The Guanzi later goes on to explain that these same rulers instituted the custom of retaining 30 percent of the harvest in public granaries for redistribution in emergencies, so as to ensure that no one would ever be reduced to such desperate straits again. In other words, they began to set up just the kind of bureaucratic storage facilities that, in places like Egypt and Mesopotamia, had been responsible for creating money as a unit of account to begin with.
