Yuan Shao, the father of Fanghua in the Three Kingdoms

Chapter 1436 Bottom Line
Lu Su and Zhang Zhao received the order and went to the palace. Yuan Xi met them and asked, "When you were in Jiangdong, were there any noble merchants who hoarded goods? How did you deal with it at that time?"

The two looked at each other in bewilderment. After a long while, Lu Su said, "My family used to be engaged in business."

Yuan Xi burst out laughing, he almost forgot about this. Lu Su's family was very wealthy, and besides land, traveling for business was naturally the easiest way to amass wealth.

He mentioned the actions of the Bingzhou merchants to raise grain prices, saying, "They overestimate their own abilities. If they continue like this, it will have a very bad impact on the people's livelihood in Bingzhou."

"So I want you to go to Jinyang to stabilize prices."

Zhang Zhao asked: "Are you going to use force or soft tactics?"

Yuan Xi said: "We use reason to convince others, so of course we should use courtesy before force."

Lu Su immediately understood and frowned, saying, "This requires a large amount of supplies and money."

Yuan Xi said calmly: "It just so happens that I have both."

He asked Cao Jie to hand Lu Su an account book and asked, "Are these enough?"

"If it's not enough, I'll recruit some more later."

Lu Su looked at it and said, "That's enough, unless something big changes."

Yuan Xi asked: "What is a variable?"

Lu Su replied: "If those people gamble all their property to buy up silver and money, leaving the market without money, and at the same time find ways to barter and buy up all the grain sold by the court, leaving the market short of grain or even without grain to sell, it is still possible to drive down the grain price."

After hearing this, Yuan Xi smiled and said, "That's true."

"In this era when paper money cannot be issued and gold, silver and copper are still currencies of equal value, if there is a shortage of goods and money, the market may indeed collapse."

"In that case, I will collect some gold and silver from various places and see how much they can eat."

Zhang Zhao reminded him, "I have heard about the wealth of the Bingzhou merchants when I was in Jianghuai. I am afraid that their hidden power is unexpectedly deep."

"I heard that Your Majesty once attacked Jinyang, but afterwards treated the Shang people of Bingzhou leniently. Your Majesty's benevolence and righteousness have instead nurtured a tiger that has become a threat to you."

Yuan Xi said: "The goal at that time was mainly to deal with the stubborn Southern Xiongnu tribe. In order to make the city work together, I proposed a very lenient policy towards the Bingzhou Shang tribe."

"Although the credit for the snowy night raid mainly goes to the soldiers who risked their lives to climb the city gate, the Bingzhou Shang clan also participated in the attack on the city gate. Therefore, I kept my promise and not only did not plunder the city, but also compensated for the losses."

"At first, I thought that if these people were grateful, they would be nicer to the people in the future, but now it seems that it was like talking to a cow. Some of the things they did later have already crossed the line."

"Since they want to make money, I will let them make as much as they want. It depends on whether they have the appetite to eat it."

"My money is not that easy to take."

He nodded to Cao Jie, who took out another booklet and handed it to Zhang Zhao, saying, "Zi Jing is kind-hearted and cannot be a bad guy, so to wrap up this matter, we need Zi Bu to be a bad guy."

Zhang Zhao opened the booklet and took a look at it. Then his expression changed. "Did they do all these things?"

"Their burden is greater than that of the Jiangdong nobles!"

Lu Su came over to take a look and sighed, "Businessmen are blinded by profit. This is the way to their death."

What is recorded in the booklet is the account of military supplies provided by Bingzhou over the years. Because the north has been waging wars for years, attacking Liangzhou and resisting the Xianbei, a large amount of supplies have been requisitioned, and naturally the various merchant clans that control the supply of Bingzhou cannot be bypassed.

At that time, Yuan Xi also used the money from the national treasury to make fair purchases, but the merchants in Bingzhou were not honest. In order to gain more profits, they did many things of passing off inferior goods as good ones.

Expired medicinal herbs, inferior cotton and linen, and copper and iron shovels that broke easily when dug were all counted as high-grade, fine goods and mixed in with military supplies.

At the beginning, the Bingzhou merchant clan kept their accounts very flawless, and they tampered with the random inspections, and even bribed some officials to deceive the quartermasters, allowing these inferior goods to flow onto the battlefield, indirectly leading to the unnecessary deaths and injuries of some soldiers.

This kind of thing has existed since ancient times, but the Bingzhou merchant clan was unaware of it. The Procuratorate had long ago collected evidence and traced it all the way back to the Bingzhou merchant clan, and then reported the evidence to Yuan Xi.

Zhang Zhao looked at the time. The earliest thing happened was three or four years ago. He thought to himself that His Majesty was really patient, as he only let the Bingzhou Shang clan jump out at this time.

He held the booklet in his arms and lowered his head and asked, "How is your majesty going to deal with this?"

Yuan Xi said calmly: "Kill those who deserve to be killed, don't condone them."

"I remember that when Lord Sun was exiled to the Hetao Plain, he had a lot of interactions with the Shang clan, right?"

"Although the person is dead, we can dig deeper to find out who instigated Sun Hou to defect. Without anyone providing the route and supplies, how could he have escaped to the outside of the Great Wall so easily?" Zhang Zhao and Lu Su complained in their hearts. His Majesty was really cruel. He even wanted to use the dead Sun Quan. He really wanted to take advantage of him.

