Chapter 202 Breaking one’s word and gaining weight

Chapter 202 Breaking one’s word and gaining weight

The personnel affairs in Chang'an City are in turmoil, and it seems that it will not be completed for a while. It is estimated that it will have to be postponed until next year, and Li Tai cannot wait any longer.

In the current situation, there is no need to think about continuing to go out to suppress bandits. It happened that Shuhui helped transport the materials back. Li Tai planned to take advantage of the free time before and after the year to completely digest this batch of personnel materials.

After all, no matter how much resources there are, if they cannot bring about real growth in power, they are just saved for others. Yu Wentai always made a fortune and then expanded his army. Of course, Li Tai could not lag behind.

Li Tai collected nearly 500 cartloads of supplies from two temples. He relied on more than 2,000 craftsmen and their families captured and recruited from Hongfa Temple, plus hundreds of people mobilized by Mao Shijian in the countryside, to collect these supplies. The goods were transported to Beihuazhou.

When he returned to Bafu, most of the supplies were taken away by Yuwen Taylor. Li Tai was already feeling unhappy. Of course, he didn't care about transportation. He just sent a message to the troops who stayed in Beihua Prefecture to sort the supplies and wait for Bafu to send people to transport them. In the end, he only had more than a hundred trucks left, including Those more than two thousand prisoners.

Yuwentai didn't ask many questions about the captives. After all, he was not short of people, and he would have to worry about settling and feeding them when he came. Therefore, Li Tai completely retained this group of people. Although Yu Wentai didn't care, in his opinion, this was the greatest wealth gained from this trip.

Temples can also be regarded as a type of large estate economy. Because of the ideological control brought about by religious beliefs, the exploitation of these temple slaves and monks is even greater than those of local powerful people who are the owners of large estates.

As a result, most of these temple slaves have special skills. Temple slaves without skills are almost not qualified to live in the temple and can only work as serfs in the manor.

There were more than 2,000 prisoners, excluding the old, weak, women and children, and there were more than 1,500 young and strong craftsmen alone. A considerable number of them were devout believers who deeply hated Li Tai for destroying the temple, and several riots broke out along the way.

Li Tai was not merciful in this regard. He directly showed the heads of the dozens of people who took the lead in instigating, and provided them with plenty of food and drinks all the way. He used kindness and power to control the crowd.

But it will still take many years to fully win back the hearts of the people and become one's loyal club. Li Tai is not in a hurry about this. Although the Buddhas have great supernatural powers, they can only protect their believers in the next life. But as long as they obey them, they can live a good life now. Which one is better and which one is worse, each one chooses.

Of these more than a thousand craftsmen, more than two hundred are skilled in making pottery, smelting and forging utensils. The reputation of Hongfa Temple for casting Buddha statues has little to do with the monks who eat well and chant sutras. It is all earned by their hard work. Although the skills of other craftsmen are not too refined, they are still guaranteed to be qualified.

In addition to casting Buddha statues, of course they can also cast other utensils, which is exactly the talent Li Tai is in urgent need of. With these talents in place, Baishui Village's smelting and foundry workshop will be able to produce a lot of output in the spring of next year, and Li Tai will no longer have to buy ordnance to expand his army.

In terms of materials, Hongfa Temple’s income mainly consists of various metals. As the largest Buddha statue casting base in the North, Hongfa Temple has more than 3,000 kilograms of gold accumulated. Li Tai was extorted a lot, but he still had more than 1,000 kilograms left, and more than 4,000 kilograms of silver.

As for copper and tin, the reserves are even more exaggerated. The Maitreya statue that Li Tai ordered when he entered the temple alone weighed several thousand kilograms. The hundreds of Buddha statues enshrined in the Thousand Buddha Hall that the monks showed off to him weighed hundreds of thousands of kilograms in total. In addition to various There are more than 200,000 kilograms of stored materials.

Copper and tin are easy to cast and process. In addition to being consumed in worshiping Buddha, they are also widely used in daily life, such as copper furnaces, copper basins, copper pans, bronze mirrors, and vehicle components. But its most important use is naturally to mint coins.

If the copper and tin metals seized by Li Tai could be minted into money, even a full weight of five baht, regardless of materials, could be minted into tens of millions of coins. If we reduce the weight and add other materials, the income will be doubled.

Extending it to the entire Kansai region, it can be imagined that the copper and tin materials harvested by Yuwentai in this wave alone are extremely amazing. It is enough to carry out monetary and financial reforms and make copper coins a stable currency for commercial exchanges in Kansai.

Li Tai also asked Yuwentai if he had such plans, but Yuwentai shook his head. Bafu faces many problems, and currency chaos is not the most harmful.

Moreover, if you want to reform currency, it is not just as simple as minting enough currency and putting it into the market. It also requires the government to cooperate in various aspects such as legislation and administration. It is difficult to achieve without a stable social and people's livelihood foundation.

A little carelessness will turn into a bad government that plunders people's property. Yuwentai is not short of money now, and he doesn't have that much energy to operate, so he doesn't have much enthusiasm for this matter.

