Internal concerns that villains interfere in politics, foreign relatives, eunuchs, and harems; middle concerns that the officialdom is in danger, and the people will inevitably rebel; external concerns that ethnic conflicts are in conflict, and foreign races are eyeing each other. The demise of all dynasties has arisen from these three.

Now the Song Dynasty has a particularly serious external troubles. The old enemy Liao Kingdom has been destroyed, the remnant Liao surrendered, and the Western Xia has surrendered. At this stage, the main foreign enemy is the Jurchens. After two battles, the Jin army suffered heavy losses and their vitality greatly damaged, and it has temporarily changed from offensive to defensive. After the reorganization, the Song army's strength has been increasing and its boundaries have been consolidated. As long as Zhao Zhen is confident of eliminating this external trouble in the future.

After two rounds of purges of the Song Dynasty, a group of upright officials such as Li Gang and Zong Ze entered the court, replaced a large number of officials who were ineffective, and laid off a large number of remaining personnel. The officialdom was curbed, but it was not a matter of complete elimination. However, the situation has greatly improved, with government orders, local governance, society gradually stabilized, and rule became increasingly stable.

The villains are always indispensable, but now everything is renewed. The emperor is full of ambitions and ambitious. The "positive energy" is everywhere. The villains have not dared to show up yet. The eunuchs have no way to talk about the interference of politics. The emperor Zhao Huan was too cold to these eunuchs. After he came to power, he cut a group of them. When he was "Fu Que" and wrote a letter to him, he was beaten and killed by the people in the capital and the Tai students. After the city was broken, a group of them were captured by the Jurchens. For a time, the eunuchs became rare things.

Now the number of eunuchs in the Da Nei has reached the founding period of Taizu. There are less than 200 people in charge of the huge harem. Everyone knows that Xi was trained by the emperor. Although he also loves money, he cherishes his life even more. He knows the emperor's temper and means, so he dares not do anything. Although he has become the top leader of the eunuchs, he is even more courageous.

The power of relatives in the Song Dynasty was always very weak and never became popular. Zhao Qi's grandmother's family made money with him and did not have much power. He didn't have to worry about these things at all. His mother Zheng Hongmei couldn't pass the level of the throne, but he still gave his grandfather the title of prince and his third uncle as a duke to thank the old Zheng family for raising and taking care of him, but this was just an honor and had no real position.

As for Zhao Qi in the harem, there were only three women, one and two concubines, not to mention comparing with his father, even compared with his brothers. After the change of the reign, the queen Zhu Shuzhen wanted to choose a daughter for the emperor to enrich the harem as the emperor. However, Zhao Qi refused. Now he wanted to marry Zhe Meiluan, who had a filial piety period, as agreed. In early February, Zhao Qi issued an edict to promote Zhe Keqiu to be Duke Xi, the prefect of the prefecture and prefecture, Linzhou and the appeasement envoy; Zhe Kecun was appointed Duke Qi, and was transferred from Shaanxi to Bianjing defense envoy, and was given a residence; and the Zhe family was also very "sensible". They immediately submitted a letter to get rid of hereditary and were willing to guard the borders of the Song Dynasty to defend the enemy, and immediately sent her sister to Beijing to get married.

Zhao Qi was very satisfied with the actions of the Zhe family. They finally figured out that the prefectures had lost their previous role in guarding the border with the recovery of Datong, and the end of the war meant the beginning of the decline of the family, but Zhao Qi asked the Zhe family to guard the three prefectures. First, as a reserve force to prevent the rebellion of the Western Xia invasion; second, it was to prevent the restoration of the remnants of the Liao forces in Datong. But he could not allow the Zhe family to become bigger, so he transferred Zhe Kecun to the capital to serve, which was in line with the custom of selecting foreign relatives to lead the imperial guards in the capital...

Another problem on the Zhao Qiong case is now. It is about the issue of currency reform. Metal currency is one of the earliest currencies, but metal is used as currency. It has a small weight value and is inconvenient to circulation. After the invention of paper and printing, people naturally thought of making paper money.

During the Zhenzong period, paper currency was protected by 16 wealthy merchants from Sichuan, using one-color paper, printing patterns such as trees, houses, and sealing letters. Each household sets a secret note of red and black color. The face value is not limited, and it is often a hundred jin. Those who hold the Jiaozi can keep it when using cash, or can directly use Jiaozi. For cash, they must cut off the interest of 30 cents per jin, and print Jiaozi once or twice every year when the silk silk, rice and wheat are harvested.

Later, Jiaozi often failed to cash out due to the issuer's bankruptcy, so the government prohibited private issuance. In the first year of Tiansheng, the official Sichuan Jiaoziwu established and issued the first official Jiaozi, and set up a special Jiaoziwu to be responsible for printing, issuance and return. When redeeming, the font size must be registered in the book and the accounts must be cancelled according to the font size to prevent forgery. If cash is used to exchange Jiaozi, thirty cents per stake must be deducted first to be admitted to the official, which is different from when the private Jiaozi cashes in Jiaozi.

