Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/38

 pots, basins and other valuable objects. So attached were the Chinese to these primitive coins that the usurper Wangmang restored a shell currency of five kinds, tortoise shell being the highest. From this time we hear no more of cowries in China Proper, but they left traces of themselves in the small copper coins shaped like a small Cypraea, called Dragon's eye or Ant coins. It is doubtless to a similar survival that we owe those curious silver coins made in the shape of shells which come from the north of Burmah and of which there are several specimens in the British Museum. They are about the size of a cowrie, and doubtless served as a higher unit in a currency, of which the lower units were formed by real shells.

Burmese silver shell money.

In 685 in parts of China pearls and gems, gold, knives and cloth were the money, and under the Shou dynasty (1100 ) we understand from ancient Commentaries that the gold circulated in little cubes of a square inch, and the copper in round, tongue-like plates by the tchin tchu, while the silk cloth 2 feet 2 inches wide in rolls of 40 feet formed a piece.

In the Shu King, when in 947 commutation for punishment was enacted, the culprit according to the offence was to pay 100, 200, 500 or 1000 hwars, or rings of copper weighing 6 ounces. The Chinese likewise used hoes as money, just as we shall find the wild people of Annam doing at the present hour. But in the course of time the hoe became a true currency and little hoes, such as that here figured, were employed as coins in some parts of China (tsin, agricultural implements). The copper knives which played so important a part in the development of Chinese coinage will be dealt