Chapter 1206 Money Travels the World

Chapter 1206 Money Travels the World

As winter approaches, all things in the Western Wei Kingdom begin to enter a period of summary and inventory.

The past year has been a year of great accumulation for the Western Wei Kingdom. Since Li Tai entered Guanzhong, including the previous development of Longyou and Shannan, the national strength accumulated over the years has finally exploded in this year, which has fundamentally reversed the overall situation of the world and completely established the Western Wei Kingdom as the strongest country in the Three Kingdoms.

However, with the end of this outbreak, the situation has returned to the rhythm of recuperation and re-accumulation. The officials appointed from various places have arrived at the government one after another, and the personnel situation in various places has gradually been summarized.

After these officials came to the government, they appeased the people and refugees in the country and re-established the household registration information. In the newly occupied territories of the Western Wei Kingdom in the past year, the number of registered households alone has increased by more than 300,000 households, which is a very considerable number.

The first place with the largest number of registered households is Jianzhou under the former Northern Qi Dynasty, with nearly 100,000 households. The second is the counties in Huainan, each of which has tens of thousands of households. As for the Heluo area, which was originally the ruling center of the Northern Wei Dynasty, the number of registered residents is not very impressive. It is mainly the scale of registered residents that was reestablished by incorporating vagrants and various barbarian tribes.

After Li Tai entered Guanzhong, he conducted a relatively detailed census of the population in the Western Wei Dynasty. The population data obtained at that time was about 2.1 million households, basically including the three population distribution centers of Guanzhong, Shuzhong, and Jingxiang. After a series of wars this year, the population alone has increased by one-seventh of the original, which is a considerable gain.

However, this data is not the most ideal. It is only the first wave of population included in the statistics after the occupation. If you continue to be patient and compile, an increase of 500,000 households is not a dream.

The population loss caused by the war is secondary to the direct casualties. The biggest loss is still fleeing and sheltering. If you want to restore the population, you must have long-term social stability and the implementation of benevolent policies.

Although Li Tai always claimed to promote the rule of benevolence and righteousness, the people in the Northern Qi had never experienced it personally, so the people in the newly occupied territories fled to varying degrees.

This situation was inevitable, and Li Tai had no way to deal with it. Anyway, when the Northern Qi was destroyed soon, these people would find that it was useless to flee, and the houses and land left in the countryside would be redistributed.

Another embarrassing and annoying thing was that all the officials sent to various places reported one situation, that is, many monks in the temples in the country had fled, and only a few remained in the local area.

If only one or two people made this report, it would be fine, but almost everyone made this report, which at least reflected several problems.

First of all, Li Tai's reputation among the monks had become stinking. Wherever he went, the Buddhists there would flee for their lives to protect their safety. Secondly, these officials probably also got his habit of attacking the monks, and after entering the country, they first asked about the situation of the monks in the country.

Li Tai was also somewhat amused and helpless about this situation. There are not many fools in this world who are concerned about their own interests, not to mention that the Buddhists are more shrewd than ordinary people. After being cut by soft and hard knives so many times, they can always taste that it is really difficult to be a monk under his rule.

If there is any group in this world that sincerely hopes that Northern Qi can defeat Western Wei, it must be the Buddhists such as Shamen. The monks lived a comfortable life in Northern Qi, but the situation in Western Wei was very different.

After learning about these situations, Li Tai couldn't help but sigh that those who know me say that I am worried, and those who don't know me say what I want. To be honest, he also wants to have a good reputation in the religious world, but for the sake of the world's great plan, he can only bear the infamy first, and he still has to suffer the Buddhists again.

This is not just talk. Although the harvest in the past year is considerable, the expenses are also very huge.

This series of wars was the largest and longest-lasting war since the founding of the Western Wei Dynasty. A total of 150,000 soldiers were recruited alone, and with the auxiliary civilian labor, the number of recruits reached hundreds of thousands. It is not an exaggeration to say that the whole country is fighting!

The grain and food consumed by these mobilized soldiers and civilians every day is as much as tens of thousands of stones, plus the transportation consumption, the number is even more astonishing. As early as the beginning of the Tongzhi period, Li Tai had been transporting food and grass to Hedong and other places in succession, in order to control the cost when the real battle started. However, when the war machine was running, seeing this astonishing consumption, he was still angry and his urine turned yellow every day, worried that after paying a huge price, the harvest would not be as expected.

Now the harvest is relatively satisfactory, but the current situation of the empty treasury in Guanzhong is also puzzling. Even the autumn tax from Shannan was not transported to Guanzhong, and it was directly used on the battlefield of Heluo via Sanya Road.

