Daming Military Empire

Chapter 300 Unified Currency
Zhu Cijiong has been busy dealing with all kinds of enemies, and has little time to pay attention to his own private property. Now the enemies around Daming are almost cleaned up, and he has to wait for all the ships to be rebuilt before going to Europe, so he finally has time to come Take care of your private property.

I really don’t care if I don’t know, but if I’m surprised, Daming’s Western Commerce and Trade is okay, because there are only so many luxury consumers, and there hasn’t been much change over the years. The annual income has been maintained at around 3000 to [-] million taels. Except for Zhu Cijiong embezzling most of the public funds, there are still more than one million taels of gold and more than two million taels of silver.

The Da Ming Ri Xing Long Company is relatively scary. In the first few years when the people of Ming Dynasty were still relatively poor, the annual income of the Ri Xing Long Company was not as good as that of Western businesses. It has also developed like a snowball, and now the semicolons have spread all over the state capitals and even the county towns of Daming, not to mention the cumulative issuance of more than 3 million taels of silver notes alone!
Although Zhu Cijiong took out most of the profits of Rixinglong Company as public funds, the gold and silver stocks in the secret treasure houses of Rixinglong are still very scary. Among them, the gold in stock has reached more than five million taels, and the silver in stock has reached A terrifying more than 2 million taels!Of course, most of these are the principal of bank notes. If there is a run on, most of these will be exchanged, but this is already quite scary. With the stable situation of Daming, coupled with the fact that Daming Royal Nikko With the name of the royal family on the bank, there is no chance of a run on the bank, that is to say, these gold and silver are already Zhu Cijiong's!
How to manage so much money?Luo Yangxing used the most old-fashioned method, which is to lend money out and use money to make money, so that wealth will grow slowly, which is also beneficial to the development of the private economy. Zhu Cijiong also agreed with this method before, but now he Don't think so, with so much principal, why not occupy the financial market of the whole world!
Of course, this financial market is hidden and does not actually exist. To be specific, to occupy the current world financial market is to make all countries in the world use Ming's money as the currency for mutual settlement.

How to make all countries in the world use Ming's money?It is definitely unrealistic to issue banknotes. The merchants of the Ming Dynasty believed in the Rixinglong Company, or the Royal Nikko Bank of the Ming Dynasty, so they used the bank notes issued by Rixinglong to facilitate currency exchange. If banknotes were issued directly, it is estimated that no one in Ming Dynasty would dare to use them. , because ordinary people are used to using copper coins and silver ingots, most people can't accept using paper as money at the moment.

This is the case in Ming Dynasty, but it is even worse in other countries. People know you, Daming, what kind of bank is it? It’s too hard for people to wipe their asses with paper money!
If you can’t issue paper money, you can only make a fuss about metal currency. The emperors of the Ming Dynasty all had the habit of issuing copper coins and silver ingots. It is no longer called Yuanbao, but Tongbao.

The Chongzheng Dynasty also issued Chongzheng Tongbao, mainly round copper coins with square holes and silver ingots in the shape of boats. The shading, so that the counterfeit copper coins popular in the past dynasties have disappeared, and all the circulation in the market are Chongzheng Tongbao made by the Ministry of Households of the Ming Dynasty!

In fact, this has a lot to do with the development of technology. Before the Chongzheng Dynasty, copper coins and silver ingots were cast out of molds. The processing method was simple, so they were easy to be counterfeited. The copper plate is stamped and formed by a large punching machine at one time. There is no such equipment in the folk, so there is no way to imitate it at all.

This situation gave Zhu Cijiong a lot of inspiration. He decided to uniformly manufacture silver coins and gold coins as currency in circulation. Both gold coins and silver coins were made to be about the same size as copper coins. The dragon-shaped pattern, while the shading is "Daming Chongzheng Tongbao" expressed in the languages ​​of various countries, such as Western, Portuguese, English, French, German, Russian, etc., anyway, as long as you know any language of the great powers, you can get it. Looking at the gold and silver coins, one can tell that this is the Chongzheng Tongbao made by the Ming Empire!

There is no popular currency in the world now. As long as the Chongzheng Tongbao made by Daming can maintain its quality and quantity and cannot be imitated, it is very likely that it will become a currency that circulates throughout the world in one fell swoop!

Once this kind of thought appeared in Zhu Cijiong's mind, he couldn't stop it. He immediately recruited Luo Yang and Cheng Guoxiang, Minister of the Household Department, to discuss the production of Chongzheng Tongbao.

In fact, the production of this currency is mainly a matter of currency value. For example, with silver taels as the main currency unit, how many taels of silver is worth a stone of rice, and how many copper coins is equivalent to one tael of silver? There must be a benchmark for these, otherwise the currency It cannot be issued.What kind of pattern and shading are very simple things. No matter how complicated the pattern or fine shading is, it is just a matter of a few days for the craftsman who carves the mold, and basically has nothing to do with the issuance of currency.

The current currency conversion standard in Ming Dynasty is roughly: one stone of rice is roughly equivalent to one tael of silver, while one tael of silver is worth about a thousand copper Tongbao, and one tael of gold is worth more than 40 taels of silver.

According to this conversion relationship, Zhu Cijiong finally decided to use silver coins as the currency benchmark, and one tael of silver was made into ten silver Chongzheng Tongbao. It is almost twice as much as silver. If one tael of gold is made into four gold Chongzheng Tongbao, the size is similar to that of silver Chongzheng Tongbao and copper Chongzheng Tongbao, and it is exactly worth one hundred silver Chongzheng Tongbao.

If gold coins and silver coins are made according to this standard, then the conversion of this currency is easy to calculate. One hundred copper Chongzheng Tongbao is exactly equal to one silver Chongzheng Tongbao, one hundred silver Chongzheng Tongbao is exactly equal to one gold Chongzheng Tongbao, ten A silver Chongzheng Tongbao is one tael of silver, it's as simple as that!
After the conversion ratio was determined, Zhu Cijiong immediately ordered the Ministry of Household Affairs and Daimyo Rixing Bank to jointly manufacture gold and silver Chongzheng Tongbao, and keep making as many as they can. Recycled and unified into Chongzheng Tongbao, and in the future, except for the use of bank notes for the exchange of large amounts of currency, only one currency is allowed to be used in the market, and that is Chongzheng Tongbao!

Zhu Cijiong also decided that he would bring countless gold coins, silver coins and copper coins with him when he went to Europe this time, and send them all the way, including the expeditionary army, allied officials, European civilians, and the European royal family. To give away is just a matter of how much or how little, so even if it is Chongzheng Tongbao worth tens of millions of taels, he will not hesitate to give away. He wants to let Daming's Chongzheng Tongbao spread all over the world!

(End of this chapter)