Comprehensive retro reform, the absurd twenty-eight currencies
Wang Mang ascended the throne, changing the country name to "New". The edict issued by the beginning of Xinli said: "I am not virtuous, and I have entrusted it to the emperor's ancestor to examine Huangdi . The emperor's ancestor to examine the Miao descendants of Emperor Yu, and the last of the empress dowager was the emperor. The emperor's God showed great blessings and formed the order of destiny, talismans, pictures and texts, letters of the golden cabin, and the gods issued an edict to me. ... With Wuchen, the crown of the king, the throne, the real emperor, there must be a title of the world called "Xin"." ("Book of Han·Biography of Wang Mang") This passage of
first describes his family genealogy, emphasizing two major key points, one is to trace from Huangdi and Shun, and the other is to originate from the empress dowager Wang Taihuang. Then he mentioned in particular that the emperor and God gave the people of the world to him through the edicts given by the talismans and texts and the letter of the Jinkui. He was directly ordered to ascend to the "true emperor".
The three words "true emperor" have dual meanings. From a realistic perspective, he was originally "taking the emperor", which was equivalent to acting the emperor, but now he is really not only; more importantly, "true emperor" refers to him clearly choosing to accept the order from God, not inheriting the throne of the emperor from a bloodline.
文分类 continued: "It changes the corrective new year, changes the color of the clothes, changes the sacrifice, special emblem, and different instruments. The first month of the twelfth month Guiyou is the first day of the first month of the founding year of the founding of the Kingdom of China, and the time of the rooster crowing. The color of the clothes is yellow, and the sacrifice should be used as white, and the flags of the envoys are all pure yellow. The signature is "New Envoy's Power Festival" to inherit the power of the emperor and the God of Heaven."
To establish a new dynasty, of course, it is necessary to "reform the different clothes". What is interesting is how to change the method. The choice of representative colors of dynasties is based on the principle of mutual generation and mutual restraint of the five elements advocated by the "Five Virtues End and First". Originally, when Qin was established, black was chosen, which belonged to "water virtue".
Liu Bang After the founding of the People's Republic of China, in order to show that he did not recognize Qin's legitimacy, he emphasized that he had inherited Zhou Dynasty , so he also chose black. But Emperor Wu had different ideas when he was , and instead emphasized that Han Dynasty successfully overthrew Qin Dynasty . Qin is water, and earth overcomes water, so the Han Dynasty should belong to "Tu De" and the color is yellow.
This means that Wang Mang did not choose a new color. The reason is that he did not restrain the Han Dynasty and established the new dynasty . The new dynasty came from the Han Dynasty's voluntary abdication, and the five elements of restraint are not applicable.
But if so, won’t the New Dynasty and the Han Dynasty be separated? Wang Mang's approach was to systematically change the Han Dynasty to "fire virtue" from the dynasty records, and fire produces earth, so naturally, the new dynasty that successfully produced "the virtue of earth" was continued from the Han Dynasty.
Although "there must be a name in the world called "new", the most fundamental ideology and guiding principles of this new dynasty are actually "ancient", and ancient times are new. Wang Mang's rise relies on the Confucianism, which is the authority of Confucius , advocated in Confucianism, so his regime actively eliminated those who were inconsistent with the ancients and set off a comprehensive retro movement.
Objective to politics. The most serious mistake of Wang Mang's new dynasty was not only Wang Mang's "fake and deception", but on the contrary, it was Wang Mang who believed too much and was obsessed with the "retro" principle he claimed. He truly believed that by establishing the ancient system described in the scriptures, the social problems left over from the Han Dynasty could be solved.
The first measure of retro is land reform, changing all the land to state-owned, and calling it "king fields", which means implementing what is described in the scriptures, "below the sky, is the king's land ". The state distributed the king's fields to the people. "In ancient times, eight families of Lujing were established, one husband and one woman had a hundred acres of land. If the tithing was taxed, the country would praise the people for their prosperity. This was followed by the three generations of Tang and Yu."
("Han Shu・Biography of Wang Mang") means restoring the well field system implemented by the "Three Generations". Each family had a small piece of land, and each eight formed a unit to abolish the current situation of land annexation in in the most thorough and intense way.
Then he changed the slave to "private", which can be owned but is not allowed to be traded.In addition, he carried out a significant and continuous currency reform . First, the original common Wuzhu coins were abolished, and then replaced them with a very complex "Five Things and Twenty-Eight Elements", that is, currencies made of five different materials: money, silver, turtle, shell, and cloth, with a total of twenty-eight different items. "Money" refers to copper, what about "silver"?
actually contains two types of gold and silver. "Turtle", "Shell" and "Cloud" are all materials recorded in the book that were used as currency in the past, and were re-taken in the retro spirit.
currency has six materials, divided into five systems, and there are 28 items in total. The original "money" was only divided into "big money" and "small money", and a big money was worth fifty little money. After the reform, there were six types of "money", "small money" worth one zhu, "mother money" three zhu, "small money" five zhu, "middle money" seven zhu, "strong money" nine zhu, and "big money" twelve zhu. What about
"cloth"? Including the "small cloth" value of 15 zhu, "mobu" 16 zhu, "young cloth" 17 zhu, "short cloth" 18 zhu, "chaobu" 19 zhu, "middle cloth" 20 zhu, "zhuobu" 21 zhu, "dibu" 22 zhu, "sci-bu" 23 zhu, and "big cloth" 24 zhu. It is divided into nine more complex types.
