Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/297

 on the ground at opposite ends of this trough and pushed the coins back and forth with their bare feet. This was the final polish. The only thing left to do was to string the wretched things on rough straw rope or string, making a knot between every hundred pieces. When finished, the strings looked not unlike festoons of link sausages, though perhaps a trifle less digestible. In four-fifths of the country this is still the only currency that is accepted. One wonders how any large transactions can be carried on with such extremely awkward money. A horse-load of it would not come to more than fifteen dollars in gold. I have estimated roughly that the mere transfer of money costs on an average one-tenth of one per cent of every monetary transaction.

There is no such thing as a genuine bank in Korea, and yet the people have certain expedients by which they avoid in part the transportation of actual cash from one part of the land to another. There are certain large firms or guilds in Seoul whose notes of hand are accepted quite generally, and a certain crude method of exchange has been common. A merchant in the country may take the money which the prefect desires to transmit to the government treasury and buy merchandise with it, bring it up to Seoul and out of the proceeds pay over to the treasury the amount originally received. At certain seasons of the year it is necessary to send large sums of money to the country to pay for the barley, rice and a thousand other things that are required by the people of the metropolis. The merchants who have this in hand will therefore. pay over to the treasury a certain amount of cash and receive an order on some country prefect who is waiting for a chance to send up the annual taxes to the capital. The order is honoured by him, and so both parties gain by the transaction. The taxes that the people have paid to their prefect come back to them in large measure by the sale of their produce. This custom is of comparatively recent origin, for in former times and for centuries the taxes were all payable in rice or other grain.