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The ruins of Luoyang seemed to still bear witness to the great fire of that fateful day. The abandoned villages and hamlets surrounding the city were like hollow husks drained of all vitality, crumbling away bit by bit under the lash of wind and rain.
Fei Qian stood in silence for a long time beneath the walls of Luoyang.
An immense weight pressed upon his heart.
Why was destruction always so much easier than construction?
Ever since Liu Xiu had established the capital at Luoyang, the Great Han had not ceased its work of building. Nearly two hundred years had passed, yet to destroy her... all it took was a single fire.
The great blaze at Luoyang had burned for ten whole days.
Black smoke blotted out the sun, visible for a hundred leagues in every direction.
Some things are like an orange. Unless you peel it open, you cannot be entirely sure whether the inside is good or rotten, sweet or sour...
The fall of Luoyang, the capital of the Great Han, was like that orange peel being torn open.
And his own hand, pushing from within, had exerted a force no smaller than that single torch of Dong Zhuo...
The vitality of a regime under a feudal system like the Han Dynasty—whether it advanced or regressed—rested, in large part, in the hands of its autocratic emperor. Whether it was Liu Che or Liu Xiu, both possessed formidable personal charisma, a clear path of thought, and the means to balance the court's political factions. Only thus could the dynasty maintain such an immensely powerful upward momentum.
But it was painfully obvious that Emperor Ling of Han had not been such a man.
And what the current ruler, Liu Xie, might grow to become... no one could yet know.
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By the time Fei Qian set foot once more in the Jing-Xiang region, it felt as though an entire age had passed.
Eight hundred cavalry, plus horses carrying supplies, made for nearly a thousand mounts in total. If he were to charge straight to the walls of Xiangyang with such a force, Liu Biao's eyes would probably bulge from their sockets. Thus, he had no choice but to first turn southward toward Miannan, territory belonging to the Huang clan.
As he traveled south, the distinct impression Fei Qian got was one of marked desolation and decline.
The Yingchuan region had once been fabulously wealthy and prosperous, but after suffering through war again and again, it had already begun to show the unmistakable signs of decay.
Perhaps many people of the Han Dynasty at this moment could not yet perceive it clearly, but for Fei Qian—a man from a later era who had been endlessly indoctrinated with concepts like CPI, GDP, and GNP—he possessed an innate advantage over these Han Dynasty folk, who were accustomed to life's slow, unhurried pace. His sensitivity to economic shifts had been forged in an age where the stock market could surge thousands of points in a single day and then plummet into the abyss the very next.
It was much like how, in that later era, numerous experts would put on a kindly face and lecture that an inflation rate of less than five percent was to be called "moderate," "benign" inflation...
To put it simply: if a certain amount of currency that originally could purchase one hundred units worth of goods can now, due to some indescribable reason, only purchase ninety-five units worth, that is five percent inflation.
Yet the way Fei Qian had utilized Dong Zhuo's mass minting of coinage in the Jingzhao region to plunder vast quantities of supplies from the rural gentry and powerful families of the Hedong region... that was a slow but relentless process. He had stripped those rural magnates of wealth that had, perhaps, been accumulated over generations—over ten generations or more—and seized it for his own use, forging the rapid expansion and prosperity of Pingyang City.
That kind of inflation had been far, far more than a mere five percent!
Those debased coins weighed a mere two zhu and were of abysmal quality. By any normal standard of conversion, they were worth at most twenty to thirty percent of the original five-zhu coins...
The predatory nature of that act was terrifying beyond measure.
And Fei Qian had not stopped there. He had continued, exploiting the desperate urgency of those very same magnates, guiding them to pass on their losses to others in turn. In doing so, he had simultaneously soothed the sentiments of these Hedong gentry and powerful families, and even, to a certain degree, forged a combined, concerted force...
Through the ceaseless comings and goings of merchant caravans, those accumulated debased coins were swiftly and cheaply circulated outwards, then, like a snowball rolling downhill, began to gradually spread into other regions.
Naturally, those most affected were always the propertied classes. As for the Han Dynasty peasants, who even in normal times could barely hold onto any wealth, the impact, for now, was still limited. From this perspective, Fei Qian's plunder at Pingyang had not yet stirred large-scale social upheaval among the common people of regions like Ji Province, Yu Province, or even Jing and Yang provinces. So, in a certain sense, its effects were indeed "moderate."
It was just that, for now, it had not yet deeply impacted the lives of the townsfolk. But with the passage of time, the after-effects of that inflation would manifest with increasing ferocity, until it finally dragged down and utterly shattered the entire Han economy.
And as for the gentry... apologies, but when it came to the affairs of the court, the maneuvers of armies, or the content of the classics, they were without equal, perfectly adept. But when it came to matters of economics, one might not find a single man in a hundred who truly understood.
Fei Qian estimated that the gentry, lured by the chase for profit, would subconsciously do their utmost to pass those debased coins off onto the unsuspecting. Thus, the economic poison originally confined to Jingzhao, Hedong, and Hongnong would inevitably spread throughout the entire realm at a speed far more ferocious than it had in the original course of history.
And as the good five-zhu coins were steadily driven out of circulation by the flood of debased currency, they would inevitably retreat from the monetary system of commodity exchange. The collapse of this coinage system would, in turn, trigger a new wave of bankruptcies among independent smallholding farmers. And the greed of the gentry class all but guaranteed that, rather than extending a helping hand to the peasants in their time of need, they would only intensify their efforts to seize more land.
Then, the conflicts among the various regional warlords would accelerate the depletion of the hoarded supplies of the rural gentry and powerful families. War would bring a decline in population and fields left barren. Coupled with droughts, snowstorms, and even outbreaks of plague, these forces would swiftly shatter what remained of the already desperately fragile Han economy...
In this way, just like the burning of Luoyang, the other great economic symbol of the Han Dynasty—the five-zhu coin—would finally withdraw from the stage of history...
One fire had burned Luoyang. The other fire would burn the five-zhu coin.
That second fire had also been ignited by Dong Zhuo. But the one who supplied the fuel and stoked the flames... was Fei Qian.
It was simply that the first fire had consumed mostly the common people, while the second fire consumed the rural magnates and powerful families...
Fei Qian slowed the pace of his march. Huang Xu, acting as an advance messenger, had already ridden ahead with a dozen soldiers to deliver word to the Huang family's secluded estate. Traveling at a leisurely pace served two purposes: it allowed the horses, after their long, punishing gallop, a chance to rest, and it was also less likely to incite panic among the common folk living along the official road.
It was a rather interesting phenomenon. The same troops, wearing the exact same gear and uniforms—whether they came charging at full gallop or approached at a slow walk, this difference in speed alone produced two utterly different emotional responses in the common people...
Yet in truth, any soldier, from the very day a military unit is formed, exists for the purpose of killing. Just as politics, from the very moment of its emergence, is born for the acquisition of profit.
Still, when Fei Qian led his troops forward slowly like this, occasionally offering a smile and nodding to the people gathered by the roadside, without giving any orders to level spears or draw blades, the majority of those common folk would simply stand there, blank and dazed, staring dumbly.
But deep in his heart, Fei Qian knew: a great many of those blankly staring, dumbfounded common folk would, in the tumultuous conflicts soon to come, meet their deaths...
Whenever inflation occurs, those who suffer the damage are neither the propertyless, nor the ultra-wealthy.
For the wealthy can invest both domestically and abroad, and may even seize even greater profits than before the inflation began...
Those who fall bleeding beneath the blade are the wage-earning poor wretches like the author—the small proprietors, the middle class—who, because of inflation, simply grow poorer with each passing day...