Chapter 62 Silver is poison!The poison destroyed the Han people’s world-leading status
So Zhu Yuanzhang's first reaction was.
The key to my house's door lock can only be controlled by myself. If anyone dares to have other keys, I will chop off his hand and kill him.
How could Zhu Yuanzhang, with his personality, let the key to his door lock be in the hands of someone else?
And it is still in the hands of people from other countries.
This is not only shameful, but also humiliating.
How can one's own property be defined by others' value?
You must have the final say yourself.
So now he has come to a conclusion in his heart, that is, no one is allowed to participate in the minting power of the Ming Dynasty.
This silver can never become a mainstream currency.
Because the Ming Dynasty produced too little silver.
As Chen Han said, you cannot control all silver origins, which is equivalent to always having a key in the hands of others. This is absolutely something that cannot happen.
After Ling Han and the others understood this truth, they ran into another problem.
Since the Ming Dynasty's silver cannot be monetized, what method should be used to solve the current predicament?
The credit of the Ming Dynasty's banknotes has depreciated to such an extent that if copper coins are used instead, in Chen Han's eyes, this is another retrogressive system.
So until now, they are even more confused.
After hearing about the two reforms of the one-step whipping method and the method of dividing people into acres, they all felt that they were an excellent way to save the current chaotic tax system of the Ming Dynasty.
But this good recipe must use a unified currency that is recognized by the people.
Silver has been denied, so we must find another thing that can serve as currency.
And Chen Han choked up a little when he thought about the suffering that Baiyin had caused the Chinese people to suffer.
But he still said: “In fact, using silver as the standard currency itself is absurd.
Judging from the history of the evolution of world currency, it later moved towards the gold standard, which contributed to the rise of the British Empire.
From the Ming Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty to the early years of the Republic of China, China's exploration of a currency standard took a long detour and even ran counter to the world trend.
What is the world trend? In 1694, the Bank of England was established and subsequently began to issue pounds.
In 1717, when he was the director and superintendent of the Royal Mint, the famous encyclopedic genius Isaac Newton helped Britain establish the gold standard, setting a ratio of 1:10 or even lower; The gold and silver exchange ratio in the Ming Dynasty was 1:6.
To put it simply, if you take European silver to China and use it, you will make twice as much money; if you take European silver to China and exchange it for gold, you will make even more money! As a result, all Europe was frantically shipping silver to China to earn the price difference.
This gold-silver ratio continued until 1931, which was equivalent to a stable monetary policy lasting 214 years. With the help of this ratio, silver continued to flow out of the UK and gold continued to be imported.
In 1816, Britain officially declared itself a gold standard , with the rise of Britain, Britain had the courage to cross the ocean to compete with China and win the Opium War.
By 1870, Britain's trade accounted for one-third of global trade.
For China, silver is not just a matter of moving against the current. The fundamental problem is: Mainland China’s silver production is extremely low and it must rely on imports.
This means that the result of the hard work of the Chinese people is to give the output of their labor to foreigners in exchange for some useless silver.
Looking at the Ming Dynasty, the domestic silver production and stock totaled less than 6000 million taels. This was obtained after hundreds of years of trade between the Song and Yuan dynasties, but the imports were as high as 2-3 million taels.
This silver was not given away for free, but was obtained in exchange for tea, silk, ceramics and other materials produced by the people for hundreds of years during the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties.
The people in ancient China worked hard all day long to produce material materials that they were reluctant to use, but gave them to foreigners in exchange for white money - and this money could be used with their own costless banknotes. Replacement! If what we exported was not money, but other materials from overseas, how rich the people of the Ming and Qing dynasties would have been! "
When Chen Han said this, his heart felt very the Chinese people’s love for silver did not end well in the end.
Zhu Yuanzhang and the others felt even heavier and felt humiliated.
Chen Han continued: "Silver has the property of being stored in a cellar, has the function of being buried with people, and can also be lost overseas.
