Chapter 425 Stamping coins (please vote and subscribe)

The group set out in the early morning and spent a whole day to arrive at Hanyang City in the evening. They told the clansmen to move the papers on the car into the house to avoid being wet by the dew, and then Luo Chong went to check the construction of the teaching building and office building as soon as possible.

Strolling to the central area, four tall blue brick teaching buildings stood at the north end of the square in the east and west directions. The ridged sloping roofs on all four sides looked elegant and majestic. The green glazed tiles were washed spotlessly by rain and shone brightly in the sunset. They were all made of ordinary clay embryos, and a layer of glaze mixed with malachite powder was hung and fired. In terms of making porcelain and configuring colored glazes, the cripple was already a world apart from the one who was determined to spend his whole life grinding stone basins. They had both made progress.

At the construction site of the office building located in the middle of the teaching building, the clansmen had dug deep trenches along all the walls, and after tamping them solid, they piled up layer by layer with large blue bricks from below. Now the exposed wall alone is already 1.6 meters high.

But Luo Chong knew that this was not an exterior wall, but only the foundation of the office building exposed above the ground. As a building representing public power, it naturally had to be built a little higher. If there were not even a few steps, it would not look like a government office.

For this reason, the clansmen had to dig a lot of earth from outside the city to fill in this foundation. The pits dug were not wasted, and they were just used to make a manure pit, which would be used to expand the farmland area next year.

The foundation of the office building was still being laid, so Luo Chong had to turn his attention to the teaching building. On the blue-black exterior wall, the lattice-shaped doors and windows were still the color of the original wood, but because they had been painted with tung oil several times, the color looked a little darker, but at this time the door and window grilles were still empty, and they were just short of pasting the paper Luo Chong brought on them.

In fact, Luo Chong had thought about replacing all the doors and windows of the teaching building with glass, but the cost of doing so was too high. The materials he had now could not be made into ordinary glass. If he directly used crystal to burn glass, the special glass made would be high temperature resistant and highly transmittant. The melting point of ordinary glass was less than 600 degrees, while that of crystal glass was around 1200 degrees, which was higher than the melting point of gold and silver. If we calculate the production cost, wouldn't it be more than the fuel used in smelting metals? Moreover, fuel in this era was not cheap.

However, although it was a bit extravagant to use crystal to make flat glass, it was no problem to use it to make tools, especially the high transmittance of crystal glass, which was very suitable for making optical instruments. At this time, Luo Chong really needed a magnifying glass to use when making coin molds or carving movable type printing plates.

After making up his mind, he immediately started to make glass products. It is not difficult to make glass products. Once heated to the melting point, it will soften into a red paste-like viscous liquid. If you want to make a hollow container, use a hollow metal tube to pick up some glass liquid, blow air into it, rotate and stretch it, and finally make the shape you want.

Another way is that the finished product is a solid solid, such as the solid convex lens to be made this time, which can be directly cast into shape with a mold. However, in order to make the surface of the finished product as smooth as possible, the mold for casting glass products is generally made of metal. In other words, if you want to make this convex lens, you must first cast a convex lens mold with bronze.

This is not a difficult thing, that is, casting two plates that can be buckled together. If you want the finished product to be more precise, you can use the lost wax casting method. Luo Chong drew the shape and the size of the finished product on white paper, and then took it directly to Dazui. It should take a few days to see the finished product of the mold.

After arranging the burning of glass to make convex lenses, Luo Chong asked Ying Rui and Chief She stationed in Hanyang City to be fully responsible for pasting window paper, requiring them to complete the replacement by the end of August.

This is not difficult. They just need to brush the paper with tung oil twice, wait for it to dry, and then distribute it to each household. When the time comes, let them paste it themselves. The only thing they need to worry about is public facilities such as schools, warehouses, workshops, and military camps.

The only thing left to prepare is currency. Regarding the production and manufacturing of currency, Luo Chong can still try it. After all, this is a problem in mechanical production, but when it comes to the monetary system, he really knows nothing about it.

In his previous life, Luo Chong had never studied finance and economics, and his knowledge in this area was basically zero. He only knew about the gold standard, the silver standard, and the purchasing power of currency being approximately equal to productivity, etc. He had heard of these unfamiliar terms and knew a general idea, but he really couldn't explain them clearly and list them in a long speech.

The gold standard, as the name implies, is to use gold as the national standard currency. Other currencies issued by the national mint must have a fixed price to exchange for a certain weight of gold. This seems to be called the gold content of the currency.

