Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/187

 contain, but such is the wide difference between different districts or provinces, that the same nominal measures are often twice, nay three times as large in one as in another. For the hamat or larger measure perhaps about eight hundred pounds avoirdupois might be considered a fair average for the different provinces of Java. This may convey some loose notion of the quantities intended to be represented. For dry and liquid measures they may naturally have recourse to the shell of the cocoanut and the joint of the bamboo which are constantly at hand. The first called by the Malays chupa is estimated to be two and a half pounds avoirdupois. The second is called by some tribes kulch and is equal to a gallon, but the most common bamboo measure is the gantung, which is twice this amount. To those exact and business-like dealers, the Chinese, and in a less degree to the Arabs and people of the east coast of the Indian Peninsula, the Indian islanders are chiefly indebted for any precision we find in their weights. In all the traffic carried on between the commercial tribes and foreigners, the Chinese weights, though occasionally under native names, are constantly referred to. The lowest of these, called sometimes by the native name of Bungkal, but more frequently by the Chinese name of Tahil [tael], varies from twenty-four pennyweights nine grains to thirty pennyweights and twenty grains. Ten of these make a kati [catty] or about twenty ounces avoirdupois; one hundred katis make a pikul or 133-1/3 lbs. avoirdupois, and thirty piculs make one koyan. Of these the kati and the pikul, because they are constantly referred to in considerable mercantile dealings, are the only well-defined weights. The koyan by some is reckoned at twenty pikuls, by others at twenty-seven, twenty-eight and even at forty. The Dutch are fond of equalizing it with their own standards and consider it as equal to a last or two tons.

"The Bahara, an Arabic weight, is occasionally used in the weighing of pepper, but its amount is very indefinite, for in some of the countries of the Archipelago it amounts to 396 lbs., and in others to 560 lbs."

Elsewhere he says, "The picul is strictly a Chinese weight