After the two men left the palace, they couldn't help but smile bitterly at each other. They thought they came to the local area to work as officials in a stable manner, but they didn't expect that because they were not deeply involved in local interests, they were sent to investigate the crimes of the Shang clan in Bingzhou!
However, now that things have come to this, we can only follow Your Majesty's ideas and proceed step by step.

Yuan Xi in the palace asked Cao Jie to take the intelligence of Wei State, looked through it for a while and said, "What currency do Jin State and Wei State use for trade?"

Cao Jie thought for a moment and said, "The currency of Wei has almost collapsed in the past two years. Most of the time, we have to trade with other things."

Yuan Xi said, "Isn't this inconvenient?"

"And does Wei have any goods worth exchanging?"

Cao Jie thought for a moment and said, "Sister was the one who did the accounting for the Northern Lands before. Although I know a little bit, I am afraid that I may have missed something. How about I ask sister to come over?"

Yuan Xi nodded, and Cao Jie went out to call Cao Xian over. She was very familiar with this and said, "Cao Wei previously occupied Yizhou, Sili, and part of Jingzhou and Liangzhou."

"Liangzhou produces fine horses, Yizhou produces brocade, and Jingzhou produces bronze and grain."

"Especially the grains from Jingzhou, which are the bulk of the trade. Although these grains are difficult to preserve, they are life-saving after all, so they are still very popular when used to exchange for goods."

Yuan Xi asked curiously, "Is food the biggest expense?"

"This is the most important strategic material for the war, and they are selling it so recklessly?"

Cao Xian replied: "But there is not much else to sell in Jingzhou except these."

"In the past, copperware was traded because some places were short of copper, so they needed to buy copperware to melt down copper coins, especially in Hannan."

"But in recent years, Your Majesty has replaced copper coins with gold and silver coins, and the amount of copper in Jin State has increased. Naturally, it has flowed to Hannan. Hannan is a small place, and the amount of copper it can absorb is limited. It was soon saturated."

"Besides, since Jin has been importing ore from the Wa Nu Islands, more and more copper will flow out in the future, so even the copperware in Jingzhou will not be able to be sold."

Yuan Xi was surprised: "Although the connection here is not complicated, it is not something that can be figured out in a short time. Who taught this?"

Cao Xian smiled and said, "I learned part of it by myself, and sometimes I asked Madam Huang who taught at the Jicheng Charity School a few years ago for advice."

"Madam Huang must have received guidance from Prime Minister Zhuge, and she is very knowledgeable about economics. I have never seen a woman more knowledgeable than her."

Yuan Xi nodded and continued, "So Jingzhou can only sell grain?"

Cao Xian said: "That's right. Most of what Jin State sold to Wei State were luxury handicrafts favored by the nobles. These were in short supply. Apart from food and some minerals, Wei State could not provide what Jin State wanted for a while."

Yuan Xi thought to himself, isn't Wei State a source of raw materials for Jin State? Then he heard Cao Xian say, "Jingzhou is the granary of Cao Wei. In addition to military use, I heard that taxes have become heavier. Although the land tax is only 20%, with the addition of labor and levies, 80% of the harvest has to be handed over. The people are suffering, so many people have fled from famine."

"As more people fled famine, Cao Wei's population decreased, leaving more land, so it was still able to hold on. However, the neighboring Jin State's Jianghuai region was affected because it needed to resettle disaster victims."

Yuan Xi said: "This is natural, but in the long run, a large population means more labor, which is not a bad thing. Otherwise, if everyone in the world died, would the world become a better place?"

Cao Xian said: "That's true, but because Cao Wei adopted the Nine-Rank System, the nobles and powerful families paid very little tax, so the three counties of Jingzhou are still quite stubborn in their resistance. I'm afraid they will have to fight Wei all the way to the end."

Yuan Xi disagreed and said, "This is better. I don't have the time to win them over. It's not a good thing for a family to become a powerful one. The fewer tree heads, the better."

Cao Xian smiled and asked, "What about Mrs. Cai from Dong'an?"

Yuan Xi was in a state of panic, "How come you are so well-informed?"

Seeing Yuan Xi getting angry, Cao Xian smiled and changed the subject, "However, the Wu Shi San in the Jianghuai region has not been completely banned. Some nobles who are addicted to it have even offered dozens of times the price because they have cut off their supply. For a while, a bottle of Wu Shi San could even be sold for dozens of taels of silver."

"So there were even people in Wei who secretly smuggled Wushisan into Jin, and then sold it to the nobles to make a lot of money."

Yuan Xi sneered. He was even more happy to see these nobles taking drugs and committing suicide. If all the nobles were so addicted and had short lives, it would be a good thing. He was afraid that within a few generations the family would decline, which would be exactly what Yuan Xi wanted.

But what made Yuan Xi unhappy was that it was fine for the gentry to spend money within the territory of Jin, as it was all internal circulation and the people of the country would benefit in the end. But if they purchased money and goods from Wei, it would be aiding the enemy, and Wei would use these money and goods to deal with Jin, so this loophole had to be stopped.

A malicious idea popped up in Yuan Xi's mind. Since he was going to sell it anyway, why not just sell it to the nobles himself?
Suddenly he was shocked. Isn't this the Opium War of later generations? The Wei State was like Britain, selling opium to the Qing Dynasty, and then the Qing government grew opium itself to fight back. After tasting the sweetness, the Qing government planted opium on a large scale, causing the national industry to be abandoned and never recover.

Yuan Xi thought that it was still a lesson from the past. One must never touch drugs. If one does, there will be no recovery, both for individuals and for the country.

The only safe way for now is to crack down on smuggling.

(End of this chapter)