People eat people, money buys money, how have you ever seen it, thieves are officials, officials are thieves, fools and sages, sad and pitiful.
Tao Zongyi, a literati at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, included a poem "Drunken Taiping" in his compilation of the anthology "Nancun Dropout Records", the name of the original author is unknown, and the order said:
"Dignified Yuan, traitorous dictatorship. The root cause of the trouble is to open the river and change the money, causing thousands of red scarves. The official law is abused, the criminal law is heavy, and the people are resentful. People eat people, money buys money, how have you ever seen it. A thief is an official, an official is a thief, a fool and a virtuous, and he is pitiful."
This small order is whipped into the inside, to the point of the times, so it has spread far and wide, It is widely circulated in the government and the opposition, and women and children know it-
"From Beijing to Jiangnan, everyone can do it." History of the Yuan Dynasty
At that time, the Yuan Dynasty was already in the last days of the storm, this small order also said that the Mengyuan Empire, which had swept through Europe and Asia, was invincible, and the unbearable epitome of the sorrows of the last days, the Yuan Empire at that time, internal and external troubles came one after another, natural and man-made disasters struck one after another, officials were corrupt and perverted the law, the economy was on the verge of collapse, the people's grievances were boiling, and there were dry firewood everywhere, and only one or two sparks would burst out to form a prairie fire...... The root cause of the chaos at the end of the Yuan Dynasty should have started with the opening of the river and the change of money, which seems to be the main cause of the trouble.
The last days of the dynasty are always accompanied by natural and man-made disasters one after another
According to the records of the Yuan Dynasty (1344 AD), in May of the fourth year of the Yuan Dynasty (1344 AD), the middle reaches of the Yellow River in northern China rained for more than 20 days. The first to break is the North White Grass Embankment, which has been flooded. In June, the Golden Causeway burst again under the continuous erosion of raging floods, causing the worst flood in decades, and many towns and villages along the Yellow River were submerged, becoming a vast expanse of the country.
In history, after the dam burst of the golden embankment, the surging flood swept down, and the counties along the river were swallowed up by the water, Jining Road, Shanzhou Road, Yucheng, Jinxiang, Dangshan, Yutai, Fengxian, Peixian, Dingtao, Chuqiu, Chengwu were almost all soaked in the water, and Caozhou, Dongming, Juye, Yuncheng, Wenshang, Jiaxiang, Rencheng and other places were also affected by the flood, and the low-lying places were all submerged. The overflowing flood water poured into the canal, which caused the canal embankment to burst, so that most of the jurisdiction of Jinan Road and Hejian Road was washed away by the flood.
This rare flood caused a huge disaster, the impact was extremely serious, because the crops were not harvested, and by August, there had been a human tragedy of "cannibalism" in various parts of Shandong. As the saying goes: blessings are incomparable, and disasters are not singular. Before the effects of the floods had passed, plagues, droughts, and locust plagues followed, killing many people and starving all over the wilderness.
The Yuan court levied 150,000 people to rule the river in order to "open the river", and the people of the Central Plains could not bear to be requisitioned, and the people's resentment was boiling
The princes and nobles of Mengyuan who were drunk and dreamed of death in the capital of the Yuan Dynasty (now Beijing) had the leisure to pay attention to the survival and sorrow of the ant people, but the huge flood that broke out in the middle reaches of the Yellow River "(washed) the salt fields of the two Huaisi and seriously hindered the national economy "Yuan History", not only the sharp reduction of national taxes, but also the impact on the personal income of these parasitic magnates, which they were very concerned about. In the winter of the ninth year of the Yuan Dynasty, at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, the powerful minister of the Yuan Dynasty, Miriqi Tokhtimur re-appointed as prime minister, he strongly advocated the management of the Yellow River flood, Yuan Shun Emperor Tuhuan Timur convened the ministers to discuss, reached an agreement, and decided to send the capital Caoyun to make Jia Lu preside over the river to eliminate the flood.
Jialu's official position is the envoy of the capital, which is equivalent to the director of the water transportation department of the Ministry of Communications today, and he is a technocrat. He proposed two treatment plans: (1) to build a north embankment to control the horizontal collapse, and (2) to dig the Baimao River in the Huanglinggang area, and then plug the gap, and divert the river water to flow into the Huai River through Xuzhou East. The first plan is "labor saving," that is, it saves time, effort, and money, but it is only an expedient measure; although the second plan is "very expensive" and requires huge manpower, material, and financial resources, it can solve the problem of flooding in the Yellow River for a long period of time. After repeated deliberations and deliberations by the Yuan court, it was decided to adopt the second strategy to eliminate the catastrophe caused by the flooding of the Yellow River once and for all. This decision of the Yuan Court can be regarded as a great good deed that has benefited the present generation and benefited thousands of generations, but it also laid the foundation for its own rapid demise.
