A string of cash coins (Traditional Chinese: , ; Vietnamese: ; ) refers to a historical Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Ryukyuan, and Vietnamese currency unit that was used as a superunit of the Chinese cash, Japanese mon, Korean mun, Ryukyuan mon, and Vietnamese văn currencies. The square hole in the middle of cash coins served to allow for them to be strung together in strings. The term would later also be used on banknotes and served there as a superunit of wén (). Usually 1000 wén, but the number could be substantially different depending on the time and place. Prior to the Song dynasty strings of cash coins were called (), (), or (), while during the Ming and Qing dynasties they were called () or ().Chinesecoins.lyq.dk Weights and units in Chinese coinage Section: "Guan 貫, Suo 索, Min 緡, Diao 吊, Chuan 串." by Lars Bo Christensen. Retrieved: 05 February 2018.The Mahjong Tile Set From Cards to Tiles: The Origin of Mahjong(g)'s Earliest Suit Names by Michael Stanwick and Hongbing Xu. Retrieved: 5 February 2018. In Japan and Vietnam the term would continue to be used until the abolition of cash coins in those respective countries.
During the Qing dynasty a string of 1000 cash coins valued at 1 tael of silver, although variants of regional standards as low as 500 cash coins per string also existed.Department of Economic History – London School of Economics Money and Monetary System in China in 19–20th Century: an Overview by Debin Ma. Economic History Department London School of Economics Dec. 2011 Chapter contribution to Encyclopedia of Financial Globalization edited by Charles Calomiris and Larry Neal forthcoming with Elsevier. Published: January 2012. Retrieved: 05 February 2018. A total of 1000 coins strung together were referred to as a () or () and were accepted by traders and merchants per string because counting the individual coins would take too much time. The coins were made up of bronze to protect China's economy. Because the strings were often accepted without being checked for damaged coins and coins of inferior quality and copper alloys, these strings would eventually be accepted based on their nominal value rather than their weight; this system is comparable to that of a fiat currency. Because the counting and stringing together of cash coins was such a time-consuming task, people known as () would string cash coins together in strings of 100 coins, of which ten would form a single . The would receive payment for their services in the form of taking a few cash coins from every string they composed. Because of this, a was more likely to consist of 990 coins rather than 1000 coins, and because the profession of had become a universally accepted practice, these were often still nominally valued at 1000 cash coins.Lloyd Eastman, Family, Fields, and Ancestors: Constancy and Change in China's Social and Economic History, 1550–1949, Oxford University Press (1988), 108–112. Village Life in China: A study in sociology door Arthur H. Smith, D.D. New York, Chicago, Toronto. Uitgever: Fleming H. Revell Company (Publishers of Evangelical Literature) Auteursrecht: 1899 door Fleming H. Revell Company The number of coins in a single string was locally determined, as in one district a string could consist of 980 cash coins, while in another district this could only be 965 cash coins. These numbers were based on the local salaries of the .Wang Yü-Ch'üan, Early Chinese coinage, The American numismatic society, New York, 1951.Guttag's Foreign Currency and Exchange Guide (1921) Uitgegever: Guttag Bros. Numismatics New York, U.S.A. Accessed: 3 October 2017. During the Qing dynasty the would often search for older and rarer coins to sell these to coin collectors at a higher price.
The number of cash coins which had to be strung together to form a string differed due to region, time period, or by the materials used in the manufacture thereof. For example, under the reign of the Tự Đức Emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, one string of cash coins included 600 zinc coins,Art-Hanoi CURRENCY TYPES AND THEIR FACE VALUES DURING THE TỰ ĐỨC ERA. This is a translation of the article "Monnaies et circulation monetairé au Vietnam dans l'ère Tự Đức (1848–1883) by Francois Thierry Published in Revue Numismatique 1999 (volume # 154). pp. 267–313. This translation is from pp. 274–297. Translator: Craig Greenbaum. Retrieved: 15 April 2018. while during the later days of the French colonial period, a string of cash coins was 500 copper alloy coins. In Vietnam a string of cash coins had the nominal value of 1 Mexican peso or 1 French Indochinese piastre.Dr. R. Allan Barker. (2004) The historical Cash Coins of Viet Nam. During the late 19th century in Qing China, some currency systems were named after how many cash coins made up a string, such as the (, 'metropolitan cash') or (),"Silver, Copper, Rice, and Debt: Monetary Policy and Office Selling in China during the Taiping Rebellion," in Money in Asia (1200–1900): Small Currencies in Social and Political Contexts, ed. by Jane Kate Leonard and Ulrich Theobald, Leiden: Brill, 2015, 343–395. which was an exchange rate that was used in the capital city of Beijing. The system allowed a nominal debt of 2 wén () which could be paid out using only one physical cash coin instead of two. In this system a string of Beijing cash coins () required only 500 cash coins as opposed to the majority of China, which used 1000 cash coins for a string (). Meanwhile, in the (, 'Eastern cash') system, an exchange rate used for cash coins in the Fengtian province, only 160 cash coins were needed to make up a string. During the Qing dynasty period, the term was used to designate long strings while the term was used to design short strings.