At present, the Bafu not only has to meet the various military and political consumption in Guanzhong, but also has to be responsible for transporting supplies to the newly occupied areas, and the supplies for the garrisons in various places are not a small number.

Faced with the huge material gap, the Bafu also changed the official evaluation standard this year. In previous years, the increase in the number of registered citizens was used as the evaluation standard, but this year it was changed to the materials and goods handed over to the Bafu.

Although the rent and tax under the equal-field system are all fixed, local governments also have other ways to generate income, such as commercial taxes such as dikes and city taxes, and official workshops.

In this regard, Yizhou in Shuzhong, Rangcheng in Shannan, Jiangling, Xiangzhou and other places have relatively unique conditions, and they each have excellent industries and trade resources.

However, in Guanzhong and some other areas with better farming conditions, in order to ensure the security of food supply, there is not much development of other industries, and even the government is deliberately suppressing them.

It is also difficult for these places to generate income through other means, but they also have advantages that other places do not have, that is, the past few years have been good weather and good harvests, so that ordinary families have accumulated considerable food.

Therefore, the Bafu allocated a certain amount of money and silk according to the number of households per capita in these states and counties, and ordered the government to purchase the stored food of the households according to the current price, and then concentrate these grains and transport them to the Guanzhong Bafu to solve the urgent need of the empty treasury this year.

This time, the government came forward to purchase the stored grain of the people, and also to promote the re-distribution of coins to the people.

Li Tai had previously ordered the minting of new Wuzhu coins, but because the production and reserves of Tongzhi Wuzhu were relatively limited at the time, it was not open to the public for large-scale exchange, and was only available for exchange in limited occasions such as military markets.

With the accumulation of several years, coupled with the crackdown by the hegemony government on the phenomenon of private minting and counterfeiting of coins in the country, Tongzhi Wuzhu coins have also been used in major cities such as Chang'an and Tongzhou, and both purchasing power and credit are very considerable.

Needless to say, the various advantages of coins in market transactions, and the reason why the system collapsed before was mainly due to the long-term social unrest and various public and private forces constantly destroying the value of coins and the credit system.

Li Tai's large-scale promotion of Tongzhi Wuzhu to the public this time, although it was also collecting private capital and property, but at the same time it was also for the construction of a healthy and stable currency trading system.

In the past few years, although the Tongzhi Wuzhu has not been fully popularized among the people, the people have also learned about it and have been exposed to it through various channels and methods. Therefore, when the government used coins to buy grain, they did not panic and resist. Instead, many families rushed to sell grain because of the high purchasing power of the Tongzhi Wuzhu.

Of course, with a large number of Wuzhu coins invested in the people and the market, it would be difficult for the Tongzhi Wuzhu to maintain the high deflationary value caused by the scarcity of coins, unless cross-regional long-distance transactions were carried out. But this is obviously not something that ordinary people can participate in. However, since the Tongzhi Wuzhu is as heavy as a piece of paper, the purchasing power will not drop significantly, and it will only maintain a slightly higher price than the official market in the end.

The administrative system of the Western Wei Dynasty under the leadership of the Bafu was still very powerful. As the Bafu used the coins in the treasury to start large-scale official purchases, the money and goods in the entire Western Wei Dynasty soon began to flow rapidly again.

In just a few states in Guanzhong, as time entered early autumn, the amount of grain and millet purchased by various states and counties reached more than two million stones. Although it was not extremely abundant, it was still easy to cope with the current material difficulties.

A large amount of money flowed into the people, and it was also necessary to enrich the number and types of goods that could be used for trading, so that the vitality of the entire society could be stimulated and continued to prosper.

Various handmade goods from Shannan, Shuzhong and other places flowed into Guanzhong, allowing people's money to be easily exchanged for various desired goods in the market, making the entire market trading environment stable and improving.

The people did not feel deprived because they sold their stored grain to the government. Instead, their wealth was flexibly adjusted, the allocation of assets became more diverse, and the quality of life was improved.

Of course, while promoting currency reform in an all-round way, Li Tai did not forget the temples that occupied a large proportion of people's economic and spiritual lives. He left the last important reform measure of the year to the Buddhas.

After entering the twelfth lunar month, the Bafu issued a new order: starting from the next year, which is the fourth year of Tongzhi, all temples and nunneries in the country are prohibited from using metal statues such as copper, tin, gold, and silver for worship, except for statues made of clay, wood, and stone.

With the issuance of this order, the newly appointed doctor of the Bafu, Lu Fahe, and other personnel were divided into several groups and went to Shannan, Shuzhong, Longyou and other places to inspect temples and nunneries and prohibit the use of gold and copper.