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The E-Sylum: Volume 21, Number 7, February 18, 2018, Article 6

CHINESE GUIDES FOR IDENTIFYING SILVER DOLLARS

Helen Wang of the British Museum publishes the Chinese Money Matters blog. A recent post describes merchant manuals used to identify Mexican silver dollars and other foreign coins in circulation in China. Here's a short excerpt - seethe complete article for much more. -Editor

1800 Silver Treatise Mexican silver dollars, and other silver coins, were known and used in China in the Qing dynasty. They were often cut or stamped in China, and there are numerous examples of cut and chop-marked dollars – there are examples in the British Museum Collection, and many more have been published in Chopmark News (there are copies of this journal online and print copies of later issues in the library of the Dept of Coins and Medals at the British Museum). For a good introduction, with wonderful illustrations, see Joe Cribb’s Money in the Bank: The Hongkong Bank’s Money Collection (published by Spink for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, 1987). For further detail, see Richard von Glahn’s article “Foreign Silver Coins in the Market Culture of Nineteenth Century China”, International Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 4, issue 1 (Jan 2007), pp. 51-78.

Abstract of von Glahn’s article: ‘Both the physical qualities of different types of money and the cultural values assigned to them contributed to the determination of their economic value. China began to import substantial quantities of silver coins from Europe as early as the sixteenth century, but it was around 1800 that a foreign coin, the so-called “Carolus peso” issued by the Spanish kings Carlos III and Carlos IV, became the basis of a new monetary standard in China, the yuan. In the nineteenth century the Carolus peso and imitations of it (mostly manufactured in China) served as the principal means of exchange, and the yuan as the standard unit of account, in the markets of South China. This paper analyzes the monetary conditions that led to the establishment of the 1836 Silver Treatise, illustrated guide, Carolus peso as the monetary standard of South China with particular consideration of the distinctive “currency circuits” formed by regional variations in monetary circulation. Significant differences can be seen in the monetary regimes that prevailed in Jiangnan and Guangdong, the major commercial centers of the empire. While Guangdong reverted to a commodity money standard that allowed the use of a wide range of different types of physical monies, including “chopped” and broken foreign coins, in Jiangnan the Carolus peso became a unified, fiduciary monetary standard. This regional variation attests to the distinctive regional characteristics of market culture in late imperial China.’

Finds of Mexican silver dollars are reported in Chinese numismatic journals, and sometimes make a splash in the local press: see, for example, the hoard of hundreds of silver dollars found in Longhai Village (Fujian province), in 2011, which Gary Ashenkazy highlighted on his blog Primaltrek.

To read the complete article, see:
CHINESE GUIDES FOR IDENTIFYING SILVER DOLLARS AND OTHER COINS, 19TH CENTURY (https://chinesemoneymatters.wordpress.com/2018/02/16/41-chinese-guides-for-identifying-silver-dollars-and-other-coins-19th-century/)

Fred Weinberg ad02


Wayne Homren, Editor

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