My younger brother Zhuge Liang

Chapter 589 As expected, Liu Ba came when he was short of money

After listening to Zhuge Jin's detailed argumentation, Liu Bei also began to feel a little worried about Pang Tong's original plan.

Liu Bei certainly knew that "Zhuge Liang was a cautious man throughout his life". Zhuge Liang was a very cautious man, and although Zhuge Jin was not as cautious as his second brother, he was definitely much more cautious than counselors like Pang Tong who liked to take risks.

What's more, the principle that "even a lion fights a rabbit, it uses all its strength" has long been tested by history.

Zhuge Jin was able to point out that our army's previous perception of Zhang Ren and Yan Yan was biased, which might affect the course of the war, so these issues must be re-evaluated.

Seeing that Liu Bei was still hesitating, Zhuge Liang, who was a bystander, spoke up and pointed out this truth: "Sun Tzu said: More planning leads to victory, less planning leads to defeat, and what about no planning? I think that no matter what the final decision is, the lord can first let someone further investigate the situation of Zhang Ren, Yan Yan and others, as well as their attitude towards our army and the trust between the master and the minister and Liu Zhang.

The more information we gather about the enemy generals, the more targeted we can be. As for soldiers, money, food, and weapons, we can first prepare them according to the plan of taking the enemy's advantage. If something unexpected happens, we can adjust it later. Anyway, this is just a hypothetical plan, and we are not really going to go to war with Liu Zhang."

Liu Bei was awakened by Zhuge Liang's words and finally realized that now was not the time to make the final decision on the detailed battle plan.

Since the main difference between Zhuge Jin and Pang Tong's plans lies in their understanding of Zhang Ren and Yan Yan, they should dig up intelligence and deepen their understanding first.

……

The subsequent domestic and foreign policy plans were agreed upon, and over the next ten days, everything was fine and there is nothing worth elaborating on.

Zhuge Liang, Lu Su and others have already begun to work on the pilot reform of the "rent, labor and tax" system in some counties of Yizhou this year, as well as related industrial, commercial and armament construction work.

Pang Tong plunged into intelligence work and, in accordance with Liu Bei's requirements, further strengthened the investigation into the diplomatic attitude of Liu Zhang's army, as well as further investigation into the mentality of generals such as Yan Yan and Zhang Ren.

Of course, this task cannot be completed by Pang Tong alone. He does not have the ability to do so. He must have the cooperation of an insider.

Fortunately, Liu Bei's army had no shortage of insiders in Yizhou, so Liu Bei gave Pang Tong the power to communicate with Zhang Song and Fa Zheng and exchange intelligence. He asked Pang Tong to carry out the work appropriately and dig out useful information while ensuring the absolute safety of the insiders.

Pang Tong gladly accepted the order, and the work was carried out smoothly.

In addition, because Zhuge Liang and Pang Tong's subsequent work needed to focus on Shu, as time came to the end of May, the two of them said goodbye to Zhuge Jin and Guan Yu respectively, and set off again to return to Yizhou.

Zhuge Liang's office was temporarily located in Jiangbei New City in Jiangzhou, while Pang Tong's residence was located in Zitong.

In this way, the two of them will be stationed on Liu Zhang's eastern and northern fronts respectively, which is enough to ensure that Liu Zhang will be safe.

After staying in Wuchang for several months, Lu Su left in late May and early June to return to Hefei to camp because Xu Yang's internal affairs required a high-level civil servant to take full charge.

Only Liu Bei, Zhuge Jin and Guan Yu were left, and they were temporarily stationed in Wuchang to coordinate the operations.

Now we are still in the armistice period, and all fronts are relatively stable, so Liu Bei can make such arrangements. Once the time comes to resume the war, Liu Bei will definitely let Zhuge Jin and Guan Yu take charge of the overall situation.

In these troubled times, the day when the top bosses of Liu Bei's camp can gather together can only be considered a coincidence.

Liu Bei also cherished this time, and basically held a small banquet every three days and a large banquet every five days to keep in touch with Zhuge Jin and Guan Yu. Zhang Fei was still in Wuchang, and he would not be late for any drinking party, and was always the first one to arrive.

……

Time quickly came to mid-June of the twelfth year of Jian'an.

Zhuge Jin stayed idle in Wuchang for a month or so. Basically, except for making important decisions, he was idle all the time.

He also doesn't like drinking. After partying every day for too long, he feels a little guilty and thinks he should do something to work.

However, there was no official business to be done in Wuchang for the time being. After he had some free time, Zhuge Jin sorted out his thoughts and thought that he might as well take advantage of this opportunity to make some small innovations in armaments and technology, and think of some ideas to help his second brother in Ba County and Zitong to provide more copper coins, Shu brocade and other hard currency support for the "rent and labor reform".

