Reborn Regent of Ming Dynasty

There are many reasons for this situation, but the main reason is that the minting industry has not really been established. www>

Compared with the main and auxiliary coins such as gold, silver and copper in the West, China has always used copper coins as the main currency.

Copper coins are the mainstay, supplemented by Jiaozi and other banknotes. This is actually a stable and reasonable monetary policy, because most farmers do not need large amounts of currency. Copper coins are used to pay taxes and are very convenient for daily life.

The tragedy is that the amount of copper coins in the Ming Dynasty was less than one tenth of that in the Song Dynasty, which resulted in a shortage of private coins, and only a large amount of silver could be used, which made silver become the mainstream currency, that is, the silver standard.

The silver standard leads to insufficient coins, and the amount of money must also be insufficient. The simplest example is taxation. [

In the early Ming Dynasty, Ming Taizu was very naive, thinking that taxes in kind could be used to solve the tax problem, but after decades, his descendants had to collect currency units to maintain daily expenses.At the end of the Ming Dynasty, under the whip, all farmers had to hand in silver to enrich the treasury.

But silver is too expensive, and ordinary farmers do not have silver in their hands. This makes farmers have to borrow money when paying taxes, or sell grain to grain merchants at a low price, and then use the silver they sell to pay taxes. Because silver is a unit of weight and not currency, it has to be re-melted, and the local government charges the fire consumption again, which exploits the peasants again.

In addition, silver is not a coin but a precious metal, which makes many wealthy families store a large amount of silver. It is not uncommon for Shanxi Shanxi merchants to dig large holes in their courtyards to store hundreds of thousands or millions of taels of silver at a time.

In this way, these silvers have been withdrawn from the field of circulation, making the amount of private currency always scarce, and in the process of small transactions, silver has been clipped and clipped, which has caused a lot of waste invisibly. When all the silver coins were collected by the government, all traders would be tricked by the government... During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the amount of coins was seriously insufficient. The former was due to the failed monetary policy and the lack of mining capacity, while the latter was downright stupid... …The Qing government simply banned mining. Except for a few official mines, any private mines were prohibited. Moreover, a self-righteous tradition formed in the Qing Dynasty was to strictly enforce the mining ban.

The minister suggested to the emperor that mining is rentier and quick success, while those who oppose the ban are old-fashioned and seek the country.

This kind of cognition was still strong in the hundred years from Kangxi to Qianlong, and became the mainstream of the cognition of the government and the public at that time.

Even at the end of the Qing Dynasty, when a large amount of foreign silver coins poured in, the Qing court still shrank like an ostrich in the imaginary sand and refused to pull it out. Seeing that the country was about to perish, they shyly issued a few batches of Longyang, and there were still insufficient coins. This problem has not been solved until the National Government. Before the Republic, silver coins and copper coins were normally used by the people...the amount of currency was insufficient, and the gold reserves were insufficient, and the credit system had never been established.

Economic issues are not Zhang Shouren's strong point, but he has read a few monographs anyway, and he understands in his heart that no matter how harmful the maritime trade in the late Ming Dynasty was to the rule of the Ming Dynasty, it is beneficial to people of insight and those who participated in it. Still outweigh the disadvantages.

Especially for a person like him who wants to do a big business, going to the sea and participating in the fight for interests in this era of great voyages is an urgent matter!

China is not a pure mainland nation, nor is it a pure ocean nation, but the next few hundred years will belong to the ocean. Nations that ignore this will definitely be severely punished. In the history that Zhang Shouren remembers, China lacks the lesson of the ocean But this time, no matter what, he must make up this one in his hand!