China and the Far East
The Origins of Money and Development of Coins
The earliest record of Far Eastern money is found in the Guanzi, or Book of
Master Guan, attributed to a Chinese minister who died in 645 BC, although it
was compiled over six centuries later (c. 26 BC):
The early kings put a value on things from the farthest distance that were
difficult to find. They saw pearls and jade as superior money, gold as
medium money, and spades and knives as inferior money. You cannot wear
money but you can be warm; you cannot eat money, but you can fill your
belly. The early kings amassed stores of wealth with which they ruled the
people, thereby bringing peace to the world.
Rare natural products, grain, cloth, animals, ornaments and metals were
exchanged from the earliest times. Certain items, such as cowrie shells, were
regarded as symbols of wealth, and Chinese inscriptions from about the
thirteenth century BC refer to cowrie shells as treasures being used as gifts.
But the first pieces that can be called 'coins' and were used as a means of payment are
the bronze spade and knife money, issued in the late seventh or early sixth
century BC by the Zhou kings. They are approximately contemporary with the first
coins in the West. They were modeled on agricultural tools, but made to a much
smaller size, of thinner metal and with an inscription indicating a clan-name,
place-name or weight. Within three hundred years all the states in China were issuing
spade coins, except for Chu in the south which issued bronze money in the form
of cowrie shells, and Qi in the east which issued bronze money in the form of
knives. In the third century BC Qin shi huangdi unified the Warring States, and
made the existing Qin currency the standard throughout the new Qin empire.
This was a round coin with a square hole and a two-character inscription, banliang
(literally 'half-ounce' in weight).
The banliang survived, albeit in coinages of varying weights, until 118 BC
when a new and historically important coin type was introduced by the Han
emperor Wudi. The Han coin, with the inscription wuzhu (literally 'five-grain' in
weight), was used widely in the interior of China, and followed imperial
expansion far off to the border regions. The wuzhu continued to be the major coin
type after the demise of the Han dynasty, when the empire fragmented into a
number of smaller states (AD 220), some of which continued to issue coins. Only
when the empire was unified once more at the end of the sixth century did the
Tang emperor Gaozu declare the wuzhu obsolete, replacing it in AD 621 with
a new coin design, the Kaiyuan tongbao.
The new coin was still round with a square hole, but where there had
formerly been an inscription indicating the weight, usually in two characters, there
was now a four-character inscription indicating the period of issue and
designating the coin as money. Thus, the new inscription reads from top to bottom
and from right to left around the hole: Kai yuan (literally 'the new beginning')
tong bao (literally 'circulating treasure').
The form of the Far Eastern 'cash', as these coins are known, thus persisted
for two thousand years. Although the Chinese knew of Western coins made
of precious metal and with pictorial images on them -Byzantine gold solidi
and Sasanian silver drachms have been found in China -such coins have been
discovered mostly in tombs or in the western regions. In ancient China,
before the appearance of coins, bronze was regarded as a precious metal and
was particularly used for making highly elaborate ritual vessels for ancestral
worship on the part of kings and dukes. The choice of bronze as the
appropriate material from which to make coinage may have cultural associations,
however ancient, with the religious and social prestige of these early bronze
vessels. Though made from a precious and highly regarded metal, coins had
to be mass-produced and the manufacturing process needed to be simple in
order to supply the huge quantities required throughout the empire.
Archaeology has revealed something of the scale of coin production in ancient
China: for example, 45 kg of wuzhu coins were found at a single site in the borderlands of the north-west.
Even in later periods, when increased foreign trade brought about greater
communication with coin-using peoples of the Western tradition, the Chinese
maintained their own distinctive form of coin. The low-denomination bronze
cash coin was appropriate to its primary function: to circulate and to be used in
payment. The day-to-day business of 'stinking coppers' was generally left to
merchants who were often despised as amoral for seizing opportunities
wherever they arose, and as long as the monetary system worked, there was no need to change it.
Gold and silver were occasionally used to make coins. The first coins made in
Japan were of silver, but very soon these had to be made in less expensive
bronze. The discovery of copper in Japan in 708 was so important that the reign
name was changed to Wado (literally 'soft copper'), which appeared in the
inscription (Wado kaiho) on Japan's first copper coins. There were some issues
of Chinese gold and silver coins, but these were mainly presentation pieces for
those working at the imperial court and were not intended for circulation.
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