Although fiscal policy in early Ming Dynasty based on spot goods, the issue of the currency is inevitable for government. It was hard to issue the currency massively due to the inflexible fiscal policy in Ming Dynasty. So they had chosen ‘Baochao(...
Although fiscal policy in early Ming Dynasty based on spot goods, the issue of the currency is inevitable for government. It was hard to issue the currency massively due to the inflexible fiscal policy in Ming Dynasty. So they had chosen ‘Baochao(寶抄)’ which costs less comparatively as the currency. But ‘Baochao(寶抄)’ was vulnerable to excessive issue with less values in possession and could not function as the currency as time went by. The Ming Dynasty also acknowledged the issue of ‘privately issued coins(私 錢)’ seriously. As officials also suggested proposals through merchandised order, inducing ‘Pu-hang(鋪行)’ into system is outstanding but the most striking thing is that they suggested to let it go in private currency market unlike the current common sense and prefer less discussion on ‘monetary regime(錢法)’ in the government, regarding the discussions on ‘monetary regime(錢法)’ as a troubleshooter for public attention of people. Even though providing enough ‘government issued coins(制錢)’ would be desirable, it was difficult with finance situation in Ming Dynasty. In terms of this, it could not help issuing different coins in various qualities with diverse financial conditions. It means that ‘government issued coins(制錢)’ could not guarantee a good quality of coins. For example, Chongzen Tongbao(崇禎通寶) with mixed kinds in quality separately seemed not that good coins to use. Meanwhile ‘privately issued coins(私錢)’ had almost same quality of government issued coin. Like this, as issue of coins in Ming Dynasty was not enough, most commercial transaction happened inside through silver greatly contributed to increasing the flexibility of commercial transaction. That is, incorporation into silver-economy had a lot of side effects. As silver was handy, wealth in a region moved to another region easily, entailing imbalance between regions and classes. In other words, the mobility of silver had been maximizing and gap between the rich and the poor had deepened in the late Ming Dynasty. Further to this, not going smoothly of silver-flux in Chongzhen reign caused serious social issues.