As mentioned earlier, if we want to learn from the rent and labor system/labor service system of the Tang and Song dynasties, integrate the three obligations of the people to pay money, pay taxes, and perform labor service, and allow the people to choose to offset them on their own, a very important prerequisite is to have sufficient supply of hard currency in the market.

Whether it is copper coins or Shu brocade, only when there is enough stock in the market can people avoid money shortages, deflation and price falls when they want to sell grain or pay for labor service.

To solve this problem, either increase the output of copper and increase coinage, or increase the output of Shu brocade and give the currency a value-binding currency, just like the "petrodollar" binding in later generations.

Zhuge Jin was well versed in economic common sense, so this problem was easy for him to figure out.

Therefore, he took advantage of this period of time to visit the Daye Iron Mine near Wuchang, because there were not only iron mines and iron smelting plants, but also large-scale copper smelting and coin minting workshops.

Since seven or eight years ago, the copper mines in Yuzhang County have been expanding their mining, transporting a steady stream of crude copper to the vicinity of Wuchang, which is then used to make various copper-intensive utensils, or directly melted and refined into coins.

Zhuge Jin's purpose of inspecting this time was to re-examine the copper smelting technology to see if there was anything that could be optimized, and then to find ways to increase production as much as possible.

Unfortunately, the little chemical knowledge he had left in his mind from his previous life had already been basically used that year.

It is now very difficult to make further progress through personal research efforts.

In the end, Zhuge Jin could only teach the principles that the ancients could understand to the core craftsmen and management officials of Daye Workshop, and let them work together to find solutions and improve things as much as possible.

After all this effort, the gains were only slight, and the improvement was pitiful. After a lot of investment, the copper mine and the mint could only increase production by 10% or 20% at most.

From the perspective of a time traveler, this achievement is not that great, but after all the fuss, it did cause quite a stir.

Within a few days, Liu Bei's army officials inside and outside Wuchang City basically knew that the lord and Zhuge Jin were now cracking down on copper coin casting. Fortunately, only these insignificant rumors were spread out, and the technical details were naturally impossible to leak. From these direct intelligence, it is not clear what the actual purpose of Liu Bei and Zhuge Jin's crackdown on copper refining and coin casting was. Most people did not think much about it, just thinking that the lord suddenly became greedy for money, or that there were too many rewards to be given out and there was no money.

However, there are a few people who are sharp-eyed but not in high positions. Based on their own speculation, they infer that "Could it be that the lord and the prime minister feel that there may be a shortage of copper coins in the future and they need to take precautions."

Zhuge Jin was so focused on technical matters that he didn't pay attention to these rumors for a while.

……

It was already the end of June.

After working on refining copper and minting coins for a month or so, Zhuge Jin found it difficult to make any progress and hit a bottleneck in his thinking.

Early that morning, he made another routine inspection trip to the mint near Daye Mining Area. After inspecting the workshop and finding nothing again, he happened to walk to the raw material warehouse of the mint and took a quick look around.

Suddenly, he noticed a phenomenon that the silver reserves in the raw material storage area of the mint were more than he had imagined.

Zhuge Jin certainly knew that the several large copper mines in Yuzhang County also contained associated silver.

However, the proportion of silver smelting in the past few years was not very high, and the total output was not very impressive. Therefore, even if some silver was produced, Liu Bei's army directly cast it into silver ingots as reserves, and did not use it as circulating currency.

This is not a problem of vision on the part of Liu Bei's military leaders, but rather that during the Han Dynasty, only gold and copper were used as large and small denomination currencies respectively. The status of silver was rather awkward. Although it could also be used for discounts and pricing, its price was not very stable.

If silver is to be used as currency directly, it will definitely take a lot of effort. New regulations will have to be established, and preventive measures will have to be taken to prevent arbitrage opportunities from appearing due to the unreasonable copper-silver price ratio, which will lead to a run on the bank...

In short, to insert a new monetary medium on a large scale into the existing monetary system is certainly not something that can be done in a snap, and it requires long-term adjustment.

Liu Bei's army was not short of money and hard currency before. At that time, they mainly focused on food, cloth, ironware, and shipbuilding capacity, which were the key in wartime. Therefore, the direct use of silver stocks was a bit delayed.

Now that Zhuge Jin has almost fully tapped the potential of copper coin minting, he has begun to turn his attention to these silver reserves, and the timing is just right.

