Even though thirty thousand people in the Central Market had cheered for Pei Xuan’s speech, asking ordinary folks to trade heavy metal coins for thin pieces of paper was still a huge leap.
By three o’clock that afternoon, outside the newly built Ward 1 Grain-Note Exchange Hall, a crowd of two thousand older villagers and cautious river merchants stood on the sidewalk whispering to each other, clutching their cloth pouches of old copper coins tight against their chests.
“I trust Lord Pei with my life,” Granny Zhao muttered, rubbing a string of rusty copper coins between her wrinkled thumbs. “He cured our swamp cough with free mung-bean soda and gave my grandson a brick house. But paper is still paper! What if I trade my five hundred copper coins for five pieces of paper today, and tomorrow the clerk at the granary says he’s on a tea break and won’t give me rice?”
“She’s right,” agreed a skeptical timber merchant from across the Silver River, stroking his goatee. “In Golden-Crow Capital ten years ago, the old King printed ‘Royal Salt Tickets.’ The first week, you could trade them for salt. The second week, the royal clerks demanded a fifty-percent bribe just to open the warehouse door! By the third week, you couldn’t even use those tickets to wipe your backside!”