Although the term appeared frequently on banknotes, the only cash coin to have ever had the currency unit "String of cash coins" as a part of its inscription was the Nguyễn dynasty-era Tự Đức Bảo Sao () 1 cash coin (, ), which was worth 600 văn (or 60 mạch).François Thierry de Crussol, Catalogue des monnaies Vietnamiennes, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, 1987. (in French)
Background
Much like how cash coins are counted in (), until the Qin dynasty, China used cowry shells and bronze cowry shells which were denominated in () and a string of cowry shells was called a (). However, it is currently not known how much was in a .
Strings of cash coin units during the Qing dynasty
During the Qing dynasty different number of cash coins were used to make up strings of cash coins. 1 () = 1000 wén () 1 metropolitan () = 1000 metropolitan cash () 1 metropolitan () = 500 pieces of "standard cash coins" (, before 1853) 1 metropolitan () = 50 pieces of "big cash coins" (, after 1861) In actual circulation, however, cash coins throughout Chinese history were put on strings in ten groups of (supposedly) one hundred coins each; these strings were separated by a knot between each group.Frank H. H. King – "Money and Monetary Policy in China 1845–1895". 1965. Publisher: Harvard University. During the Qing dynasty period, strings of cash coins rarely actually contained 1000 cash coins and usually had something like 950 or 980 or a similar quantity; these amounts were due to local preferences rather than being random in any form. In the larger cities cash shops would make specific strings of cash coins for specific markets. The cash shops existed because at the time there were many different kinds of cash coins circulating in China, including old Chinese cash coins from previous dynasties (), Korean cash coins, Japanese cash coins (), Vietnamese cash coins, large and small genuine Qing dynasty cash coins, and different kinds of counterfeits, such as illegally private-minted cash coins. Some of these strings would contain exclusively genuine Zhiqian, while other strings could contain between 30% and 50% of counterfeit and underweight cash coins. The actual number of cash coins on a string and the percentage of counterfeits in a string was generally known to everyone who resided in that town by the type of knots that were used. Each of these different kind of strings of cash coins fulfilled different functions. For example, one string of cash coins was acceptable to be used in a local grain market, while it would not be accepted at a meat market, while another type of string was able to be used in both markets but not to pay taxes. The cash shops sorted all cash coins into very specific categories, then would make up appropriate kinds of strings that were intended for use in specific markets or to pay taxes to the government.
Silk as currency Silk was used as a commodity worth as much as gold. Silk started out as primarily produced by the Han Dynasty. While strings of cash coin were used as currency, it was not very valuable, only being worth its weight in the material it was made of (bronze and sometimes silver). Silk was used to purchase many things but lost its value over time as middle eastern communities started producing their own silk and using it for trade. This over abundance of silk caused it to lose its worth. Strings of cash coins were mainly used for small purchases while silk was for larger trades.
Banknotes
During the Song dynasty the first series of standard government Jiaozi notes were issued in 1024 with denominations like 1 (, or 700 wén), 1 (, or 1000 ), up to 10 . In 1039 only banknotes of 5 and 10 were issued, and in 1068 a denomination of 1 was introduced which became forty percent of all circulating Jiaozi banknotes. The Huizi also continued to use these currency units. Between the years of 1161 and 1166 the government of the Song dynasty had produced 28,000,000 (, equal to a or 1000 ) in Huizi notes. The exchange rate between Guanzi banknotes and copper cash coins was 1 for 770 wén while Huizi notes of the eighteenth production period were valued at 3 for 1 .ResearchGate Study of the corrosion from the printing plates of `Guan Zi' by Raman spectroscopy by Jilong Shi, Tao Li, Min Feng, Zhenwei Mao, and Changsui Wang. Received 22 April 2005; Accepted 13 December 2005; Retrieved: 06 February 2018. During the last days of the Southern Song dynasty, China was suffering from inflation to the point that the value of the Huizi had lowered so much that a was only accepted at between 300 and 400 cash coins, which caused people to start hoarding the coins, removing them from circulation which had a devastating effect on the economy. As the Mongols continued marching south, the Chinese military required more money causing the government to print an excessive amount of Huizi banknotes. The currency unit would later also be used by the Jurchen Jin dynasty and the Mongol Yuan dynasty on their Jiaochao banknotes, though due to hyperinflation these currencies would not be able to be exchanged with any real cash coins and under Mongol rule non-paper forms of currency were abolished.
From the early fourteenth century to the early sixteenth century in Japan, banknotes which were known as were used for transactions, payments, and the transfer of funds between remote regions. Most of these banknotes had a value of 10 (10,000 mon, or 10 strings of 1000 copper coins), these notes also circulated among the general public.