How much did it cost to buy a servant in ancient times? Let's see if your current income level is enough
In ancient times, rich people could buy their own servants, and such a purchase and sale of people was a legal transaction. For servants, if someone is willing to buy themselves, that's a good thing. Because most of these servants lived in poverty, if no one bought themselves, they could starve to death. So is it expensive to buy a servant? In modern society, how much does it cost to buy a servant? Let's analyze it.
In February of the forty-eighth year of Qianlong, with Chen Heizi as a guarantee, he was worth twenty-five taels of silver, and Bai Qi bought Zheng Rong, a citizen of Daxing County, with his wife Liu Shi, his son-in-law Gao Shou'er, and his daughter-in-law four as slaves.
This historical record records that during the Qianlong period, someone bought 4 servants and spent a total of 25 taels of silver, which means that the price of an ordinary servant is about 7 taels of silver. So how much is 7 taels of silver equivalent to now? The value of money varies from period to period, so we can only convert it through the purchasing power of money. So we may wish to take pork as a reference for conversion, one or two silver in the Qing Dynasty can probably buy 50 kilograms of pork, and the current price of pork is about 35 yuan a catty; that is to say, one or two silver in the Qing Dynasty is equivalent to the current 1750 yuan. After conversion, the price of a servant is about twelve thousand yuan today.
However, the 12,000 yuan bought was just an ordinary servant, who usually did some manual work at home and had no special skills. The fate of such servants is often the most tragic, they can only work from youth to old age, until one day they are too old to do anything, they will be abandoned by the master of their own house. Servants without any ability to work can only starve to death on the streets. If you meet a good master, when the servant has worked for a certain period of time, the master may burn the servant's deed of sale. Then spend a sum of money to go to the government office to help the servants get rid of slavery, and from then on the servants are considered to be in the good register (the type of household registration of ordinary people in ancient times). But the slaves who can meet such masters are after all a minority, and most of the servants are miserable throughout their lives.
Servants or women with a skilled skill will be much more expensive
For some talented servants, the price will be much higher, and the price of such servants can be as high as 30 taels of silver, which is about 52,000 yuan now. It should be noted that the talented servants who are purchased are generally women, because ancient China was a male society, men had a relatively high social status, were the masters of a family, and men had an absolute right to speak in the family. Such servants were bought back, and generally did not need to engage in manual labor, but only needed to play their own skills in piano, chess, calligraphy and painting to survive in the master's house. Sometimes such servants will also be looked up to by their masters, although it is impossible to become the master's wife, but to become the master's concubine can also be a lifetime of food and clothing. If he had given birth to a son to his master, it is very likely that his mother would enjoy a certain status in the family.
In ancient times, buying a servant was really so cheap, isn't that what many people can afford now?
Speaking of which, there must be many people who think in their hearts that if they lived in ancient times, they would be able to spend money to buy a few servants. Even if you lived in ancient times and had the equivalent of 100,000 yuan now, you might not be able to afford a servant. Earlier we used pork to measure the price of buying a servant, but pork is a commodity, and since it is a commodity, its price must be affected by supply and demand, just like the supply of pork in the market last year decreased, and the price of pork immediately increased exponentially. The level of productivity in ancient times was low, and the production of pork was very small, so it would be precious, that is to say, you now have the money to buy 7 taels of silver pork, but you may not be able to afford to buy servants when you go back to ancient times, unless you bring these pork back when you cross, and you also sold out of these pork at market prices in ancient times.