Lin Chong was fooled by a knife. It is said that one day Lin Chong was shopping and drinking, and he met a big man selling knives in the street. As an imperial coach, Lin Chong is naturally a man who knows and loves knives. Knowing that it was a treasure knife, he spent 1000 yuan to buy it. Who knows, Gao Taiwei told him to bring a knife into the White Tiger Hall on the grounds of "seeing a knife", and finally disaster came. ...
Yang Zhi sold a knife and killed Niu Er in a fit of pique and sold a murder case. Lin Chong bought a knife, which had the same effect, and was finally exiled. I have to say that the arrangement of the water margin story is really interesting.
It is worth mentioning that judging from the fact that Lin Chonghua bought a knife, his family is still quite rich. You know, this thousand penetration is not a small sum.
In ancient times, penetration was a method of making money, that is, putting copper coins on a rope. Generally, 1000 is the same, so you can regard it as a monetary unit. However, it should be emphasized that in the Northern Song Dynasty. Traditionally, money is not a thousand dollars as generally understood, but 770 copper coins.
"Seventy-seven yuan is one hundred"-Song Shi. Food records
Therefore, a thousand penetration is 770,000 pieces of copper coins. This is not a small sum. When Yang Zhi was selling knives in the street, Niu Er, a rascal, once said that an ordinary knife can be worth 30 articles, and a thousand penetration can buy more than 20 thousand.
Niu Er shouted, "What a bird knife! This will cost a lot of money! I bought one for thirty pence and cut the meat and tofu. What are the advantages of your bird knife? It's called Bao Dao! "
Of course, if you put it today, this thousand dollars is also valuable. As for the specific value geometry, we might as well calculate it.
The historical background of this ancient and modern currency conversion is very important, and the values calculated in different dynasties are very different. As we all know, Lin Chong and Song Wu are both characters in Water Margin. Shi Naian, the author of Water Margin, is from Ming Dynasty, but the background of the story is Northern Song Dynasty. To be precise, it should be the last year of the Northern Song Dynasty, during which many historical figures and events such as Song Huizong, Gao Qiu and Fang La Uprising appeared.
So what we need to ask is, how much is 1000 yuan at the end of the Northern Song Dynasty equivalent to now?
At the same time, there is definitely no direct exchange rate with a Millennium difference between ancient and modern currencies, so our conversion needs to be compared with reference objects.
Generally speaking, gold is the most commonly used conversion reference, because it is a kind of hard currency, which can be linked to currency in ancient and modern times.
So we can convert this thousand dollars into equivalent gold, and then use the current gold price to convert the result. In the late Northern Song Dynasty, the exchange ratio of silver money was about 1: 2, that is, one or two pieces of silver could be exchanged for two dollars. If converted according to this ratio, 1000 yuan should be convertible into 500 taels of silver. In addition, the exchange ratio of gold and silver in the same period was about 1: 10, that is, one tael of gold can be exchanged for twelve taels of silver, so one thousand taels of silver can be exchanged for fifty taels of gold.
Of course, the Song Dynasty was a "copper standard" monetary system. Although gold and silver are hard currency, they are not money, so the price fluctuates greatly and varies from time to time. These ratios are only approximate.
After converting it into gold, we can cover it with the current price of gold. However, it should be noted that the ancient units of mass are different from ours today. In the Northern Song Dynasty, 50 taels of gold was actually only equivalent to 40 taels now, that is, two kilograms.
It is based on 1975, a bronze ruler carved on armor unearthed in Xiangtan, Hunan Province, which weighs 100 Jin, but the actual weight is 128 Jin.
In other words, a kilo in the Northern Song Dynasty was heavier than our present kilo, which had to be 640 grams. However, because the old system used 16 a catty, it was much lighter than our modern one in the Northern Song Dynasty, actually only 40 grams.
So how much can two kilograms of gold be worth today? I looked at the price of gold, which is about one gram of 450 yuan, which is 900,000 yuan.
Of course, someone here will definitely ask, why do you have to use the gold price to convert, but the silver price can't? This is mainly because silver depreciated too much during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. At that time, China's porcelain, tea and silk were sold overseas, earning a lot of foreign exchange, but China basically did not import foreign goods, resulting in a serious trade surplus and a large amount of silver flowing into China. Later, in order to reverse the situation, western countries began to import opium, which eventually triggered the Opium War.
As the saying goes, things are rare, and when there is more silver, it naturally depreciates. In the Northern Song Dynasty, the price difference between gold and silver was only a dozen times, but now it is a hundred times.
In fact, from this perspective, the method of gold conversion is not very reliable. Although the price fluctuation is not as big as silver, inflation does exist after all. Therefore, in order to ensure the objectivity of the data, we can also find other conversion references, such as rice price based on purchasing power.
According to historical data, we can estimate that the price of rice in Bianjing has been around one stone in the late Northern Song Dynasty. In other words, a thousand crowns can buy a thousand stones of rice.
"Before Feng, rice and stone were no more than six or seven hundred" (History of Song Dynasty, Shihuozhi).
In the Northern Song Dynasty, one stone is equivalent to 120 Jin today, and a thousand stones is 120000 Jin. According to the rice price of 3 yuan a catty, 1,000 yuan is equivalent to 360,000 RMB. It can be seen that this is very different from the value of gold conversion.
In fact, I think this purchasing power conversion is not very reliable. After all, the productivity of the Northern Song Dynasty is far from today's level. Two hundred kilograms per mu and two thousand kilograms per mu are simply two concepts. Besides, we have many food substitutes. With the improvement of living standards, the proportion of rice expenditure is very low.
So the data reflected in this way is also very objective. In fact, I prefer to compare the income and wages of the two eras.
According to the Introduction to Price Research in Song Dynasty written by Mr. Cheng Minsheng, in the Northern Song Dynasty, in a first-tier central city like Bianjing, a general handyman in a restaurant or a street vendor earned about 200 articles a day, which was about 6,000 articles a month.
In today's first-tier cities, such bottom-level wage earners have a monthly income of only six or seven thousand yuan. In contrast, a penny in the Northern Song Dynasty is equivalent to one yuan today. According to the previous calculation, 1000 yuan has 770,000 pence, which is 770,000 yuan. That's a lot of money. In ordinary second-tier cities, you can almost buy a small apartment.
So this thousand penetration is really not a small number. From this, it can be inferred that the 10 Long Live birthday program that Chao Gai robbed at the beginning was a major robbery with an amount of 77 million yuan and nearly 100 million yuan. No wonder you can't kill your head if you get caught.