Qianlong's Money Bag (Instructions on Political and Business Relations)

If you understand the fate of businessmen in the Qianlong era, you will understand the political and business game of two thousand years in ancient China! Taking the salt industry of the Qianlong Dynasty as the starting point, this book shows the complex interactions between salt merchants and the Qianlong Emperor around the interests of the salt industry. It is a political and business account of the emperor and the merchants: —Salt merchants curry favor with the imperial power by continuously delivering money to Emperor Qianlong, and for a time became the emperor's "money bag"; —Qianlong kept the salt industry firmly in the hands of the royal family through layers of control and occasional knocks. Salt merchants could only survive carefully caught in the gap between the market and power. Their ups and downs also reflected the political, business, and social landscape of the prosperous era of Qianlong. This is not only a history of the rise and fall of salt merchants in the Qianlong Dynasty, but also a two-thousand-year history of political and business games that understands how power controlled capital in the imperial era and how capital affected politics and society. It provides a unique perspective for understanding the political and economic operations of the Qing Dynasty and even traditional Chinese society.