Shen Wansan and Hu Xueyan, as the richest people in the Ming and Qing dynasties, why did they end up in misery?
Although China has a thousand years of history in the morning and afternoon, it has always been based on agricultural development, and in ancient times, according to the level of rank, it was divided into four levels: 'scholar, farmer, industry and businessman', of which the status of merchants has always been at the lowest level of the professional level. However, among the ancient merchants, there were some powerful people who were recorded in history, in addition to Lü Buwei of the Qin State, the most well-known ones were Shen Wansan and Hu Xueyan of the Ming and Qing dynasties.
For Shen Wansan, many people learned from the TV series when they were young, in the film and television drama, Shen Wansan became the richest man in the country at the end of the Yuan and the beginning of the Ming Dynasty because of a cornucopia. But in history, Shen Wansan is also a famous businessman at home and abroad, he was born in the last year of the Yuan Dynasty, at the beginning he was just an ordinary small trader, because the family had some field products, and finally harvested the first bucket of gold in his life by selling grain.
But with the passage of time, Shen Wansan is more and more unwilling to be a small trader, so he began to look for other high-return business opportunities, in ancient times, Chinese ceramics and silk has been popular at home and abroad, many Western nobles in order to obtain a silk, and a thousand gold, so at that time, the silk and ceramic business, basically the hottest deal. Therefore, Shen Wansan set his sights on silk and porcelain sold at home and abroad.
Maybe some people have to ask, in the last years of the Yuan Dynasty, wars and chaos broke out, how did Shen Wansan still do business? In fact, at that time, the war was mainly concentrated in the interior, and Shen Wansan lived in Zhouzhuang in the southeast and did not receive the impact of the war, and Shen Wansan also took advantage of this and accumulated a large amount of wealth in the local area.
With more and more funds in his hands, Shen Wansan began to turn his business to the sea, he felt that China's silk, tea, ceramics, only to buy overseas can make a lot of money, although but the navigation technology is not very developed, but high risk represents high returns, Shen Wansan feels that he can let go.
As the business became bigger and bigger, Shen Wansan at this time had become the richest man in the Ming Dynasty, and his style of behavior was becoming more and more arrogant, and even Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, did not pay attention to it. Zhu Yuanzhang had issued a special ban on sea trade in order to control maritime trade, but Shen Wansan not only ignored it, but also continued to maintain maritime trade in private. In desperation, Zhu Yuanzhang punished Shen Wansan for paying for the construction of the city wall, but this money was not worth mentioning at all for Shen Wansan, Shen Wansan not only repaired the city wall high and large, but also put forward the excessive demands of treating the three armies, which touched Zhu Yuanzhang's bottom line, and said angrily: My people, do you need you to reward it? He ordered Shen Wansan to be arrested and assigned to Yunnan, eventually dying elsewhere.
As the richest man in the late Qing Dynasty, Hu Xueyan, he also made the same mistake as Shen Wansan. At the beginning, Hu Xueyan was very clever, he first hugged the thighs of the imperial court, and had a close relationship with Zuo Zongtang, a major minister of the Qing Dynasty, and through the relationship between the imperial court, he legally earned a lot of money, and through these money, he raised armaments for Zuo Zongtang, and under the influence of Zuo Zongtang, the business was even more prosperous.
But what he never expected was that Hu Xueyan also began to be confused in his later years, and this time Hu Xueyan's patron Zuo Zongtang was no longer there, and the overseas powers were eyeing the Qing court and finding excuses to force the Qing Dynasty to open its doors. As the richest man in the Qing Dynasty, Hu Xueyan, in order to prevent the Continuous Commercial Invasion of China by the West, launched a commercial war with the West, but under the internal and external difficulties, some people inside the Qing court joined forces with the West to collectively encircle and suppress Hu Xueyan, and in the end, only Hu Xueyan failed miserably, and the people who originally supported him also took the opportunity to fall into the well, and in the end, Hu Xueyan not only lost his family property, but also ended up dying in grief.
As the two most famous richest people in China's history, why did they fall back to such a miserable end? In fact, the reason is in one sentence, that is, 'the people do not fight with the officials'". Shen Wansan sat on a huge wealth, but he preferred to be compared with the emperor, and although Hu Xueyan was rich, he ignored the current form: how could he win the "official" who did not even dare to provoke his own patron?