🧐📚 "More than fifty years have passed since the founding of the Qing dynasty, and the empire grows poorer each day. Farmers, artisans, merchants and officials are destitute. Grain is cheap, yet it is hard to eat one's fill. Cloth is cheap, yet it is hard to cover one's skin. Boatloads of goods travel from one marketplace to another, but the cargoes must be sold at a loss. Officials upon leaving their posts discover they have no wherewithal to support their households. Now, silver and coin are the vehicles by which goods are circulated and surpluses and deficits balanced. But a family of average means may go ten days without seeing a tael of silver or a string of cash. With no money to facilitate the circulation of goods, farmers suffer cold and hunger, the hundred trades find no customers, and a year of bountiful harvest is no better than a year of dearth." "...in recent times, the supply of silver has progressively decreased, and no longer suffices to meet contemporary needs...because silver is scarce, sellers of grain, meat, and cloth no longer can earn a livelihood." -1600s, China