Because land is immovable, farmers can only cultivate in a fixed location, while money is mobile. Merchants often carry money from one country to another to make a profit.
Therefore, in order to prevent the loss of population, the emperor deliberately demeaned merchants.
As a result, many scholars began to use public opinion to demean merchants in order to show their own noble status in society.
Merchants were accused of not engaging in production, of engaging in speculative and underhanded practices, of being immoral and greedy, and of representing greed and desire...
With such an argument spread, in a society where benevolence and kindness were the moral norms, merchants naturally ranked last, even if they were wealthy, they were no match for a poor "literary family".
Of course, in this society, scholars represented "money", "power" and "wealth"; there were many literary families, and not many of them were poor.
