The term "balance of payments" comes from an Eastern tradition where the sultan, once a year, would demand from the people who lived in the district which his army protected, payment of taxes in the amount of his own weight, such that the sultan would sit in a very large scale on one side, and demand that laborers, merchants, and peasants come forth and place on the other side of the scale rare gems, silver, and gold, in his own weight. Hence the term, "balance of payments."
And so, throughout the year, the sultans tried to gain as much weight as they possibly could. And there was a great pretax payment feast, in which the sultan would consume temendous quantities of very fattening foods: sweet meats, lots of pasta, lardy cakes, as well as enourmous jugs of spiced wine, all of which would cause the king to expand into an enourmously obese individual, such that his tax levy would be increased.
At the balance of payment ceremonies, the emporers were stripped naked. But some of them used the old prisoner's trick of rectal insertion, of, for example, metals of extremely high density. Hence the expression of the populace when they felt they were being cheated, "get the lead out." Others, in addition to endless eating, swallowed tremendous quantities of liquid just before the weighing.
This tradition continued for almost thirteen hundred years in the Kingdom of Hansao, until the great catastrophe of 1675, in whcih the entire country was destoyed. The emporer, at that time, was king Hofu, whose self indulgent gluttony, and enourmous weight, caused such a crushing tax burden on the country that the people, economically ruined, had been reduced to lives of utter squalor, working days and nights in the mines to produce enough precious stones and metals to meet the next year's tax levy.
The king's girth was enourmous. He'd been fed like a sumo wreslter for a decade. And as his body grew, his appetite grew. He was so enourmously fat that when he would bathe in the great river, the flooding waters would sweep away entire villages, and rise to unprecedented levels in the capital. And when he stepped out of the river, a great sucking vortex of inward flowing waves would not only carry hapless peasants and townspeople and domestic animals to their deaths; it would cause drought in outlying areas, raise enourmous hot winds that would fan forest fires, and avalanches would result from the geological displacement of river beds.
The king's obesity prevented him from being moved, except by devices that were adaptations of medieval siege engines. To make matters worse, a few weeks before the balance of payments ceremony, the king began to suffer from constipation. And it was with growing horror that the citizenry realized that without relieving himself, that his weight would multiply at an even faster rate.
Occasionally, a gaseous discharge burst forth. A great cloud of noxious material rose forth heavenward, and birds in the thousands fell from the sky, littering the streets of the kingdom with their carcasses. Then, on the day of the weighing, there was a great rumbling sound. At first, the royal cosmologists thought that it was an earthquake. But before anyone could do anything but stand in horror and fear, the emporer began to split. First a crack in the seam beteween his legs occurred, and then, as a fissure raced upward, a trremendous boiling dark ocean of noxious and corrosive liquid burst out of the exploding emporer, causing the castle itself to expand, and then blow up. The only other explosion in history that rivals this is the eruption of Krakatoa in Java at the turn of the century.
And these highly corrosive and powerfully enzymed digestive fluids covered about two thirds of the kingdom, and most of the citizens were digesterd and dissolved by the fluids that were cast off from the emporer's body. In fact, it was the largest case of external digestion in the history of nutrition.
The people were reduced to liquid nutrients which, when flowing into the soil, produced the great Asian ricebowl. The great Asian breadbasket. Which, to this day, is the most fertile and fecund on earth.