There is a very strange thing in Chinese history, that is, there is always a group of people who want to take risks and earn a strange ill-gotten wealth - counterfeit copper coins, but how to prevent counterfeit copper coins, generations have been very headaches.
At the beginning of the Han Dynasty, the currency system was chaotic and private minting was prevalent, and at that time, because official money could not meet the needs of society for a while, it was debated for a long time whether to allow private minting. Liu Bang finally ordered that private minting be allowed, for reasons that were very funny: because Liu Bang thought that the Qin Dynasty copper coins, that is, the famous Qin half two, were too heavy to use, so he decided to order the people to mint the "Yu Pod Money", and you would use the coins yourself (how obvious the result would be). Emperor Hui of Han abolished Liu Bang's order because the money was too light and it was too easy to manufacture, and demanded that the common people be forbidden to mint privately, and those who violated it were sentenced to death. When Emperor Wen arrived, he also "removed the order of stealing money and made the people cast it", and allowed four coins to be minted privately, but "those who dared to mix lead and iron as their tricks" were sentenced to capital punishment. During the reign of Emperor Jing, it was not allowed to be minted privately, and anyway, the Han Dynasty had been changing orders and orders, and Emperor Wu of Han ordered the production of unified five-baht money to end this problem.
The more funny thing here is Wang Mang, the currency reform during the Wang Mang period was frequent and extremely disordered, for serious private minting, initially it was ''the death of the private minter',' and then the mountains were among the lawbreakers, ''invincible''', so it was changed to ''All were not included in the official slave brand'', and stipulated that one family minted money, five families sat together, and finally the whole country was full of slaves, completely changing the slave society. The use of copper coins in the early Sui Dynasty was very chaotic, and the people used all kinds of old money issued by successive governments since the Han and Wei dynasties and privately minted evil money. In the first year of the Kaihuang Dynasty (571), the five plants of the Kaihuang were minted, and the circulation and use of various coins of the previous generation was strictly prohibited, and it was stipulated that all unofficial minted coins should be destroyed, and their copper would be entered into the government, and if the private minted money was traded in the Capital Division, "it was held by the officials, and there were dead people". The effect is very good, it can be seen that Yang Jian will still play.
In the Tang Dynasty, the punishment measures for private minting of money were more complete, and for different cases of private minting, different punishments were imposed with different severities, and the Tang law stipulated: ''Those who mint money privately, flow for three thousand miles; those who have their own preparations, those who have not forged, two years in vain; For those who are not prepared, a hundred rods. If it is made into money, it is made thin, and he who takes copper for profit will be in vain for one year. Not only was the death penalty imposed on the private caster himself, but it was also imposed in the townships, and the punishment was even more severe. The punishment methods personally formulated by Tang Taizong were very effective, and this phenomenon basically disappeared during the Taizong period in the Tang Dynasty.
The prevalence of counterfeit currency in ancient China deprived the central government of a unified management of the minting, issuance, and regulation of the country's currency, and added to the chaos of the already chaotic currency system. At the same time, a large number of private money and counterfeit money have been poured into the circulation field, which has aggravated the vicious development of inflation. In order to seek greater interests and objectively insufficient raw materials and technology, counterfeiters make the quality of counterfeit money much lower than that of official money, on the one hand, affecting its credit in circulation and leading to further depreciation of currency; on the other hand, the proliferation of such counterfeit and shoddy money will inevitably lead to the phenomenon of bad money expelling good money from the circulation industry, that is, good money of sufficient value or stored by people, or sold and minted into bronze, or mixed with lead and tin to make evil money, so that the good money cast by officials in society is almost extinct, while light and small bad money is flooded in the market, which is not conducive to the circulation of commodities. It should be said that the best Yang Jian and Li Shimin in the past are probably Wang Mang.