With Zhuge Jin's decisiveness, in order to understand these principles, he immediately ordered people to conduct a detailed and thorough check of the inventory and collect the latest production capacity data of major copper mines in Yuzhang, especially the ratio of copper to silver production capacity.

The people below did not dare to neglect the materials that Situ wanted, and Zhuge Jin quickly got what he wanted.

"The major copper mines in Yuzhang now produce more than 6 million kilograms of copper and more than 2,000 kilograms of silver annually... This co-production ratio is not bad. In the past seven or eight years, the silver mined was stored, and now there are more than 10,000 kilograms of reserves. A lot of rewards were given out during the previous Battle of Hanzhong. This amount of reserves is not small, but it is still a little short of supporting a new supplementary currency..."

Zhuge Jin couldn't help but ponder.

Zhuge Jin was neither pleased nor dissatisfied with the copper-silver output ratio.

Compared with the technical strength of other princes of the same period, the Yuzhang Copper Mine developed by the Zhuge family has a very high silver yield - because other princes of the same period did not have the metallurgical idea of "replacement method" and did not know how to replace the silver ions in the metal salt solution with other metals. Therefore, other princes basically could not purify the associated silver when smelting copper ores.

Zhuge Jin at least knew the replacement method, which made the silver extraction rate at least an order of magnitude ahead of the times.

Of course, the replacement method is still very different from the later electrolysis method, because most silver mineral salts are not soluble in water, and only a few such as silver nitrate are easily soluble in water after being crushed and precipitated. For insoluble silver mineral salts, the replacement method cannot replace them, or it is very slow.

These details are not important. In short, for example, according to the domestic electrolytic method of copper production in later generations, the national output can reach 13 million tons a year, and the associated silver refined is about 8,000 tons, that is, about 1,500 tons of copper can produce one ton of silver.

This is also an important reason why silver has become increasingly cheap and unable to support its currency properties. This is because 60% of silver production in later generations is a byproduct of zinc smelting from lead and zinc mines, and nearly 40% is a byproduct of copper smelting.

It is impossible to control the production of silver because the demand for zinc and copper as industrial raw materials is too strong. As long as zinc and copper are continuously produced, silver will continue to flow out as an inevitable by-product, and it will become cheaper and cheaper if it cannot be spent.

In the third century, 1,800 years ago, Zhuge Jin had only mastered a little bit of the idea of smelting copper-related silver, which would have crushed his contemporaries by at least an order of magnitude. This was a dimensionality reduction attack. The silver output in Cao Cao's hands is now less than 10% of that in Liu Bei's camp.

It’s a pity that the absolute number is still not enough. Zhuge Jin still needs to consider how to play this card well.

However, it was a coincidence that when Zhuge Jin was thinking about his strategy, Jiangxia County Magistrate Xiang Lang suddenly ran over, looking for him in a hurry:
"Your subordinate greets Situ! I didn't expect Situ to be here. The lord came to E County today to discuss important matters concerning coinage with Situ."

Zhuge Jin glanced at Xiang Lang and quickly regained his composure: "My lord, have you come to E County? Are you in the county government?"

Xiang Lang: "I'm already at the mint here, waiting in the signing room."

Zhuge Jin quickly put down what he was doing and asked his servants to sort out all the accounts. He then dusted off his hands and asked Xiang Lang as he walked:

"But what has happened? Why is it so urgent? I recently came to inspect and rectify the copper smelting and coinage. The lord knows about it. If it's nothing serious, I can still make a decision after I return to Wuchang County."

Xiang Lang hurriedly helped to explain: "Don't worry, Situ, nothing has happened, it's just that the master couldn't sit still, so he came out for a walk.

A few days ago, it seemed that the news of our army's massive expansion of the copper smelting and coin minting industries had spread, and many people came to offer advice to the lord, hoping to gain fame and success.

Among them was a famous scholar in southern Jing who had been recruited once by Liu Jingsheng and then by the lord. His name was Liu Ba from Lingling. Upon hearing that the lord was troubled by coinage, he also rushed north from Xiangxiang County to seek an audience with the lord.

The lord had heard of his reputation and treated him with courtesy. I don't know what Liu Ba said to the lord, but the lord immediately came to E County in person to discuss things with the Minister of Justice.

After listening to Xiang Lang's retelling, Zhuge Jin had a bad idea in his mind: Liu Ba! Has this guy finally had enough of living in seclusion in Jingnan? Now he is out to seek official position and fame.

Moreover, this is at a critical juncture when Liu Bei is minting coins on a large scale, encouraging industry and commerce, and needs to expand hard currency... I can't let Liu Ba make random suggestions, I must help to strictly control it!

(End of this chapter)