The men sent to seize Hu Xue Yan's fortune found an empty house. Two years earlier, he had bankrolled imperial China and cornered a global market.

He started by sweeping the floor of a small bank in Hangzhou. An orphan with no name to trade on and one talent: he could count. He died the most powerful private banker in China — and then he died broke. In between, he built a network of nine banks, financed the official Wang You Ling and then the general Tso Tsung Tang's campaigns in the west, and channeled millions in foreign silver loans through his own vaults before the government ever saw a coin. The access bought him rank no merchant had ever held. Then, at the height of it, he reached for one last prize: control of a global commodity market. His agents bought up nearly an entire year's supply, cornering the market against the foreign trading houses of Shanghai — until, by one account, his rivals couldn't buy an ounce. For one season it held. Then the corner cracked, and the richest man in China was left holding a fortune no one would buy. This is the anatomy of the largest private bank collapse in 19th-century China — built on credit, trust, and silver, and undone in a single autumn. The Silk Ledger audits the record — because the money usually tells a story the textbooks leave out.

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CHAPTERS

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0:00 — The Empty House

0:41 — From Orphan to Banker

3:17 — Buying a Province

4:12 — The Richest Man in China

4:59 — The Empire's Banker

7:01 — The Spread

7:46 — The Minister

8:38 — The Corner

10:05 — The Crack

12:14 — The Run

13:38 — The Same Trap

#EconomicHistory #ChineseHistory #QingDynasty

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