Nowadays, costume dramas have become the mainstream, and in these dramas, we can often see that people in ancient times traded with silver, and even as soon as there was merit, the emperor rewarded silver with thousands of taels. In fact, these are TV series that can exaggerate history. First, the people of ancient China were not as carefree as we are today, and they were tired and tired for a year, and they were only enough to fill the stomach of a family, let alone take out silver casually.
In addition, silver was not the main currency in ancient times, even if the commoners really had silver in their hands, those who did business did not dare to accept it, because silver was difficult to sell, and accidentally fell on the charge of killing the head. However, this is the case, during the Ming and Qing dynasties, the imperial court still collected taxes in silver as a unit of measurement, which brought great pressure to the lives of ordinary people, so that those at the bottom who had no income could not survive.
China is vast and vast, not only has many materials on the surface, but also contains many mineral resources in the formation, which is why ancient China has always been worshiped by other countries, and the end of the Qing Dynasty was the preferred target of the great powers. Because these resources attract countless people. However, in ancient times, because of the limited technical conditions, the mining of silver ore in ancient China has always been a big problem, which is also the root cause of silver scarcity.
Moreover, most of the silver was still in the hands of a small number of nobles, which was also one of the reasons. Therefore, in ancient China, the scarcity of silver was even lower than that of gold. Therefore, most ordinary people still like to exchange goods with each other for trading, which is more cost-effective and more suitable for the people.
During the Tang Dynasty, the imperial court also issued regulations on the proportion of goods and currency exchanges, during the Song Dynasty, due to the limited amount of gold and silver, the weight of copper coins was a big problem, very inconvenient to trade, although there was a "jiaozi", but Cai Jing issued a large number of paper money, but became an excuse for the imperial court to loot the people, and in times of war, so the people used grain cloth as a voucher for trading.
During the Ming Dynasty, the Ming government was basically cut off from trade with the surrounding countries, but thanks to the unremitting efforts of Qi Jiguang and others, maritime trade was able to continue. At this time, the Europeans have begun to invade, they occupied many places in South America, and South America is a rich producer of silver, because Europeans like Chinese tea, porcelain, so a large amount of silver flowed into China, so the imperial court also used silver as the standard for the people to pay taxes.
However, in order to make a profit, the nobles squeezed the common people by secretly inflating the price of silver, so the common people have always been an important group of suffering. Therefore, there were so many peasant uprisings in the late Ming Dynasty, and excessive taxation was one of the important reasons. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the corrupt Qing government was even more profligate, and even more frenziedly squeezed the people, and the income of the people who had worked hard for a year not only lost all of them when paying taxes, but sometimes had to sell their property to pay it off. So this has also led to the displacement of many people, starving to death on the streets.