"money" is arranged in value "one, three, five, seven, nine, twelve", and "fabric" is "fifth, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four", which seems to have a certain order, but such arrangements are completely unreasonable in currency application, because their values are not multiple relationships. There is no multiple relationship, how to convert it?
Who can calculate how many "medium money" is equal to "money" or "young money"? Or is it that a "bad cloth" equals several "small cloth" or several "small cloth"?
This is not the most complicated one yet. In addition, there is "Bei", which forms a system and does not use baht as a unit to calculate its value. There are "big beans", which is equivalent to two hundred and sixteen "friends", and there are "brained beans" fifty friends, "mobe" thirty friends, "small beans" ten friends, and "beans" two friends. "Turtle" can communicate with "Beige", "Yuan Turtle" is equal to the Big Beika Ten Pairs, "Public Turtle" is equal to ten strong shells, "Hou Turtle" is equal to ten Mo Beika, and "Zi Turtle" is equal to ten small shells. This is a turtle.
"silver" has not been added yet. Do you know how to use the above four currencies? Have you been in a cold sweat and found that your arithmetic level is not good enough and you have lost in this currency system ? Or do you suspect that the people at that time had problems with the arithmetic ability, otherwise how could they design such a currency that should be known to be unworkable?
When Wang Mang makes another reform, you will know that no matter how good the arithmetic level is, there is no way to use this set of currency. "Small money" and "Big money" were abolished, and the newly issued " goods " and " goods ". The value of "Huoquan" is Wuzhu, and the value of "Huotu" is twenty-five zhu. How many "goods" can one "goods" be exchanged for? Five? Wrong, it is stipulated that the previous "stock fabric" is equal to twenty-five "stocks"!
is so ridiculous! In this way, who would be willing to exchange twenty-five "stockings" for "stockings" worth only five "stockings"? In the end, no one is willing to use it or dares to use "stock cloth" and "stock spring", right?
Live in the fantasy of principles and ignore the reality
Maybe that's the point, right? What exactly is Wang Mang's monetary reform going to do? Like restricting land and slaves, his reforms were all directed at the social atmosphere at that time. There will be land annexation, and there will be a wider gap between the rich and the poor. A large part of the reason is from the developed monetary economy .
Wuzhu coins strongly promoted by the Wudi Dynasty formed a unified and effective currency tool, allowing everyone to use this simple and secure currency to trade. Commercial trade has grown significantly over the past few decades, and everything can be easy.So even land becomes the object of buying and selling, and wealth can be calculated and stored with money. The gap between having money and not having money becomes more and more obvious.
Wang Mang’s real purpose is to cancel the currency and return to the simple state of “three generations”. The method he adopted was "Zun Gu", artificially pushing time back to the era of currency chaos, making the originally convenient and easy-to-use currency complicated and difficult to use. Going further, using absurd pricing method makes everyone feel that the currency is unreliable, so they reduce or even completely give up the use of currency.
Later generations accused Wang Mang of the monetary policy of , and often got the point wrong. It’s not that he wanted to make the currency better, but he messed up because of his incompetence. His original intention was to make money difficult to use, and in this regard he actually successfully achieved his goal. His fault is that he does not understand the key role of currency in economy and people's livelihood, and does not see that people are unable to live without currency. The cancellation of currency will bring about painful catastrophe. Another important economic measure by Wang Mang was to set up "Five Equals", namely, establishing "Five Equals" in Chang'an , Luoyang , Handan, Linzi, Wan, and Chengdu, the six most lively and commercial and trade-oriented cities at that time. The "equal" of
"five equality" means to regulate prices and control prices. Therefore, the "five equalities" and monetary reform are related to each other, and they all exist to destroy business and slow down transactions.
"Five All Officials" are responsible for setting the public pricing in cities. The market price is lower than the public pricing. The official acquires it, and the market price is higher than the public pricing, and the official sells it. On the surface, its operating mechanism is similar to the "Equal Loss" set by Sang Hongyang , but the value spirit behind it is completely different. The practice presided over by Sang Hongyang is that the court intervenes in business and uses the power and huge resources of the court to "fight profit with the people" to "fight for profit" and can be more convenient for business than everyone, and get more benefits than ordinary business from it, thereby enriching the treasury.
Wang Mang is concerned about it, but he uses the power of the court to ensure that merchants are not profitable, firmly control prices, and to achieve the equivalent of buying and selling anything, so no one can make a profit from the transaction, so gradually no one wants to do business.
Wang Mang opposes land annexation, opposes large-scale purchase of slaves and saves slaves, and opposes commercial trade. He advocates "retro and anti-principle", which means "focusing agriculture over commerce." He was from a wealthy family of foreign relatives, but he made such a claim that it violated his own class interests, so the people trusted him and enthusiastically supported him. And he seriously introduced various policies, all towards realizing these fierce ideals and changes.
But the problem is, Wang Mang believes too much in the dream of reform and too much in the emperor's power, thinking that the world can be changed overnight by giving a few orders. He had a serious lack of a sense of reality, lived in the fantasy of principles, and ignored reality, paralyzed the entire country.
Is it possible that the landlord obediently gave the country all the land in his hands as a "king field" when the emperor gave the order? Wouldn't the landlords use their resources and strength to fight against the court? The currency chaos and the intervention of "five equalities" have made commercial trade unable to proceed normally. What will affect the merchants who get profits from it will not only make businessmen, but also make the lives of most people inconvenient. In just a few years, social disturbances, the people suffered before Wang Mang's "retro reform", and the original political order was also collapsed.
