C738 Silver Game (1/2)
After all, it was the Middle Age's way of thinking, and it was the result of being educated and raised in Confucianism. Manchu dynasty Court and Zai Chun knew the benefits of having money, and they also knew that it was impossible for a government to not have money.
But their thoughts remained on old objects and gold and silver. Silk was wealth, porcelain was wealth, tea, jewelry and spices were wealth.
Fields, pastures, mountain forests, lakes, rivers... Even the cattle and the population were considered to be the wealth of the imperial government. Only someone with a full debt would not think that it was such a fortune.
This kind of thinking wasn't unique to the Great Qing. The whole of Asia's current fiscal thinking was still on the most primitive level of running a bank account. The Great Qing's Department of Revenue was nothing more than adding and subtracting items.
The amount of taxes, taxes, and customs duties incurred by the provinces in the course of a year depended on how much the provinces owed and how many were actually deported to the capital.
After calculating the income, they would have to pay the expenses. They had to calculate the salaries of the officials, the military salary, and the river workers' taels of silver. One item after another, the final total would be a deficit.
It is a pity that I cannot say the word surplus, because Great Qing Dynasty has not seen a surplus for many decades. According to the records of the Ministry of Revenue, it seems to be the balance of income between the initial years of the Dao of Light.
The problem of debts had already plagued the imperial government since Daoguang was born. There were a total of five generations of emperors, Daoguang, Xian Feng, Tongzhi, and Xuan Tong.
The imperial government was poor. War required money. Raising the Eight Flag's ancestors needed money. The foreigners needed money … But another puzzling phenomenon is that across the whole of the late Qing, China's silver is flowing in net.
You didn't hear wrongly. Even though the compensation is several hundred million taels of silver, in reality, the amount of physical silver that flows out of the country is not much. The core reason was that silver was not even considered a currency in Europe, only the Asian recognized silver as money.
Silver was a relatively valuable ore in Europe. In particular, the silver mines in nineteenth century and Mexico had all entered a period of prosperity, breaking the global balance in the supply of silver. It was a long-term phenomenon where the supply exceeded the demand.
By this time, the Europeans had already seen the opportunity to exchange gold and silver from different countries. They would use the silver produced in the North America mines to exchange for gold and all kinds of precious goods in China, and then transport them back to Europe. This way, they could not only earn a normal commercial profit, but also earn a difference in the profit from the exchange of gold and silver.
To give a simple example, Department of Revenue should compensate the British 1 million silver taels worth of contract compensation this year. In that case, British Government would definitely not be so foolish as to use the boat to bring the million silver taels back to the Kingdom.
They would spend one million silver taels on the Great Qing, which could be converted into gold. Most of them used silver to buy silk, tea leaves, porcelain, even pig hair and leather … Wait a minute.
The silver remained in the Great Qing, but the goods were taken back to London, where, after their sale, the government and the contractors were given gold standard sterling!
This was the main mode of trading between East and West in the nineteenth century. It was also because of this that the entire late Qing had more and more silver on the market.