Thinking about it, he unconsciously took a few jelly beans in his hand and wanted to throw them in his mouth, but this Emperor Zhu Youzhen immediately remembered something, and threw them back into the jar - it is ridiculous to say that these chocolate jelly beans were marked as given to several princes and princesses in the palace in the tribute catalog sent below, but seeing that Chongzhen also likes to eat, Empress Zhou quietly took a jar for him, but she was absolutely embarrassed to publicize it - saying that the emperor grabbed candy with children to eat? That's going to be laughed out of your big teeth. Moreover, the quantity is not much, even with the dignity of the emperor, he can only strictly control himself, eat a few pills a day, and refuse to exceed.

After eating a few candies, his mind calmed down a little, Zhu Youzhen finally put down the imperial pen in his hand, dispelled the idea of sending troops to the south, in order not to spoil his mood, he decided to put aside all the pieces related to the salt tax for the time being, and look at the others first-all the pieces will be read by the eunuch of the inner study before they are sent to the emperor's table, and at the same time write down the general content on a small yellow note, so that the emperor can grasp its content and give instructions in the shortest possible time. The reason why the eunuchs of the Ming Dynasty Bingbi were extremely powerful was because they had the power to "paste yellow", which could influence the king's decision-making in a large way.

Today, the chief eunuch who is in charge of writing and pasting yellow may have accepted bribes from some people in the court, and the order in which those pieces are placed and the content of the yellow stickers are extremely pertinent - Chongzhen picked up a copy casually and opened it to look at it, and his eyebrows couldn't help but stand up again. However, the Ministry of Household and the Ministry of Industry jointly wrote a letter talking about the issue of the Qiong Navy's private minting of silver coins.

The music is very long, but its core content is a report submitted by a subordinate official of the Baoyuan Bureau of the Ministry of Industry. It makes extensive use of tables and figures, and the text is mostly in the vernacular, which is very different from the style of traditional scholars, which is evident from the subtle influence of the Qiong Navy on the Ming Dynasty: even the impeachment of the Qiong Navy was written in order to increase the persuasiveness. It also had to adopt a format similar to that of Joan's official letter from the navy, which cannot but be said to be a sarcasm.

According to the official's report, more and more "Hongwu Tongbao" silver dollars have been circulating in Beijing recently. These silver coins are beautifully minted and full of weight, and one silver dollar is equivalent to five pieces of silver, and many merchants even use it as a weight. It is extremely popular in the market. The silver dollar is an excellent currency on its own, but the problem is that it is not officially produced!

The money system of the Ming Dynasty was not perfect, and since the treasure banknotes were rotten on the street, the private circulation was dominated by silver. Copper coins complement it. It is not uncommon for wealthy people to cast gold and silver into large ingots for easy storage, and then cut them when they need to use them, and there are also rich and noble families who cast some gold and silver coins to hang on their children as mascots. But I have never heard of anyone who would dare to put silver into standard coins for circulation, let alone struck them with a date name on them!

But that guy with short hair just did it in such a big way. And it's doing well. Some magistrates once wanted to prohibit the people from trading with "short-haired silver money", but people said that they were using silver instead of money, and the court did not necessarily give people silver. What if the silver coin is cut open and used as broken silver? ――Not to mention the loss of fire consumption costs that will increase after cutting, it is impossible for any user to be willing to bear it. Just with the long horse face on the silver coin, which is said to be the head of the founding emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, who would dare to cut off the head of the great grandfather?

entrusted the blessing of Zhu Yuanzhang's avatar. The "Hongwu Tongbao" silver dollar spread quite smoothly in various places, and even if local officials knew that it was not appropriate, they could not find a reason to ban it -- the point was that the imperial court itself was very vague about it. There is no ban requirement. If it is for ordinary people, it is definitely a crime to do this kind of thing that is not allowed by the government. But for a master as strong as Shorthair, since the court did not officially oppose it. Then no one would dare to go to trouble.

So why did Shorthair go to such great lengths to mint silver into silver coins? The official also made a very detailed analysis. Generally speaking, privately minted currency is nothing more than coveting the difference between the actual value of the currency and the face value - for example, some private traders who steal and melt copper and privately mint inferior copper coins use the face value of the currency to make profits by using the face value of the currency to be higher than the cost of coinage, but there are very few people who can do this in the Ming Dynasty, because the Ming Empire itself is the largest manufacturer of inferior copper coins - the first few batches of coins minted by the Baoquan Bureau in various places have a higher copper content, but the more black lead is mixed later, from the early copper nine lead one to the later copper five lead five, or even lower, As a result, the trading value of copper coins in the folk naturally fell again and again - in the Hongwu and Yongle eras, large coins with high copper content could be exchanged for one tael of silver for every 700 wen, while the inferior lead coins minted after the Wanli year fell to 2,100 wen for one tael of silver.

