The third update is here! We will give you ten thousand rewards for Brother GK, thank you for your support!

Chang'an City, Wubenfang.

On the second day of the Lunar New Year, everyone began to busy visit relatives and friends and greet each other.

Qingluan also came to Li's house to pay New Year's greetings. The New Year's greetings were very special, with a few pounds of dog-headed gold and a few large jadeite. Cui Yingying was very arrogant when Qingluan came to the door. She kept smiling and greeting him enthusiastically.

"When will you go back to Kangyan?"

Li Chao peeled a frozen pear for Qingluan.

"Your Majesty promised to sell our batch of weapons, but he still had to wait for the military weapons to be manufactured. I want to wait here. But my brother will go back first. He will send the commercial goods we traded back first, and then organize more commercial goods to come over, and bring some gold to pay for the money for the military weapons."

Qingluan took the pear that Li Chao peeled for her, and then jumped into Li Chao's chessboard without hesitation.

Cui Yingying and Honglei were scattered by the side.

Six people played checkers, but not only Cui Yingying, Zheng Hongseong, Du Caiwei and Zhao Siniang both beat Li Chao, but even the novice Qingluan won him, and Li Chaocheng lost in the end.

A handful of money was taken from the box in front of him and counted several in front of the five.

"Awesome, I'm convinced."

"Sanlang, we also want to give rewards." Qiuyue and Dongqing were also smiling and asking for rewards. Although the two girls have not realized their original dream and become Zhang Sanlang's woman, they are now the Li family's kitchen manager. The rewards are quite a lot of money given on New Year's Eve. If they are willing, they can redeem themselves.

"Okay, I'll give you one for each of you."

"Xie Sanlang!"

There are also prizes for playing chess, but the money Li Chao lost just now was not copper coins, but gold coins. This was a project he tried when he was in Taozhou, hydraulic stamping coins.

Traditional coins are troublesome and simple. They use the mother coin sand turning process. This process is still more advanced than the Han and Wei dynasties.

But even so, a furnace of thirty craftsmen works for ten months a year, but only 3,300 stags of money are used every year. It is not only used for a lot of labor and is also inefficient, which leads to a high cost of minting money.

Li Chao had previously found a copper mine in Taozhou based on his secret map, and then prepared to launch the hydraulic stamping coin process.

The die-cast coins are completely different from the traditional mother coin turning sand coins.

It is normal to die-cast coins faster and more efficient.

First melt copper tin lead into a liquid alloy in the furnace, then pour it into the ingot tank to cool, or directly press it into alloy bars. Then perform some rolling operations to make it into strips with a thickness of the cake, and then stamp these strips into semi-finished cakes.

Then these cakes need to be processed through an annealing furnace, and they also need to be cleaned, grinded, polished, etc.

Finally, these qualified cakes are sent to a hydraulic press, and the cakes are stamped with a special steel mold, and then they become the final coin.

However, this craft is simple to say, but it is also quite complicated.

Whether it is melting and casting alloys, making coarse blanks, processing fine embryos, and finally stamping, it is not easy. Especially for that set of steel molds, it requires excellent special steel, which is very hard. On this steel, it is even more difficult to carve a negative mold.

The two steel molds on the front and back of a set of molds were hired by an excellent engraver, and it took several months to carve them.

When Li Chao entered Beijing, his Taozhou Mint only started to mint gold and silver coins because copper coins are harder and more difficult to mint.

The first batch of gold coins was 90% in color and weighed one or two taels. The front of the gold coins was the Great Wall, the back of the gold coins were dragons, and there were tooth patterns around them. The silver coins also contained 90% in silver, and the same one weighed one or two taels.

The amount of gold and silver coins in this batch is not very large, and it can be said to be a preparation for the large number of copper coins.

Gold and silver were not directly circulated in the Tang Dynasty, but they could also be used as currency at some point. The first batch of gold and silver coins minted by Li Chao were placed in his money shop. They were not weighed, but used according to the value of the currency. One gold coin is worth 8,000 copper coins and one silver coin is worth 5,000 copper coins.

As long as the surrounding tooth patterns and surface relief patterns are not worn, then calculate it directly by one or two. If it is worn, it is called a type calculation.

This kind of gold and silver coins are actually just like banknotes in Liji Money House, and are considered to be circulated in a small range.

Once launched, it was quite popular. The main reason is that this thing is easy to carry. The five-silo coins weigh more than 30 kilograms, but a silver coin is only one liang. One gold coin is even eight jin. A cube contains ten gold coins, and one can be used as a copper coin of five hundred jin.

The bank ticket is lighter, but after all, the bank ticket is just a piece of paper and is worthless. It is not as valuable as gold and silver itself, so there is no need to worry about breaking it. Even in a place where there is no Zhangji Money House, it can be used directly as gold and silver.

For money shops, they are also happy to launch gold and silver coins, because both gold and silver coins are only 90% purity, and the remaining 10% are replaced by copper. Copper is much cheaper than gold and silver, with a difference of six or seven times or even ten times.

Mints use hydraulic die-cast coins. Although there are many processes, the mass production efficiency is extremely high and the cost is greatly compressed. The main cost is materials such as gold, silver and copper. Other costs are very low, especially labor, which can be almost negligible. The expensive one is the carving board, which is the set of machinery.

