taxes must be paid in coins.

This regulation undoubtedly sent a bad signal, so everyone from the wealthy families to the common people began to hoard coins. However, if the common people wanted to pay taxes, they could only sell their goods cheaply in exchange for coins, and then save them and never use them for transactions again.

This further exacerbated monetary tightening, ultimately leading to less and less money circulating in the market.

Moreover, because copper products are more valuable than copper coins, instead of circulating them, it is better to use copper coins to make copper utensils, which greatly accelerates the disappearance of copper coins.

As a result, this policy collapsed within a short period of time. Although the Tang Dynasty took remedial measures, namely prohibiting the private production of copper ware and the private hoarding of large quantities of copper coins, the situation was alleviated afterwards, but the monetary system had lost its most basic credit and the monetary policy was declared a failure.

The Song Dynasty that came later learned from the lessons of the Tang Dynasty. The officials who formulated policies were not the kind of people who would just sit there and do nothing. They keenly discovered that the most critical problem was the scarcity of precious metals, which was difficult to change in a short period of time, so they tried another approach.

The paper currency Jiaozi was issued with the backing of the state's credibility.

To be fair, this idea was thousands of years ahead of its time and can be regarded as a highlight of the embryonic stage of capitalism in ancient China.

But it still failed.

Because they were limited by the vision of the time, they did not see, and could not see, an extremely critical problem in the Jiaozi and silver exchange system.

The number of Jiaozi issued must not only match the number in circulation on the market, but also be lower than the amount of silver that the Song Dynasty government could provide as a currency.

However, after the Treaty of Shanyuan, the Song Dynasty used a large amount of silver to pay the annual tribute, which led to a decrease in precious metals circulating in the market and the depreciation of Jiaozi. At the same time, because the Song Dynasty had given away a large amount of money and goods in the Treaty of Shanyuan, it came up with evil ideas and began to issue more Jiaozi.

The final result is that a vicious cycle is formed again and this monetary policy attempt has failed again.

As for why Britain was successful in issuing the pound sterling a thousand years later, the most crucial point is that after Britain colonized America, it obtained a huge amount of silver. In just a few decades, the value of silver circulating in the UK depreciated by more than ten times, losing its function as a storage of precious metals.

To put it simply, there is too much target currency to be used up, and even if over-issuance of pounds is carried out, deflation will not occur. With the right time and place, the UK's monetary policy was successful.

The failure of the Song Dynasty was due to the fact that its route was right, but the times were wrong, so it was doomed to fail from the start.

The same was true of the Ming Dynasty's Single Whip Law, which aimed to solve the problem of landless peasants having to pay taxes while landlords who owned large amounts of land did not pay taxes. It was successful in the first few decades, but chaos began to emerge afterwards.

It all comes down to that question.

There is not enough silver.

The landlords soon discovered the loophole and began to use scarce silver currency to coerce civilians into annexing land.

Moreover, the north and the south are different. The south has a developed economy, abundant silver and money, and is mainly based on households. The north has suffered from wars and is mainly based on population, and the main exchange product is food. Therefore, the Single Whip System is obviously more beneficial to the south, or even too beneficial.

As a result, the Single Whip System was widely popular in the South, creating a large number of landlords. However, it failed in the North. The people could not pay the taxes and were forced to become displaced and even rebel.

At that time, someone commented, "It is convenient for the rich, but not for the common people; it is convenient for those who make a living in the streets, but not for the farmers in the remote countryside."

Among the three dynasties, this was the policy that was closest to the monetary policy of Emperor Wen of Han. The ultimate result was that the government granaries were full and the people were miserable. It was also the worst policy and one of the important reasons for the demise of the Ming Dynasty.

There is a saying that humans do not learn lessons from history. This is actually quite one-sided when applied to Chinese history. Many problems that plagued previous dynasties were actually improved to varying degrees by knowledgeable people in later dynasties, and then they encountered new problems.

For thousands of years, these ancestors have stepped into almost all the pitfalls that their descendants might fall into. Only later generations can stand on their shoulders and see higher and farther.

All in all, in a feudal society where production was not yet developed, the only way to solve this problem to the greatest extent possible was to have a huge amount of metal currency that exceeded the social circulation.

After Yuan Xi had instilled these things into Bu Zhi in a different way, Bu Zhi was also confused and kept saying, "My lord, please let me think about it carefully. I really can't understand it for the time being."

Outside the window, Lü Lingqi was picking her ears out of boredom, and said to Bu Lianshi who was listening carefully, "Can you understand?"

"I once thought this thing was a heavenly book, not meant for human ears."

(End of this chapter)