During Ming, tea was a form of currency also used to pay imperials tribute. Ming Dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang (also known as the Hongwu emperor) was born to a poor family and understood the difficulties of the lives of farmers. He abolished the compressed tea brick style and replaced it with the whole, loose-leaf tea style, and also declared people instead pay tribute with tea buds. This amendment especially helped relieve tea farmers of some of the pressures of the laborious and complicated tea production processes. These complex processes for farmers included: steaming tea leaves, breaking them down into fine remnants, mixing the powder with plum juice, then baking them with molds to shape into tea bricks.