The profit of minting coins is very high, but it is difficult for ordinary people to imitate them. Because this is not an ordinary copper coin, you can just turn sand and mint it. Without a mold, you can't cast gold and silver coins as exquisite as the Li family. The difference is too big. It is also a precious coin such as gold and silver, so it is difficult to use.

Unlike copper coins, it is too easy to cast privately.

Now, the Li Ji Mint has minted hundreds of thousands of gold and silver coins, and a large number of gold and silver coins have begun to flow out through the money shop and the pawn shop.

Just by minting coins and circulating, the Li family made a lot of money. Li Chao had calculated a lot of money early, and through minting coins and circulating, he could make five percent of the profits for every gold and silver coin minting and circulating.

Collecting gold and silver from the market, then processing and minting coins, and then circulating them out is simply the easiest and most profitable business. For every twenty coins minted, Li Chao earns one.

One hundred thousand pieces, he earns five thousand pieces.

This should have been a national seigniorage tax, but private minting has always been rampant among the people because of the huge profits. The court also had a severe blow to private minting, but Zhang Chao cast gold and silver coins, which is equivalent to a gold and silver product, so it can be regarded as a staggering ball.

However, the profit of minting gold and silver coins is greater than that of privately minting copper coins or destroying copper coins to cast copperware.

Those bold guys, regardless of the ban, destroyed copper coins and cast copperware. They sold 1,000 coins and earned six kilograms of copper, and made 1,000 coins. They could earn more than three,000 coins if they melted copper coins.

As for directly casting thin copper coins and white copper coins with a lot of lead, the profit is also extremely high.

However, both of these behaviors are quite dangerous, and the court is ruthless in attacking them.

But they are not as profitable as Li Chao's gold and silver coins. As long as they can't steal the steel mold of Li Chao, they can't mint the same coins. Not to mention that they want to imitate gold and silver coins by relying on the traditional coin minting method, the efficiency is that there is no money to make.

If Zhang Chao dedicated this hydraulic stamped coins to the court and the court used this method to mint coins, the cost of minting would never remain high, and even the coin would be costly. Moreover, using this method of minting, it would be more difficult to imitate and even reduce the composition of copper.

In the past, the most important reason for the failure of those coins that were minted by one as five as ten was that the coins were minus 5 as ten, was that the main reason was that the coins forced to increase the value of the currency, but they did not have the anti-counterfeiting function, and others were too likely to imitate them. Some dynasties even directly cast iron coins instead of copper coins, which was as stupid as Zhu Yuanzhang of later generations printed a large amount of treasure money.

However, if Li Chao's method is used to ensure the exquisiteness and anti-counterfeiting ability of copper coins, then even if the copper content is reduced, it will be difficult for ordinary people to forge private casting, because die-cast coins and sand-cast coins are not products of the same era at all.

Cost and currency phase are greatly increasing the difficulty of anti-counterfeiting.

It is very profitable to mint gold and silver coins, but Li Chao did not plan to make it for long. He first made a few money and then turned back to the court. He wanted to control this technology for a long time, and it was too dangerous to control the huge profits.

In fact, if you don’t cast gold and silver coins, it is also very profitable to have a money house. If you play money, you can make money by making money and borrow chickens to lay eggs. Use other people’s money to earn interest for yourself.

In the afternoon, Li Chao went to Qin Qiong's mansion to pay New Year's greetings.

As soon as I entered the mansion, I found that Qin Qiong's face was not very good.

"Yang Wengan rebelled!"

"Didn't Yu Wenying go and declare Yang Wen to do it?"

"Yang Wengan rebelled after Yu Wenying arrived in Qingzhou. It is not known whether Yu Wenying deliberately revealed the news or accidentally leaked the news. In short, Yang Wengan already knew that the prince was under house arrest and had already rebelled."

"This is a good thing!" Li Chao thought about it and felt that it would be better if Yang Wen did not rebel. If he rebels, wouldn't he be 300 taels of silver? He became more and more confident that the prince had been planning to rebel with him before?

"After Yang Wengan raised his army, he did not go south, but directly led Liang Shidu to Qingzhou to go north."

"That's nothing. Master Liang can still stand up in Shuofang. If he dares to go south, he is seeking death."

"But when the news came back, Li Yi's subordinates in Liangzhou were also preparing to make trouble, and the Turks also had abnormal movements."

Of course, a general like Qin Shubao would not be afraid of Yang Wengan. Even if Liang Shidu was added, it was not worth mentioning. But if the Turks wanted to take the opportunity to cause trouble, it would be different again.

"Turkish Jie Li Khan claimed to stand up for the prince, Shen Zhang was righteous, uphold justice for him, and lead troops south to ask clearly."

"What was the reaction of the court?"

"I heard that the prime ministers were quarreling. Some people thought that envoys should be sent to explain to the Turks, while others proposed to send troops to destroy Yang Wengan and Liang Shidu directly. If the Turks dared to come south, they would fight with them."

"What about your majesty's intention?"

"Your Majesty has not made any statement yet!"
Chapter completed!