In the eleventh year of Yuan Zhizheng (1351), the Yuan court appointed Jia Lu as the secretary of the Ministry of Industry and the general envoy of river defense, forcibly recruited a total of 150,000 people from Bianliang (Kaifeng) and Damingfu, and transferred more than 20,000 troops from 18 wings such as Luzhou (Hefei) as superintendents to control the water in the middle reaches of the Yellow River. For a time, the people of the Central Plains were in turmoil, causing great public indignation.
The Yuan court indiscriminately printed jiaozi (banknotes) to make up for the financial deficit, which led to inflation, resulting in the rapid depreciation of more than half of the jiaozi in the hands of the people, which was the so-called "money change".
The Mongol-Yuan Empire spanned Europe and Asia, and the Yuan Dynasty was nothing more than the nominal co-owner of this horseback empire. After Meng Yuan entered the Central Plains from Mobei, because the Mongolian nobles did not know much about economics, they reused the Semu people from the West (Europa and Caucasian races) from the West to help them manage the country's finances. These business-savvy people introduced the financial system of precious metals such as gold and silver into the Central Plains. Therefore, the Yuan Dynasty rarely minted copper coins, and with precious metals as the main currency in circulation, China itself did not produce silver, and needed to import a large amount from foreign countries, so when the huge Chinese market suddenly switched to precious metal silver as a hard currency, it immediately led to a worldwide silver shortage. At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, deflation caused by the intensification of the silver shortage, and in the face of the huge economic crisis and the ensuing social crisis, the Yuan court adopted a countermeasure: desperately printing paper money to offset the terrible deflation caused by the silver shortage.
Paper money, also known as Jiaozi, has been printed and distributed as early as the time of Renzong of the Northern Song Dynasty, and has become mature in printing technology. Jiaozi is easy to carry and trade, and it is also a major invention of the Chinese. However, because the ancients lacked modern financial knowledge and could not grasp the ratio of paper money and hard currency, there were many drawbacks and hidden dangers in circulation: it was difficult to ensure credit by handing over the right of issuance to private individuals; and the state monopolized the right of issuance, and it was easy to over-issue or even indiscriminately issue money, resulting in currency depreciation. Therefore, paper money cannot completely replace precious metal money in the long run.
At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, due to the arrogance and extravagance of the dominant Mongol and lustful nobles, coupled with the heavy financial burden of raising troops and officials, the precious metals used for weight, such as gold, silver, and copper, could not make ends meet, and the finances gradually tended to dry up. In order to pass on the financial crisis, in the tenth year of Zhengzheng, Emperor Yuan Shun issued an edict:
"In order to hand over the banknotes in the middle of the province has always been a thousand copper coins, quasi-to the ingot banknotes twice, still cast to the Zhengtong treasure money and the copper coins of the past dynasties, with the real money method. (The headline was first issued, plagiarism and handling are strictly prohibited) to the ingots, the passage is the same, the right of the son and the mother, the old and the new, the original intention of the legislation of the deputy ancestor (Kublai Khan). "Yuan History: Food and Goods"
However, it is obviously much more troublesome to mint metal coins than to print paper money, so the Yuan court cut down the complicated and simplified, cut corners, and minted not many copper coins, but printed a lot of banknotes. "Yuan History: Food and Goods" records:
"Printed (handed in) daily, not countable...... Those who are scattered all over the world are everywhere".
As for the exchange rate and exchange, the Yuan Tingdu branch (Ministry of Finance) stipulates that the exchange of banknotes for treasure banknotes is one to two, which is tantamount to depreciating the banknotes in the hands of the people by more than half in a forceful and unreasonable manner, what is the difference between this and blatant robbery?
Emperor Yuan Shun
On the eve of the Great Rebellion......
This is not the most ruthless, due to the uncontrolled printing of Jiaozi, the indiscriminate issuance of paper money led to a serious currency depreciation, which soon caused inflation and even more serious deflation -
"It hasn't been done for a long time, and the price is expensive, and the price is more than ten times ......." "Yuan History: Food and Goods"
According to the literature, due to the over-issuance of Jiaozi, the price of goods soared, and 500 yuan of banknotes were handed over in Dadu (now Beijing), which was not enough to buy a bucket of millet. Perhaps, at that time, to buy a cabbage or a bucket of millet, you really had to carry a big bag of money.
These emergency measures taken by the Yuan court seriously violated the laws of the economy, and caused the resentment of countless poor people who had lost their jobs, lost their economic resources, could not afford to live, could not afford to die, struggled in harsh labor every day, and were tragically robbed by the economy......
[Picture from the Internet]