Liu De held Yi Nu's little hand and walked leisurely into the shop. ()
This is a typical shop in the early Han Dynasty. It has a simple layout. The walls are made of rammed mud. The foundation is paved with wooden boards. There is a simple counter and goods stacked on the shelves. With three or two clerks, it is almost a shop.
All of them.
Walking into the store, Liu De knew why its business was so good.
Because this is a fabric store.
There are many kinds of fabrics in the store.
From the expensive Sichuan brocade to the linen cloth worn by ordinary people, everything is available.
At this time, ordinary people basically spent most of their savings on clothing, except for food.
Every year during winter leisure, ordinary people will choose to use the year's savings to buy a new dress for their wife or a beautiful new dress for their children.
There is no doubt that due to the limitations of technology and conditions, fabrics are very tight and therefore expensive.
Basically at this time, gold, copper coins and cloth could be circulated as currency.
Among them, gold is the top currency and is only circulated among the nobility, big landowners and bureaucratic class. It usually exists in the form of gold cakes and has no fixed exchange ratio with copper coins.
Suppose someone must exchange copper coins for gold.
Liu De does have a reference data.
There is a question in Zhang Cang's Nine Chapters of Arithmetic. This question quotes data from the Prime Minister's Palace, and the final answer is that a pound of gold is worth six thousand two hundred and fifty.
As for cloth, as we all know, China has always used silk cloth in place of money for transactions and circulation.
At this time, cloth was the hard currency.
Even in the eyes of many people, cloth is more reliable than copper coins.
Because if you are unlucky about copper coins and get inferior copper-lead-iron coins, you will undoubtedly suffer a big loss.
But the cloth will not be costed.
Therefore, at this time, the most promising industry is undoubtedly the textile industry!
"If we introduce cotton from the Western Regions to China, plant it on a large scale in imperial villages, and then find someone to invent a spinning machine, how much money will the national treasury make that year?" Liu De felt his adrenaline rush as he thought about this.
It started to secrete rapidly.
Liu De knew that the law enacted by the Han Dynasty and the imperial court stipulated that a piece of burlap was worth thirty-five yuan. Of course, this was the cloth you handed over to the government as a tax. The government's assessment of the value of your cloth did not
I mean, one horse is only worth thirty-five cents.
In fact, the cheapest piece of linen that Liu De saw in this cloth shop was worth fifty-five yuan, and the one with slightly better quality was fifty-seven or fifty-eight yuan.
As for the prices of silks worn by nobles and even luxurious Shu brocades, they are jaw-dropping.
The cheapest silk is worth thousands of dollars each. As for Shu brocade, copper coins are basically not accepted. They are only traded in gold.
After walking around in the fabric store, Liu De basically understood the value of cloth at this time.
Don't underestimate the importance of cloth.
Basically, if you know the price of cloth, you can roughly calculate the price of other commodities.
Because the Han Dynasty did not implement any standard currency system, even the face value of copper coins circulating in the market would be used differently by the people during actual use due to the copper content, appearance and weight of the copper coins.
Only cloth is a basically constant reference.
Liu De remembered that during the Eastern Han Dynasty, even for a long time, the court and government abandoned the circulation of money and only used cloth as currency.
During the Three Kingdoms and Two Jin Dynasties, Cao Pi once abolished the circulation of copper coins and only recognized cloth.
These are all for a reason.
There are reasons for Confucianism to praise and advocate, and there are also reasons why cloth is indeed a good reference that can accurately reflect commodity prices. At the same time, it can also allow farmers who cannot read a word to accurately judge whether they have been cheated.
"Five baht coins..." Liu De walked out of the cloth shop and thought about the five baht coins he had minted.
There is no doubt that as long as the quality of his five-baht coins is guaranteed, he will definitely seize the world's coin market.
However, Liu De could only scrape together about 30 million yuan of copper at most by selling iron.
