Yu's ANALYSIS OF CURRENCY 893
cials to commoners, merchants, innkeepers, and monks would be allowed to keep
more than 5,000 strings of cash. Any commoner who had accumulated a sur-
plus in cash was encouraged to buy goods on the market as a means of reduc-
ing their total liquid holdings, but if they violated the 5,ooo-string limit after
the deadline, they would be executed. Officials guilty of the same crime would
be exempted from execution, but they would suffer a demotion in rank.^26
In the capitalist world of the I 980s piling up a vast fortune was seen by many
as one of the happy consequences of free enterprise, and the rise of real estate
values in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Seoul as an understandable though
regrettable consequence of too much money chasing after limited resources. To
my knowledge no one was executed for accumulating a high bank account or
bidding too much for a piece of property, but in the moralistic world of the late
T'ang, wealth was still a sign of the ill-gotten gains of the manipulator, the spec-
ulator, and the cheat. It was not surprising that Hsien-tsung preferred coercion
and the death penalty to rectify a cash shortage rather than simply minting more
cash or ordering government treasuries and bureaus to spend more cash in the
market to drive prices down, especially since Tu Yu and others had already argued
that intervention in ever-normal manipulation of goods and cash was one of the
major duties of a responsible ruler.
Emperor Hsien-tsung was simply incapable of either separating market
actions from moral implications or tinkering with the market mechanism -as
Kuan-chung and Liu Chih had suggested - to remedy any imbalance by vary-
ing the supply of either metallic copper or cash. But why did Yu Hyongwon choose
to include this tale in his coverage of the history of currency in China? Proba-
bly because Yu admired a display of moral fortitude by the ruler of an empire
in the face of what he, too, must have agreed was an illustration of the capac-
ity of avarice to destroy proper balance in the distribution of wealth and com-
mercial activities.
Government Restraint on Cash Possession: Ma Tuan-/in and Limits on Cash.
Emperor Hsien-tsung's attempt to force imperfect human beings into compli-
ance with rational and moderate economic behavior, particularly by setting an
upper limit on the private possession of cash, called into question the role of
ruler and state as economic guide and overseer. Ma Tuan-lin, compiler of the
Wen-hsien t'ung-k (10 in the early thirteenth century in the Southern Sung
dynasty, had a more reasonable solution to the problem of avaricious private
accumulation.
Ma's approach differed from Emperor Hsien-tsung because he brought a sense
of historical perspective to the problem. He was aware that the ruler felt a respon-
sibility to control and regulate the economy, but the historical situation deter-
mined the kinds of methods he should use. He believed that after the end of
the Chou dynasty and the loss of the well-field system, the emperors of sub-
sequent dynasties lost the power to control economic production and maintain
equal distribution of wealth among the people. The only means they had left