"Fifty horses are easy to get one, and you can get Malay no more days."
Poet Bai Juyi in the poem "Yinshan Road" tells the story of the silk horse exchange transaction between Uighur and Tang Dynasty , which shows that silk does play the role of coins.
At that time, horses, slaves, etc. had clear "pricing" with silk, and The Tang Dynasty circulation field implemented a policy of both money and silk.
" Shuowen Jiezi " annotation on "currency" is: goods, money, money, silk.
The former focuses on value storage, while the latter tends to value circulation. The rules of making characters in ancient Chinese indirectly reveal that silk fabrics have the attributes of mediums for object exchange.
In China, silk as a currency used for goods exchange was earlier than metal currency . The earliest metal currency was copper shell in the late Shang Dynasty , but its real general use was in the middle of the Warring States Period.
So for a longer period of time, silk is not only used to purchase goods, but also the currency itself used to purchase materials, and can be circulated directly in the market.
Archaeologists have discovered gold coins of Rome and Byzantine on the eastern end of " Silk Road " (now in China), but in the West, copper coins and silver used in ancient China were rarely found, which indirectly confirmed the monetary function of silk.
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