Among them, Piyanghou, a large family with thousands of households in the city, accounts for the majority of the bronze wares that have been accumulated for decades. If you want to cast more, you have to find a cheap father.
In order for the five-baht coin to replace other currencies currently in circulation, at least two million copper coins must be minted.
Because the Han family's annual financial income is now about 300,000 to 400,000 yuan.
Multiply this number by five, which is almost the total amount of currency in circulation in the world.
Where to find so much high-quality copper?
This problem may be extremely difficult for others.
But for Liu De, it is as simple as drinking water and eating.
All he had to do was wait until he became emperor and send a eunuch and a few prospectors to Yuzhang.
As a time traveler, no matter how ignorant he was, Liu De still knew the name of Jiangxi Dexing Copper Mine.
…………………………………………
After leaving the cloth store, Liu De took Yi Nu and went to a shop next door that looked like a grocery store.
As soon as he entered the door, Liu De saw a tense situation in the store. Two sturdy farmers were confronting two men dressed as shop assistants.
Both sides looked at each other angrily and their veins were exposed, as if they were about to start a fight at any time.
The guards pretending to be customers, rangers wandering the streets, and travelers became nervous immediately after seeing this scene. Some even put their hands on the handles of knives hidden in their loose robes.
Liu De, however, didn't take it seriously. He pulled Yi Nu and stood aside to watch.
At this time, another person ran in.
This man was wearing dark green cloth. As soon as he entered the door, he spoke with a rough Anyi local accent and said loudly: "What are you doing? What are you doing? Come over here!"
To Liu De's surprise, both groups of people walked up to the man obediently. One of the waiters bowed his hands to the man and said, "Mr. Zhang, you are Pingjia from Dongshi. You have to give us some help."
Call the shots!”
The man said: "The two of them want to buy something from our store with their shabby money. Is this possible?"
He excitedly waved a handful of copper coins in his hand and put them in front of the man. Liu De took a sideways look and saw that they were indeed inferior coins. Not only were they extremely thin, but they were even smaller than ordinary copper coins.
Some! Liu De's visual inspection suggested that it was probably a scam created by some unscrupulous private money-making workshop.
The two farmers looked at each other and asked, "Are you Pinja?"
The man in green shirt nodded, put the copper coins back into the hands of the two men, and said: "There is no virtue in the money, you two should not use it again in the future!"
He cupped his hands and said, "Give me a thin noodles and forget about it. Otherwise, if you go to the Yamen, if I don't help you, you know the consequences!"
The two of them seemed to be very afraid of the man with the name of 'Ping Jia'. They cupped their hands and said, "Since Ping Jia has spoken, we brothers will give Ping Jia some face!"
After saying that, he took the copper coins and left without looking back.
This made Liu De very strange.
What is Pinja?
Is it this man’s name? His nickname? His official position? Or something else?
After seeing this man speak a few words, he sent away two gangsters who pretended to be farmers, but were actually here to blackmail him.
Liu De feels that this person is too powerful, right?
You know, even the government may not have such great prestige.
So Liu De asked Yi Nu: "What is Ping Jia?" (To be continued...)
ps: There will be another update later~
Well, I went out for an impromptu trip at night and didn’t come back until 10:30, but no matter what, if I say 3 updates, I will definitely update 3 times!
In addition, students who are confused about whether Western Han gold is gold or not, don’t worry, I will open a special chapter to explain it in detail tomorrow.
Well, let's put it this way, according to the information I have reviewed, including but not limited to historical records, Hanshu, Sanfu Huangtu, Later Hanshu, the deeds of ministers and literati of the Han Dynasty, and the unearthed Han bamboo slips, it is certain and unmistakable that the Qin and Han Dynasties
Gold is gold, and it is legal tender and a listed currency.
There are pictures and truth, clear cases, detailed evidence chains, as well as sufficient written records, conversations of people at the time, legal regulations, and emperor's edicts.
It can only be said that history cannot be made up by the imagination!
