I am the prince of the Ming Dynasty, I don't give up

Chapter 95 Ming Welfare Lottery
The lottery that Zhu Houxuan wanted to create was actually quite different from modern lotteries.

Limited by current technical conditions, he simply cannot do the Double Color Ball, and there is no way for buyers to choose numbers. The manpower required just to record the numbers is too great.

So the original lottery rules he came up with were actually very rough.

No matter how many people buy tickets in one period, the first prize winner will get 40% of the total lottery tickets sold in that period as the first prize, the ten second prize winners will share 20% of the total, and the 100 third prize winners will share 10% of the total.

The reason for having so many winning places is to promote the spread of lottery and to gain the trust of the people.

Anyway, there are two principles. The first prize must shock everyone and exceed everyone's imagination.

There must be a lot of small prizes, but not too many, and the prize money must be able to significantly improve the lives of the winners.

The design of the lottery ticket is that two lines of identical Chinese numbers are printed on the ticket with special ink, with a dotted line between the two lines, and then a large red seal is printed on the two lines of numbers, which is actually a saddle stamp.

After getting the lottery ticket, you have to tear it into two halves along the dotted line, keep one half for redeeming the prize, and put the other half into a special translucent glass ball.

There are dozens of such large glass balls, distributed throughout the capital city and strictly guarded by soldiers from the Beijing Camp. After the deadline, these large glass balls will be sent to one place and poured into a larger glass ball.

Then a specially designed mechanical device is used to shake the lottery tickets out of the big ball one by one.

Yes, there was glass in the Ming Dynasty, and it was very common. Zhu Houxuan discovered this shortly after he traveled through time. It was also made into various jewelry and was not very expensive.

Jewelry made of glass is cheaper than jade and gold jewelry, but more expensive than silver and copper jewelry, and is called medicinal jade.

During the reign of Zhu Yuanzhang, medicinal jade was relatively scarce, so he specifically set a rule that only officials of the fourth rank and above could use medicinal jade on their belts (belt ornaments) and waist pendants.

But the skill tree of Ming Dynasty's glass manufacturing technology has been completely distorted.

What the craftsmen think about all day long is not how to remove impurities to make the glass purer and more transparent, but how to add impurities to make the glass look colorful.

With the advancement of technology, glass was already common at this time, but due to Zhu Yuanzhang's regulations, the belt ornaments of officials above the fourth rank must be made of glass, so glass with good color could still be sold at a high price at this time.

There was a glass workshop outside Beijing. Under the temptation of high prices and technical guidance of Zhu Houxun, they fired a batch of colorless glass blocks. Although there were many impurities in them and the light transmittance was not very good, you could already see the lottery tickets rolling through the glass, which was enough.

This big glass ball is not a pure glass ball. It is impossible to make a pure glass ball with current technical capabilities. Instead, a frame is first made of wood, and then the glass blocks are inlaid on it one by one.

After testing, the strength is still very good.

Another important thing about lottery is anti-counterfeiting. For this purpose, Zhu Houxuan prepared three anti-counterfeiting measures:
1. Special paper. The paper used is made of cotton and linen fibers. The US dollar bills of later generations are made of this material. With the current technical capabilities, it still takes a lot of effort to imitate it.

2. Special ink. The color is specially formulated and can be used for movable metal stamps.

3. Seal on the interline. The seal itself has an anti-counterfeiting function, because the material of the seal has a natural texture, and the texture of each seal is theoretically unique. Usually, you may be able to get away with it by engraving a carrot seal, but if you carefully identify it, you can easily find the problem, because the texture on the seal cannot be forged. Moreover, the seal on the interline itself has anti-counterfeiting ability. It is impossible for the artificial stamp to be so neat. It is normal to have a little more on the top or a little more on the bottom. A seal is torn in half, and it must be able to be pieced together into a complete seal when redeeming the prize. Anyway, with these three anti-counterfeiting measures, Zhu Houxuan believes that it is impossible for anyone to make a lottery ticket that can be mistaken for the real thing within three years.

Even if someone copies it three years later, his anti-counterfeiting technology will have been greatly improved.

As for the lottery distribution strategy, Zhu Houxuan directly chose to give away all the first lottery tickets for free!
All!

free!

He paid the lottery prize out of his own pocket. The first prize was 20000 taels of silver, the second prize was 1000 taels of silver each for ten winners, and the third prize was 50 taels of silver each for one hundred winners.

I would like to reiterate the purchasing power of silver in this era.

According to research, the value of one tael of silver in the mid-Ming Dynasty was equivalent to RMB 600-800 today.

How were people's salaries at that time? Let's look at the salaries of officials first. In the Ming Dynasty, the monthly salary of a seventh-rank official was 7.5 dan of rice, while the monthly salary of a first-rank official was 87 dan of rice, a difference of more than ten times. In the Ming Dynasty, one dan was about 94.4 kilograms, equivalent to about 0.5 taels of silver. The income of a first-rank official was 87 dan, equivalent to 43.5 taels of silver, or about 500 taels a year.

An ordinary person can live comfortably with an annual income of 20 taels.

House prices in the Ming Dynasty were still very low. According to Zhang Chuanxi's "Compilation and Interpretation of Contracts of All Dynasties in China", in the eighth year of Jingtai (1457), Li Tianxing, a resident of Qimen County, Huizhou, sold his house with a kitchen and a pigpen for only 4.3 taels of silver. In the first year of Wanli (1573), Wu Changfu, a resident of Xiuning County, Huizhou, sold his house, a small courtyard covering half a mu of land, for only 2 taels of silver.

In his first issue, he directly printed one million lottery tickets.

As for the distribution channels, they are ready-made.

When he was approaching for jersey advertising, he had established contacts with many businesses in Beijing. He directly distributed 800,000 of the jerseys to these businesses without telling them what they were for. He just asked them to give one to a customer after they made a purchase.

This kind of beautifully printed ticket was very popular with customers. The shopkeepers who knew Zhu Houxuan's identity also worked hard and did not dare to be negligent. This simple task was naturally done very well, and 800,000 lottery tickets were distributed quickly.

He sent people to distribute the remaining 200,000 copies on the streets like leaflets.

Maybe in modern times we hate receiving these colorful slips on the street or after shopping, and usually throw them away, but Zhu Houxuan was not worried about it at all.

Because the ancient Chinese people have always had a tradition of cherishing paper. Due to the low literacy rate, they all have a reverence for words. When they come across a piece of paper with words on it, they will carefully keep it. Zhu Houxun's lottery tickets are printed so beautifully that naturally no one is willing to throw them away.

Of course, there are exceptions, and quite a few are thrown away, but the base number of lottery tickets is still too large, and those that are thrown away will not be drawn anyway.

When everyone was caught off guard, more than 30 shops in the capital suddenly hung up the signs of Ming Welfare Lottery, and large glass balls for receiving lottery tickets and the rules of Ming Welfare Lottery were placed at the door.

At the main store of Daming Welfare Lottery, 35,000 taels of silver were displayed directly at the door.
The entire capital city was bombed.
I will continue to post as much as I write today.

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(End of this chapter)