At first, humans had no money, and they exchanged things for things. Later, people used shells as currency to complete transactions. However, because early Chinese people lived inland, shells were not easy to obtain. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Peri

At first, humans did not have money, they exchanged goods for goods. Later, people used shells as currency to complete transactions. However, because early Chinese people lived inland, shells were not easy to obtain. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, with the increase of productivity, people began to cast metal currency . Qin Shihuang After unifying China, the circular square hole copper coins was used from Qin Dynasty until the early years of the Republic of China. In addition to copper coins, the ancients also used paper money and silver as circulating currencies. By the Ming and Qing dynasties, silver replaced paper money and became the main circulating currency. However, after the demise of , a large amount of silver disappeared. Why is this?

The history of silver as circulating currency

Before Song Dynasty , silver was basically not circulated on the market as a currency. The amount of silver used in the Song Dynasty was also very small. Silver became the main circulating currency from Ming Dynasty , because before the Ming Dynasty, the amount of silver in my country was very small. During the Ming Dynasty, a new maritime route was opened, and a large amount of silver flowed into China from the Americas. It is estimated that in the late Ming Dynasty, the amount of silver inflowed overseas was 10 times that of domestic silver, which made silver qualified to become the main currency in circulation.

During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, silver was the main circulating currency on the market. In the early Ming Dynasty, the government also banned silver and required the use of paper money and copper coins, but paper money depreciated too quickly, and the purchasing power of copper coins was far lower than that of silver. With the rapid development of social economy, commodity transactions require the use of a large amount of currency for payment, especially bulk transactions are more suitable for settlement with silver. Therefore, the government had to lift the ban on silver and encourage commodity transactions to be paid with silver. Therefore, the monetary policy of "silver as the main and copper coins as the auxiliary" in the Ming Dynasty continued until the Qing Dynasty.

The currency value of ancient silver

In ancient times, how much is one tael of silver equivalent to now? If measured simply by the price of silver, based on the price of 3.5 yuan per gram of sterling silver today, one tael of silver in the Ming and Qing dynasties is equivalent to 130 yuan today. However, this way of simply considering the price of silver cannot reflect the value of ancient silver, but should be measured by purchasing power.

During the Song Dynasty, one tael of silver was 1,000 cents, and the price of rice was 6,700 cents per stone, and one stone was about 118.4 jin. According to the current 3-4 yuan of 1 jin of rice, one stone was about 450 yuan now. Therefore, one tael of silver in the Song Dynasty was equivalent to seven or eight hundred yuan today. During the Ming Dynasty, , half taels of silver and one stone of rice were about 145 kilograms of rice. You can buy two stones of rice for one tael of silver. According to 145 kilograms of rice today, more than 500 yuan for the Ming Dynasty, one tael of silver is equivalent to more than 1,000 yuan today. During the Qing Dynasty, the price of one stone of rice was between 1.5 and 2 taels of silver, and one stone of rice was about 145 kilograms. So one tael of silver in the Qing Dynasty was about 350 yuan today.

It is not a very scientific approach to use commodities to measure the value of ancient silver. Because the economic level in ancient times is very different from today, this calculation method can only be used as a reference.

Ancient silver payment methods

Silver ingots commonly known as Yuanbao. Before the Song Dynasty, if you went to a restaurant for dinner, you could not use silver ingots to settle the bill, because silver ingots were not a legal payment currency and the store did not collect it.

silver ingots were used as currency only in the Song Dynasty, and generally have two specifications: ten taels and fifty taels. Ten taels of silver ingots are equivalent to seven or eight thousand yuan today, and fifty taels of silver ingots are equivalent to four thousand yuan today. Therefore, small-value transactions like meal checkout generally do not use silver ingots because the "face value" of silver ingots is too large. Silver ingots are mainly used for storage of wealth and payment of bulk transactions.

Ordinary people generally use broken silver to pay for it. The weight of broken silver is not standard, both big and small. Therefore, in order to facilitate payment, the ancients usually carried scissors and slap ( slap is a small scale with extremely high accuracy, which can be accurate to centimeters). When paying, you need to use a scissor to cut out an appropriate amount of broken silver, weigh it with a powder and then pay. Another function of cutting silver is to verify the purity of the silver, to see if lead is inserted, and if there is adulteration.Some people will store the fallen scrambled in a bag, accumulate the small amount into a large amount, accumulate it to a certain amount, and then make it into silver again.

In the late Qing Dynasty, silver was lost in large quantities

During the Qing Dynasty, silver officially entered the market as a circulating currency, and taxes in various places were also settled and paid to the treasury every year. However, since the Daoguang period of the Qing Dynasty, Western capitalist countries have been constantly invading China, and the corrupt Qing government has signed a large number of unequal treaties, which in addition to ceding the country, has to pay huge compensation. 1842, the Qing government signed the " Nanjing Treaty " with the United Kingdom, and compensated the UK with 121 million taels of silver. In 1860, the Qing government signed the "HTM1 Treaty of Beijing " with Britain, France and Russia, with compensation of 16 million taels of silver. In 1895, the Qing government and Japan signed the "HTM1 Treaty of Shimonoseki " and compensated 270 million taels of silver. In 1901, the Qing government signed the "HTM1 Xin Chou Treaty" with eleven Western countries including the Eight-Nation Alliance, with a total of 982 million taels of silver. According to statistics, in the entire modern history, the total compensation of these unequal treaties signed by the Qing government reached 1.3 billion taels, causing a large outflow of silver in our country.