Zhang Cang, the Prime Minister of the Han Dynasty

Zhang Cang was born in 256 BC. He was an outstanding politician and almanacist in the early Western Han Dynasty. He was proficient in legal and calculus science. He studied under Xunzi, a Confucian master at the end of the Warring States Period, and studied in the same school as Han Feizi, a representative figure of Legalism, and Li Si, the prime minister of Qin. After the establishment of the Han Dynasty, Zhang Cang successively served as the Prime Minister and Chief Accountant, and was in charge of the audit of national financial revenue and expenditure. Relying on the clerical and archival experience accumulated during the reign of Emperor Zhuxia of the Qin Dynasty, and with his excellent arithmetic skills, he pioneered the establishment of the audit system of the Han Dynasty: formulating the accounting law, establishing legal norms for counties and counties to prepare and submit accounting reports level by level every year, and incorporating audit supervision into the legal system to strengthen financial supervision and official evaluation. At the same time, he deleted and added nine chapters on arithmetic to provide solid arithmetic tools for audit practice. Zhang Cang consolidated the financial foundation of the Han Dynasty with his professional academic system, and can be called the well-deserved founder of the audit system in the early Han Dynasty. This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.