Let’s look at Bai Juyi’s poems first:
The charcoal seller cuts down firewood and burns charcoal in the southern mountains.
His face was dusty and smoky, his temples were gray and his fingers were black.
Where do you make money from selling charcoal? The clothes on your body and the food in your mouth.
Poor clothes and clothes, worried about the cold weather.
At night, there is a foot of snow outside the city, and at dawn, the charcoal cart rolls over the ice tracks.
The cows were trapped and the people were hungry. The sun was getting high and they rested in the mud outside the south gate of the city.
Who is Pian Pian riding here? The messenger in yellow is in white.
He holds the document in his hand and pronounces the edict, returns to the carriage and shouts at the oxen to lead them north.
A cart of charcoal weighs more than a thousand kilograms, and the palace envoys will regret it.
Half a piece of red gauze and one foot of silk are tied to the cow's head and filled with charcoal.
This poem has three key messages:
1. Charcoal was fired in Zhongnan Mountain, more than a hundred miles away from Chang'an City, and the ox cart traveled more than a hundred miles to Chang'an.
2. The charcoal sold by the charcoal seller was forcibly bought by the "messenger" from the palace when he was waiting for the West Market to open. He must not have a shop in the West Market, so it can be concluded that he should be a businessman planning to sell to the West Market. .
In other words, being able to travel hundreds of miles to sell a load of charcoal proves that the price of charcoal has turned it into a highly profitable business.
3. Of course the people who bought the property by force knew that it was tantamount to robbery, but they would definitely not be punished when they went back, for reasons I will explain later.
First of all, I would like to thank the poet Bai Da for leaving such precious first-hand historical materials for future generations.
Now let’s analyze the important key messages in this poem.
First, the charcoal seller wants to cut down firewood to burn charcoal in the Nanshan Mountains because the amount of firewood needed in Chang'an is so crazy that people of all kinds have cut down the trees around Chang'an! There are no trees left to cut down!
This is not only proved by food records, but also some clues can be seen from Li Longji's appointment of Yang Guozhong as the "charcoal envoy" who was responsible for the supply of firewood in Chang'an.
The charcoal envoy is responsible for the public and private charcoal trade. In the future, if you cut down the charcoal at will, you will be punished.
According to a conservative estimate based on relevant literature (I won’t go into details), the Chang’an government, including the palace gardens, etc., consumed a total of 120,000 tons of firewood a year. The imperial court had a special agency, the "Gou Shield Agency," which was responsible for official firewood needs, but it could only supply less than 30,000 tons a year.
In other words, the firewood purchased centrally by the government was far from enough. There was a huge gap in firewood, and the palace and officials could only purchase it from the east and west cities.
I don’t know how to count the folk firewood, and there are also those from workshops and smelting, the number is even more uncountable.
Therefore, according to the simple principle of commodity prices, as long as there is a shortage, price increases are inevitable.
Can the market price of firewood in Chang'an City be the same as the wholesale price of centralized procurement by the government?
The answer is not only different, but also very different. Those who collected salary from the government were forced to do corvee labor. Seven thousand civilians from Guanzhong were used to cut firewood and burn charcoal and then sent them to Chang'an, which was almost equivalent to free prostitution.
During the Tianbao period, those people who called the Tang Dynasty Qianqiu Eternal Dynasty did not know if they paid attention to the government's financial expenditures. Why is the court running out of money? Where are the details? Here they are. The shortage of firewood is just the tip of the iceberg.
In addition, during this period, the long-standing environmental damage around Chang'an City finally reached the stage of concentrated outbreak. There were successive droughts and floods. Due to the lack of trees to regulate the climate, there was a severe drought in the thirteenth year of Tianbao, and then it rained for 60 consecutive days. By autumn, the vast fields in Guanzhong had failed to harvest, and the Great Famine in Chang'an began.
Second, it is shameless for the palace people to buy and sell by force, but the problem is that they can just rob, so why do they have to "give money"? Why do they bother to do things that can be done with public power?
It is impossible for the charcoal seller to retaliate against these people, and there is no way to report it to the official. The answer is that these palace people are probably not just robbing, they also have their own set of "logical self-consistency." This issue will be even more disturbing if we delve deeper into it. People shudder.
This detail issue that cannot be ignored is that the objects in the palace and inner gardens are out of touch with the prices in the Chang'an market.
The pricing system for "silk" in the palace is different from that of ordinary silk on the market. This is not surprising at all. It involves the issue of "depreciation" of transaction items in the Tang Dynasty and the issue of local tribute.
Ordinary silk fabrics are no longer ordinary silk fabrics when they enter the inner garden of the palace. These are tributes.
They are expensive, at least when they are "in stock".
Take the current situation as an example, if a LV bag is different from an ordinary bag that costs one or two hundred, if we put aside the attribute of "high style", how different is the actual use value?
The answer is almost the same, but the price is hundreds of times different.
Now this LV bag has been gathering dust at home for many years. The leather has aged and is quite rotten. At this time, I want to sell it, maybe only for a few hundred yuan, because I can't force it to buy or sell!
But when it comes to the palace people, they think that the "LV bag" has not depreciated. It was worth several hundred pounds when they first entered the palace!
Now it’s used to buy firewood, isn’t it cheaper for these people?
Therefore, it can be concluded that after these people return to the palace to report the matter, not only will they not be punished, but they will also be rewarded. Moreover, similar things will become a routine and an exclusive system for searching for people's wealth and wealth.
Because they got rid of the rotten things that were no longer needed in the palace and brought back the urgently needed daily necessities. From the emperor's point of view, someone must do this kind of scavenger job.
It can be seen that Li Longji has been calling him poor. He is not really poor, but under the non-commodity economic system, there are too many things in the palace that are not used. These things are just like ordinary people's utility rooms where they store miscellaneous items. They all look like money, but they can't be exchanged for money.
In modern popular terms, it is called: insufficient liquidity.
The problem reported by Bai Juyi was actually that the Tang Dynasty palace had no good way to "destock", and then with the blessing of power, it used robbery to obtain the people's livelihood supplies that maintained a decent life in the palace.
There are only a few types of things in the world.
Benefiting oneself and benefiting others is something only parents would do.
Benefiting others and oneself is what everyone pursues.
However, the above two points are often encountered in life.
What is more common is to take a step back and "lose small benefits to others and give yourself great benefits."
What's even worse is those who harm others without benefiting themselves. Such people need their brains to be repaired, but they can be found everywhere in the world.
In the period from the prosperous Tang Dynasty to the middle Tang Dynasty, the good, evil and deeds of a single person are actually insignificant. It is more about the overall situation and the general trend, which forces people to take risks.
Today's update will be sent later.