The silver standard is the same as the gold standard, but the name has been changed. Considering the current situation of the Han tribe, gold has not been discovered so far. The metal resources they have are only brass and silver, which are suitable for making currency. They are soft enough, highly ductile, stable in nature, easy to cast, wear-resistant, and easy to store.

Among the remaining metal resources, lead is too soft and toxic. It is okay to use it as a small amount of additive, but it is not a good thing to contact it every day. Iron is easy to rust, and stainless steel is too difficult to process. It also requires chemical plating, so iron is not suitable. That leaves only brass and silver.

However, if the Han tribe adopts a silver standard monetary system, there are two major problems that need to be paid attention to.

Because in the history of world economy, this silver standard should have two characteristics, and it is very unfavorable to the current Han tribe. That is, first, private individuals can cast freely. Of course, this casting does not refer to silver coins, but silver ingots, silver blocks, or silverware, silver jewelry, etc., but they all have one thing in common, that is, this privately cast silver can also be used as currency for transactions and payments;

this is undoubtedly a huge problem. Once this happens, doesn't it mean that anyone who picks up a natural silver block can become rich instantly? Of course, this possibility is relatively small, but what if someone gets silver products from irregular channels? For example, smuggling from the Xin tribe.

Another thing is, what if the Xin tribe uses a large number of silver products to obtain materials from the Han tribe.

It is conceivable that once a large amount of irregular currency flows into the market, it will definitely cause the national economy to collapse. Wealth is created by productivity, not by the wind. How much money a country has depends on its production capacity. You can't say that I have no money and print money desperately. What is printed is not money, but a pile of waste paper.

Similarly, others cannot break the rules and exchange as many materials as they want with a pile of silver. This is absolutely not allowed.

So Luo Chong simply decided that all transactions with the Han tribe should be done by barter. If currency is used, it must be the coins minted by the Han tribe. Direct use of jewelry and utensils cannot be used for transactions. In this way, the Han tribe, which has the right to mint coins, will not be threatened by the Xin tribe.

Second, in the historical silver standard, foreign currencies are allowed to be exchanged for domestic silver. In international trade, foreign silver is also allowed to be used to purchase domestic goods. This is a good thing in the past, which can promote international economic circulation. Money can only be used when it is circulated. But in the current situation of the Han tribe, this is a big problem.

It has been confirmed that the Xin tribe has silver. Now Luo Chong's room still has the silver bowl cast by the Xin tribe, so what should we pay attention to?

In fact, it is still the first problem. In the foreign trade of the Han tribe, barter is still the main trading method, supplemented by money and goods trading. All currency that needs to be used must be the currency minted by the Han tribe.

In this way, the Xin tribe could not interfere with the trade of the Han tribe, nor could they use their metals to disrupt the economy of the Han tribe.

The last point is the currency exchange system. If a system is made up, it will easily collapse. Therefore, for the sake of safety, Luo Chong decided to directly apply the yuan, jiao, and fen decimal system that he was most familiar with.

Although it felt a little awkward to listen to a group of primitive people calculating yuan, jiao, and fen every day, he was the only one who felt awkward. In this world, Luo Chong was the first person to issue currency, and the other natives were all in contact with it for the first time. It didn't matter if it was awkward or not, because they had never seen it anyway. If it really felt awkward, then just change fen to wen, and the yuan and jiao would not change. In this way, the yuan, jiao, and wen sounded more smooth.

After the exchange system was decided, the material problem came up. The location of the silver mine was still a little far from the two cities of the Han tribe, and transportation was not as convenient as the copper mine in Babaoshan. Therefore, Luo Chong decided to use a bronze alloy made of 95% brass and 5% lead to cast two small-denomination copper coins, Wen and Jiao, and use pure silver to make yuan-level silver coins, that is, silver dollars.

In addition, it should be noted that in order to increase the anti-counterfeiting recognition ability and increase the difficulty level of coin casting, the coins of the Han tribe are all solid coins, not the square-hole coins of ancient times.

In contrast, if it is made by mechanical stamping, the coins are simpler to make than casting square-hole coins, and they are more delicate and complex. Their quality and precision are simply not comparable to those of coin casting, and not everyone can imitate them.

Because if you want to stamp coins, you must have a steel stamp. With the current technological level of this world, the Xin tribe may be able to imitate the square-holed copper coins cast by fire. After all, they can already cast silver bowls with embossed patterns, so casting square-holed coins should not be a difficult task. The most is that the output is low. But if they want to play with stamping, the production of the steel stamp alone will be difficult for them. They will be exhausted for hundreds of years and still not be able to figure it out.

(End of this chapter)