The steps of the Fengsha City Hall were packed with the masters of forty-eight town merchant guilds.
Weavers, oil-pressers, salt merchants, carpenters, cobblers, and apothecaries stood in a tense, murmuring semicircle around Elder Song and Lin Xiao. Many of the shopkeepers still wore the stained aprons of their trades, their weathered faces etched with tiredness. Even with sweet, cold water flowing freely from the Grand Market Square’s bronze fountain, their shops had remained shuttered for nearly a week.
On a wooden table in the center of the terrace lay a small, miserable heap of royal currency: brittle, greenish copper coins stamped with the seal of the Great Qian Dynasty.
“Look at this trash, Lord Lin,” spat Master Chen, a sixty-year-old apothecary whose shop had dispensed fever medicines in Fengsha for four decades. He picked up a royal copper coin and snapped it cleanly between his thumb and forefinger with a heard crack. “The royal mint in the capital has debased the metal until it’s eighty percent lead and sulfur-melted rock waste. A coin that should buy a fresh steamed bun can’t even buy a pinch of salt. The big grain hoarders and money lenders have bought up every scrap of true silver bullion, demanding three thousand of these rotten copper slugs for a single silver coin! No honest merchant can restock his shelves without losing everything.”
