Finance, Taxation and Government Behavior

There are two Chinese television series that I like very much, one is Ming Dynasty in 1566 and, the other, Towards the Republic. These two shows have something in common, during the first episode of each series, some of the most famous characters in Chinese history are displayed, not in a state of impassioned ecstasy or insidious plotting, rather they are doing the most mundane thing in the world—accounting. The imperial chancellors of the Ming Dynasty in 1566 were calculating the debts of the treasury and making a budget for the new year.