The 'Zi' is the circulation period. At that time, it was stipulated that one zodiac sign every two years, with the issuance amount of more than 1.2 million jin, and 360,000 jin of iron coins were prepared for redemption. This type of Jiaozi's face value is fixed and stamped with an official seal, which is from one to ten jin of face value. It was changed to Yiguan and 500 jin of paper in the first year of Xining. The earliest Jiaozi was a bit like a private loan document, and it was also a bit like today's securities, so it was both very primitive and had many attributes of monetary capital.

The convenience of paper money as a means of payment is easy to be recognized, so once it was invented, it was quickly promoted by the people and the court. At that time, the government directly used Jiaozi as a bulk payment method, such as buying military supplies from merchants or directly filling military expenses. Wang Anshi also used it as the capital of the green seedlings during the reform, and the government often closed the position and paid in advance. Since payment was indeed convenient, the government had the enthusiasm for promotion. However, the main and fundamental reason was that there was a serious "money shortage" in the Northern Song Dynasty.

The so-called money shortage means currency shortage. Because iron smelting technology is not as mature as copper smelting, and iron is prone to rot, copper coins were the main currency at that time. The reason for the money shortage was that the development of the commodity economy led to insufficient money supply; the other was the leakage of copper coins; and the other was that the copper coins made by a large number of privately sold copper coins and made through multiple manual processes. Once destroyed, they would gain more than several times of profit.

These factors lead to an imbalance between the value of metal coins and the market price, and copper minted currencies have long been higher than the price of currency. In the case of shortage of metal coins, the Song Dynasty implemented a system of official salaries and military salaries in kind and mixed currency, and the lives of the wage-food class were all or partly included in the market exchange. The hard currency in the market is metal coins, so many bureaucrats and governments gathered them together, further leading to the shortage of metal coins, which in turn promoted the promotion of paper currency.

The emergence of this prototype of modern currency is an improvement and a good thing. However, people's understanding of Jiaozi was still limited at that time. The rulers quickly regarded Jiaozi as a tool for making money - wasting paper money indiscriminately to solve financial difficulties. When Zhao Ji was in power, the number of Jiaozi was over-printed by the war increased to more than 26 million yuan. Such a huge issuance volume, coupled with no cash to convert, caused a sharp depreciation of paper money and social shock. Zhao Huan's administration not only failed to stop this momentum, but instead increased the issuance volume. In addition, various forces issued it in order to raise military funds, resulting in currency disorder and credit collapse...

Zhao Qi now took over this mess, and he was eager to reissued paper money, which was also forced by the situation. In this era, productivity was low and metallurgical technology was backward. Although the output of copper was greatly improved compared with the previous generation, he opened the Pandora's box of firearms. Cannons, guns, and bullets all needed a large amount of copper to produce. Now the copper used by the military workshop to produce weapons is the copper coins reserved in the past. Now the number of troops has doubled, the weapons and ammunition consumed has increased sharply, and the amount of copper is also rising. The output of copper is there, and if you take care of this one, you can't take care of that one!

A major feature of the Song Dynasty's economy was the development of commerce. Now the contradiction between the development of the commodity economy and the shortage of coins was becoming increasingly acute. The resulting deflation effect has seriously hindered the development of the commodity economy. Zhao Qiong knew that the silk and porcelain of the Song Dynasty had driven overseas trade. His next step was to expand overseas trade to increase commercial taxes and solve the economic problems of the Song Dynasty. This also required a currency replacement, which was the popular "silver standard".

Zhao Qiong planned to use silver as the currency standard to establish a new financial order, but his two experts failed to fully understand his intentions, and the prescription he prescribed failed to prepare the medicine. This requires him to give some advice, and he, the second-hand man, had to pretend to be an expert...

"Mr. Gong, it's a bit inappropriate to exchange four-cent of old banknotes for Yishen's new banknotes!" Zhao Qiong said with the old name of the royal palace.

"Your Majesty, I dare not!" Zhou Xingji hurriedly said with respect, but he was very helpful in his heart. "I think that the court issued 40 million guan in several years, but the payment amount was less than 5 million guan. The difference between the two is very big. There is also an old case for exchanging 40 million guan in old guan in new guan!"

"Yeah!" Zhao Qi nodded. How could he not know about this kind of thing? In the early years, he and Huang Jingchen joined forces to speculate on salt banknotes to make a big profit, but now the situation is different. Such speculative transactions cannot be done, otherwise they will be smashing their own signature. "But once such an operation is done, it will inevitably cause chaos, which will lead to Jiaozi's depreciation again as soon as it is listed, making it difficult to stabilize the market, and will lose credit, and it is still a waste of time!"

Currency is not only a tool of circulation, but no one knows that it has the attribute of credit capital. It can be dispatched into a strong economic accumulation force, used for commercial operations and centralized construction, and it is also very easy to deviate from value and expand infinitely, destroying the economic operation system. This is unexpected by the feudal dynasty. Since the Song Dynasty, China has raised this question to the wise people of financial management since the issuance of paper money in the Song Dynasty, but they have never seen through it, but it is also a problem that is difficult to bypass now.

"Your Majesty, if the equivalent collection requires huge amounts of money, the court still needs to vigorously mint copper coins, and the Ministry of Revenue is really unable to bear it, it will leave the treasury of the central government of the court empty and there is no money available!" Zhou Xingji said, this problem is also difficult to solve.
Chapter completed!