Knowing that Yu Wentai had no idea of ​​reforming the currency, Li Tai did not keep too much copper metal, leaving only more than 40,000 kilograms. After all, you can't follow the policy and make another payment. It's useless to leave too much, and it's too conspicuous.

In addition to these metal materials, the relatively large savings in the temple are spices and dyes. Li Tai left behind more than 200 stones of spices and more than 500 stones of pigments. Although this number seems small, its actual value far exceeds the sum of gold, silver, copper and tin.

Everyone knows the value of pepper in the Middle Ages, and the value of pigments cannot be underestimated.

Brightly colored minerals such as lapis lazuli and turquoise can be used as gemstone decorations or ground and prepared into pigments. Even in later generations when the mining industry was developed and logistics was convenient, the price remained high, with one gram costing hundreds or even thousands of yuan. The current value is only high but not low.

Li Tai is not talking about grams here, but about stones. One stone is one hundred and twenty kilograms, and a few hundred stones is tens of thousands of kilograms. Although the quality and value of the pigments varied, the total amount was so large that it was an astonishing treasure.

There were dozens of boxes of other items such as pearls, jade, and crystals. Li Tai didn't even bother to calculate their value. In short, they were very expensive. There are also more than 2,000 pieces of fine damask and brocade, which can be converted into tens of thousands of pieces of silk for trading.

These are the remaining harvests of Li Tai and his party after being blackmailed by Daxingtai. Although they also gained a lot of grain and silk, they took up too much space. After excluding the consumption of this group, the remaining Li Tai All were handed over to Ba Mansion.

Anyway, Yuwentai ensured that the cost of the two defense cities in the coming year would be borne by the Bafu, so Li Tai did not have to keep too much and sent all of it to the Bafu, which could also support the total amount of supplies and cover up the fact that his own pockets were full.

In short, after this incident, Li Tai is no longer the poor boy who was worried about money and food all day long.

That is to say, Kansai does not have any ranking of personal assets. If there really was one, Li Tai's ranking would jump up like a rocket. At least among the richest people under the age of 20, he would dare to be a guarantee. The dream of two against three.

Even the princes and clans of the Yuan and Wei dynasties in Chang'an City may not have such a substantial private wealth as his.

Of course, his actual wealth level is still very high. Although the value of various materials is huge, they cannot be directly used as a trading medium for circulation. Moreover, due to the huge total volume and narrow use, once a large amount of selling is realized, the market will inevitably bottom.

It must be said here that temples were really the most economically minded group in ancient times, and many advanced financial and market operations originated from temples.

The reason why Li Tai was able to steal so many high-end luxury goods from Hongfa Temple was because the temple wanted to cover the entire market and create religious pursuits. They control large quantities of materials, sell them bit by bit to believers, and harvest wealth for a long time.

Scarcity is artificially created, and market demand comes from the religious environment of Salmon Dachang. Therefore, a considerable part of the price of these materials is to pay for faith.

If Li Tai wanted to sell it to others, the actual income would be far less than the theoretical value, so he would need a means to package it for cash, in order to shorten the gap between reality and ideals.

"Otherwise, build a temple?"

This was not an accidental thought on his part. He had had similar thoughts very early on. After all, the temple can make money really quickly, and now there is an actual need to sell stolen goods, so Li Tai started to think about it seriously.

First of all, this temple cannot be built in Guanzhong. The religious forces in Guanzhong also have their own regional scope. It will be difficult to build it without paying protection fees. Of course Li Tai doesn't want to spend money, not to mention that he also wants to show off his face and doesn't want to give people the image of a Buddhist worshiper.

If he wants to avoid Guanzhong, the remote area where his tentacles can reach right now is northern Shaanxi. If we want to do it in northern Shaanxi, we can be more open-minded. Northern Shaanxi is vast and sparsely populated, so the main believers it can attract are Jihu.

Then, building a big temple of Liu Shifo would be a natural attraction for Jihu. It could not only attract money from those wealthy chiefs of Jihu, but also add a means of restraint and control.

As for the imperial court classifying Master Liu as a prostitute and a hypocrite, it is not to hurt your feelings, but to correct your beliefs. I'll build a big temple for you as a model. You guys will come here to worship, don't make a mess on your own.

Anyway, the purge operation and money carried out through this have been received, so there is no need to continue to maintain it.

What is harmed by the change of orders from morning to night is the majesty of the imperial court. It has nothing to do with Bafu or me, Governor Li. As long as you are willing to pay, you can continue to worship. I will even provide you with the materials for worshiping Buddha.

Li Tai was not embarrassed because he went back on his word. After all, he gained weight by breaking his promise. As long as he could eat, he didn't care about that. What's more, no one knew that he was the instigator of the previous incident. If he wants to establish a foothold in northern Shaanxi and develop in the future, he must also pay attention to the differentiation and integration of Jihu forces, so this matter is really starting to happen.

He was planning to wait until the turmoil in Chang'an City passed, and then propose to Yu Wentai to build a temple of Master Liu in Diaoyin in the upper reaches of Luoshui River, and set up a defensive city nearby. When the time comes, with a Buddhist scripture in one hand and a steel knife in the other, I will ask those Jihu tribes which one to choose!