In the face of the official bad currency of Zhengda Guangming, it is unprofitable for the private minting of currency, but it is more profitable to melt the good copper coins with high copper content in the early years and cast them into bronze and sell them. And Shorthair is now doing the opposite, are they really stupid?

- Of course not! The official was clearly empirical and had been following this for a long time. Since the silver coins were also dated to the silver, the official managed to obtain the first batch of shorthair, the "1630 edition" and the latest "1633 edition", to verify their silver content, and sure enough, it was found that the purity of the new silver coins was slightly lower than that of the earliest batch, and it was actually less than five coins of silver.

Upon discovering this, the official was overjoyed, and felt that he had seen through the Shorthair's conspiracy - they were trying to build credibility among the people with high-quality silver coins, and then gradually reduce the silver content, with the ultimate goal of using counterfeit silver coins with very low silver content as currency. This is how to make a profit from it - this is what Emperor Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang did, but Zhu Yuanzhang was too ruthless and directly issued treasure notes with pieces of paper, but the result was unsuccessful. Shorthair's current method is nothing more than learning the wisdom and lessons of Taizu, and it is just going step by step.

It should be said that the official who wrote this report is a good technocrat in the current Ming court, and the content of the article is quite specific and detailed, including his personal experience, as well as the number of inquiries through various channels, and even predictions about the future - although there are slight errors in some aspects due to lack of knowledge, he actually saw the next issue strategy of the Qiong naval monetary system: that is, to gradually reduce the silver content of silver coins, so that the function of these silver coins can be converted from "silver" to "coin". However, while reducing the silver content of silver coins, the Qiong Navy will also have a whole set of exchange and recovery mechanisms to maintain the credibility of this currency, and these policies are impossible for the official to know and difficult to understand.

But in any case, this article at least made the emperor realize: like Yan Zheng, the money law of the imperial court has also been hacked by those bold and reckless short-haired people!

According to the practice of the feudal dynasty, as well as the temper of Emperor Chongzhen, when encountering this kind of thing before, Zhu Bi must be mentioned, and a few big words "kill" will be approved, and then the state machine of the entire empire will naturally start to crush those traitors who dare to offend the majesty of the imperial court.

But today's Ming Dynasty is no longer what it used to be, and it no longer has the ability to easily crush that group of short hairs. If the two sides really want to make another move, even the people who have the most confidence in the imperial court will only dare to say that "I am afraid that the victory or defeat is unpredictable" -- through the contacts in the past few years, under the subtle influence of various war reports and daily utensils, although no subordinate has ever dared to say in front of the emperor that the imperial army cannot defeat the short-haired army, even if Zhu Youzhen's character is notoriously stubborn or stubborn in history, he has to gradually begin to accept such a fact.

Therefore, the final instructions made by Emperor Chongzhen on these two matters were to hand them over to the cabinet office, which was unprecedented for Zhu Youzhen, who had always liked the dictatorship of the Qiangang, and also made the cabinet officials who secretly bought off the eunuchs who had bought the pen and specially picked out these unfavorable pieces for the short hair and put them together and played them at the same time, hoping to influence the emperor's attitude.

Today's Ming cabinet, when it comes to things about short hair, of course, Qian Qianyi has the most right to speak, and this privilege makes Qian Qianyi both happy and headache - of course, he has a share of the good things brought by short hair, but if it is bad news, then he will inevitably be dragged out to be tied up. Fortunately, as an ally, Shorthair has always been quite reliable, and compared to his fellow officials or Donglin students, he is definitely much more reliable - I think Qian Qianyi just heard the proverb "If you are not afraid of god-like opponents, you are afraid of pig-like teammates" This proverb was really tearful, and he said in his heart that he didn't know how many times he had been pitted by pig teammates over the years......

This time, when they encountered trouble, it was caused by the short-haired side themselves, so of course they had to solve it by themselves -- at the cabinet meeting, in the face of the attacks and questions jointly raised by Zhou Yanru, Wen Tiren and others, Qian Qianyi, who was already a veteran in the political arena, waved his hand very chic and blocked them all. Then he changed hands and played a big move, throwing all those opinions to Chen Tao: "...... Recently, there are a lot of opinions that are unfavorable to you, so you'd better explain them, otherwise the old man may not be able to speak for you. ”

Chen Tao was an honest boy, and he was frightened by Qian Dacai's pretended heaviness, so he hurried back and sent the news back to Hainan Island by wireless telegram overnight and delivered it to the committee. And of course, in the end, it will be the staff group that will have to worry about it. Pang Yu and Zhao Lide must also be among them, and this matter is more reliable than handling the marriage matter for a singleton.