I am the prince of the Ming Dynasty, I don't give up

Chapter 165 Market for Industrial Products
The reason why Zhu Houxun started to take action against the salt administration of the Ming Dynasty was actually to open up a larger market for industrial products.

At first it may sound strange to link these two things together, but in fact they are deeply connected.

In fact, after Qizhou's industrial products were covered with the shell of imperial power, they did not have to worry about the problem of the industrial products market for the time being, because all the closed local markets of the Ming Dynasty opened up a part of Qizhou's industrial products when facing the imperial power. Now the main consumers of Qizhou's industrial products in the Ming Dynasty are actually landlords, gentry, citizens and other people with consumption power. The population base of the Ming Dynasty is there, and the number of this part of people is still not small. With Qizhou's industrial production capacity, it is far from enough to meet this part of the demand, and it will take a few more years to develop production capacity.

However, Zhu Houxuan had to prepare for the future, because with sufficient markets and resources, industrial production capacity would grow exponentially. In particular, Zhu Houxuan also controlled the financial institution, the Ming Royal Bank, and could use the wealth accumulated among the people to develop industry. Without the pressure of policies, resources, markets and funds, the industrial production capacity of the industries in Zhu Houxuan's hands would grow even faster, which meant that he needed more markets.

What is the market?

Zhu Houxuan believed that it was the people’s consumption demand and consumption capacity.

People in later generations always call for stimulating consumption, but consumption cannot be stimulated. It requires actually increasing people’s income. And people’s income cannot be increased by renting out idle houses or driving private cars for Didi as experts say.

Now most of the people in the Ming Dynasty have consumption needs but lack the ability to consume. Zhu Houxun cannot increase the income of the people in the Ming Dynasty, but he can reduce their unnecessary expenses.

The people of the Ming Dynasty now spend a large amount of money on salt every year. Salt is something that people must consume, so it is necessary to spend money to buy salt, but it is not necessary to spend so much money to buy salt.

The current high salt price in the Ming Dynasty is entirely caused by the salt merchants' monopoly on salt sales. Salt is not scarce in the Ming Dynasty, but they artificially create scarcity to maintain high salt prices and to better reap the wealth created by the people of the Ming Dynasty.

The people of the Ming Dynasty could only endure the high price of salt while suppressing their demand for salt.

The wealth created by the people of the Ming Dynasty every year is limited. So much of it is harvested by the salt merchants with high-priced salt. How can they have any consumption capacity?

Take a family of five as an example. Each person consumes 5 jin of salt a year. If one jin of salt is priced at 100 wen at the current relatively low price, the money spent on salt in a year is 2500 wen.

If the price of salt can be reduced to 20 coins per catty, then a family of five would only need to spend 500 coins a year on salt, and they would save 2000 coins, or 2 taels of silver. With these 2 taels of silver in hand, wouldn't they have a certain spending power? If they use these 2 taels of silver to buy industrial products produced by Zhu Houxun's industry, would there be a market for industrial products?

This is the underlying logic behind Zhu Houxun's intervention in the salt industry.

The salt merchants reaped a large amount of wealth created by the people of the Ming Dynasty every year, but their consumption capacity for industrial products was very limited, because they, their relatives, family members and servants were too small in number compared to the vast majority of the people of the Ming Dynasty, and such a small number of people could not consume many industrial products at all.

They wasted a lot of wealth on personal enjoyment without promoting social progress at all. Given the current consumption scenario in the Ming Dynasty, they could not spend all of their wealth and it was just deposited in the cellar. This was something Zhu Houxuan could not tolerate.

But this was not the only reason why Zhu Houxun wanted to get involved in the salt business.

In addition to being eaten, salt is also an important industrial raw material. The amount of salt consumed by Chinese people in later generations only accounts for a few percent of China's national salt production, and the rest of the salt is consumed as industrial raw materials. Therefore, maintaining a low salt price is of great significance to the development of related industries in the future.

In addition, salt was essentially a poll tax in ancient times, because everyone could not live without salt. Everyone had to eat salt, and everyone's salt intake was relatively stable. Even the rich did not consume much more salt than ordinary people every year.

Therefore, if we have the data on the production and sales of salt, we can make a rough survey of the population of the Ming Dynasty. This data can be made more detailed, down to each province, each prefecture, and each county.
The importance of such population data is self-evident. With this data, Zhu Houxuan would know roughly how many hidden households there were in each place. It was also of great significance to Zhu Houxuan's future economic policy formulation and industrial layout. Therefore, Zhu Houxuan wanted to intervene in the salt administration, and his appetite could not be satisfied by the Changlu Salt Field alone.

Even though this data is relatively rough and contains many interference factors, it is still more accurate than the population statistics of the Ming Dynasty's current administrative system.

The population numbers counted by the Ming Dynasty's administrative system are simply a joke.

根据《明实录》记载，洪武十四年（1381年）人口总数是5987万，成化十五年（1479年）为7185万，弘治十七年（1504年）是6015万，正德元年（1506年）为4680万，万历六年（1578年）是6069万，万历三十年（1602年）是5635万，天启六年（1626年）人口总数是5165万。

The population in "Ming Shilu" is like a roller coaster, sometimes high and sometimes low, and this data is an insult to people's IQ.

You have to know that except for the last twenty or thirty years of the Ming Dynasty, there is no record of huge losses in the core population areas of the Ming Dynasty. Overall, the living environment is still relatively peaceful. In such an environment, the population should continue to increase, or at least should remain the same.

What can we learn from the salt data?

Taking the Song Dynasty as an example, the official population of the Northern Song Dynasty was around 6000 million, and the total annual salt production was around 3 million jin, which meant that each person needed 5 jin of salt per year.

The official population of the Ming Dynasty was around 6000 million, and the annual output of Guangzheng salt was 6 million jin.

The price of salt in the Ming Dynasty was much higher than that in the Song Dynasty, which means that the amount of salt needed by the people of the Ming Dynasty every year could not be higher than that of the people of the Song Dynasty.

If each citizen of the Ming Dynasty needs 5 kilograms of salt every year, then the current population of the Ming Dynasty should be around 1.2 million. And this only counts the regular salt, and also the production of surplus salt. If the production of surplus salt is included, the population of the Ming Dynasty will be even greater.

In fact, the salt intake of ancient people was still very low. Modern people consume an average of 10 kilograms of salt per person per year.

It was precisely because of these reasons that Zhu Houxuan decided to intervene in the salt administration.

(End of this chapter)