In the year 276 of the Ming Dynasty, mainland China imported hundreds of millions of taels of silver. By the time the Ming Dynasty died, very little was the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, the people started from scratch, worked hard again, and imported silver from the world again, but they had nothing. During the so-called heyday of Kangxi and Qianlong in the Qing Dynasty, the people's lives were still very poor.
Those free money were obtained with the hard-earned money of hundreds of millions of Chinese people, but what happened next? In 1843, after the failure of the Opium War, the Qing government signed the Treaty of Nanjing with the United Kingdom. In addition to ceding Hong Kong, it required compensation of 2100 million yuan in silver dollars, equivalent to 1470 million taels of 1843, the fiscal revenue of the Qing government was only 4226 million taels, and the balance was only 35 taels. As a result, 7% of the compensation was funded by Guangdong merchants and other private individuals.
In 1895, after the defeat of the Sino-Japanese War of , China and Japan signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, and the Qing government compensated Japan with 4500 million taels of that time, the Qing government's annual fiscal revenue was only 5 million taels, while Japan's fiscal revenue at that time was only [-] million amount of money is equivalent to Japan’s fiscal revenue for five years.
In 1901, the Qing government signed the "Xin Chou Treaty" with the foreign powers, and paid a total of million taels of silver as compensation, which was paid back in 39 money gradually stopped being paid in 1938, and the actual cumulative compensation paid was million taels of silver, of which a full 5700 million taels were paid to Japan, which was another year's fiscal revenue for them.
In other words, from 1895 to 1901, Japan, a hateful country, was actually supported by the Qing Dynasty for six years.
They eat us, drink us, and eventually take the lives of our people. Why? Ironically, the Qing government was overthrown 10 years after signing the treaty, while the newly established government of the Republic of China continued to make payments. It was only in 1943 that it began to sign agreements to abrogate the treaty with Britain, the United States and other countries, and it was only in 1947 that letters were exchanged to complete all abolition matters.
After the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, all the silver earned by all the people's hard work for 200 years was turned into free compensation for foreigners in the following 100 years.
It started with the failure of the Opium War in 1843 and ended with the abolition of the Xinchou Treaty in the past 100 years, China has compensated a total of 9 million taels of silver!
There is not that much silver in mainland China and even the world.
This means that the silver we compensated flows back through people's labor, and then we compensate it again.
If we measure it from this perspective, from 1567 to 1947, a long history of 380 years, the Chinese people have always made free contributions to the world.
The bond of contribution is that ridiculous silver.
Because of silver, people earn back it through hard work.
Because of the defeat, the government paid compensation free of charge.
Because of reworking, the silver is earned again.
Because of further compensation, the silver was given away again.
Then, due to the changes in the world, silver became waste and gold entered the stage of history. The efforts of the past 400 years turned into a dream.
This is what I am talking about. We in China have been poisoned by silver for more than 400 years.
Silver has poisoned our position as the world's number one power, and it has even poisoned us to this day.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, it also experienced difficult explorations in the process of currency development. After anchoring to gold and the US dollar, and experiencing the pain of drifting with the economic trend, it finally chose the most suitable anchor, thus achieving economic take-off. An era in which Chinese people are in charge of their own affairs. "
After Chen Han said this, the atmosphere in the whole room became depressed again.
Zhu Yuanzhang's face turned pale when he heard that his blood pressure was rising.
Li Shimin once said that by taking history as a mirror, we can know the rise and fall.
And the father and son are now fortunate enough to hear the experiences of later generations, which is really rare.
Hearing this, they even felt that it was not too late.
If Chen Han spoils history that has nothing to do with them, they won't feel much.
But Chen Han told them that ancient China began to be poisoned by silver in the Ming Dynasty, and it was because Zhu Yuanzhang issued treasure banknotes that caused the people to lose confidence in the currency issued by the court, and he inexplicably blamed himself.
Nearly 400 years of hard work have been in vain. How many people have contributed?
When everyone thought silver was good, Chen Han put forward the argument that silver is poison...
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(End of this chapter)