User:Donald Trung/Silver currency in the Qing dynasty (2020 Xun Yan expansion)

This page serves as "the editing history" of the English Wikipedia article "Qing dynasty coinage" and is preserved for attribution.


 * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/952369344 ✅. --Donald Trung (talk) 22:17, 21 April 2020 (UTC).

Silver coinage
Originally imperial China was on a monometallic standard of using only bronze cash coins during most of its history, but the large influx, because of international trade, of silver during the Ming dynasty period created a bimetallic system in China. From the 3rd century B.C. copper had been the paramount currency of most of China but during the 16th and 17th centuries A.D. this had changed.

Silver had long been the currency for China's overseas trade until the mid-1930s. China during most of the Qing dynasty period was not a silver producing country and its silver supply relied on imports from abroad. It was only during the 1890s that provincial Chinese mints started producing native silver coinages.

Status of silver during the Qing dynasty
During the most of the Qing dynasty period silver circulated in China in two forms, that of silver sycees and foreign silver dollars (primarily Spanish dollars). Silver was used more in interregional trade and was more often used to pay for large transactions, furthermore it wasn’t counted by denomination but by weight. The primary weight unit of silver was the tael. Contrary to copper, silver was not monopolised by the government but the price of silver instead was determined by the market.

The tael was used both as a unit of account as well as a unit of weight, the concept is similar to "pound" and "pound sterling". There were various standards for defining the weight of a tael, this was because the weighing scales varied a lot between the different regions of China and Qing government bodies. The weight unit "tael" (兩) usually varied between 33.99 to 37.50 grams, but when used as a unit of account the "silver tael" (銀兩) had many different definitions that were based in terms of purity and fineness of the silver being weighed. For example, the Treasury tael (Kuping liang or Kuping tael) is the standard for taxation, the Maritime Customs tael (Haiguan liang or Haikwan tael) is the standard used in the Maritime Customs Service, the market tael (Shiping liang) is the standard used in the market in Beijing.

Contrary to how the supply and demand of copper was regulated through government channels, supply and demand of silver was determined solely by the market. The domestic silver production in China was generally low and the silver in China came mostly from Edo Japan and later from the Americas, mainly through international trade with foreign merchants.

This situation of silver in Qing China is similar to that of medieval England. The Kingdom of England did not produce significant amounts of silver by itself and therefore its coinage was closely associated with its overseas and international trade. The monarchs, both in imperial China and in the Kingdom of England, did not own the native silver supply. But unlike the English Crown, which had set up royal mints in England to strike the silver bullion into coins with a nominal (or face) value, the Chinese Emperor allowed only silver bullion itself to circulate in various forms throughout his empire. The government of the Qing dynasty provided only the standard unit (known as the Kuping tael) that a silver ingot should be melted into, which itself evolved into one of the many different "taels" that was used for silver bullion to be traded.

Because the purchasing power of silver bullion was so much higher than that of copper-alloy cash coins, silver was used primarily for larger transactions and long-distance trade as well as international trade, while copper-alloy cash coinage was therefore not taken as subsidiary money: it was the currency for daily and smaller transactions and copper was the only currency in rural China during the Qing dynasty period. Silver also enjoyed a special status as it was also the major form of currency that was used for the payment taxes and government expenditures.

Because of this, the government of the Qing dynasty had attempted to establish a fixed rate for the exchange of copper-alloy cash coins and silver bullion. During the majority of the Qing dynasty period, the official ratio between silver (in taels) and copper-alloy cash coins (in wén) was maintained at 1:1,000. The ratio was later revised to 1:2,000 during the 1840s, due to the rising price of silver.

This theoretical official exchange rate was in practice not enforced by any government institution as because the imperial government did not coin any silver, it had no control over how silver circulated on the market. As the silver flow was primarily based on foreign trade and silver both entered and left China in large numbers, the market exchange rate between silver and copper changed drastically over time and tended to fluctuate, furthermore this exchange rate also varied from region to region. Services specialising in money exchanges, known as money-changers, developed in this currency system, and the exchange normally took place in commercial centres and trade ports where different trades were frequently carried out.

The currency system in China during the Qing dynasty is sometimes called a "parallel bimetallic system", in order to distinguish it from the more conventional model of a bimetallic system. The term "parallel bimetallic system" is given to this system because it functioned more like a form of coexistence of "two currency systems, each using a different metal" than an actual bimetallic system. Also unlike real bimetallism in other countries, the actual exchange ratio between the two different metal currencies was not actually fixed; the exchange ratio tended to vary depending on time and place.

Government produced silver coins during the Qianlong era
During the reign of the Qianlong Emperor commemorative silver coins with the portrait of the Tibetan Panchen Lama are known to have been produced.

Government produced silver coins during the Daoguang era
During the reign of the Daoguang Emperor several attempts were made in China for the native production of government backed silver coinage, the first of such attempts were tried in the year 1821. Machine-struck Chinese silver coins were known to have been first produced in the year 1822, by the modern Jilin Arsenal Mint (吉林機器局). These early milled silver coins were known as the Changpingliang (廠平兩, literally "factory tael") and only had the denomination of one tael. These silver Changpingliang were not manufactured in any high numbers and are consequently very rare today.

Other models of modern silver coinages, which are known as ban (板), that were known to have been produced in the cities of Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Wuxi, and Jiangxi. The models of milled silver coins produced in Wuxi are known as xiban (錫板) and the ones produced in Jiangxi are known as tuban (土板). There were also the models known as Wuzhuang (吳莊) and Xingzhuang (行莊).

Another early attempt at creating a native government-produced silver Chinese coinage was made by Lin Zexu, he created a system of silver coinages known as the Yinbing (銀餅, literally "Silver cakes") which had a standard weight of 0.72 tael, but the Yinbing was eventually rejected by the Jiangsu market.

The earliest known surviving modern silver coins of the Qing dynasty period were manufactured in the city of Zhangtai, Fujian. There are two types of these modern silver Zhangtai coins, one featured an image, this image either consisted of Shouxing, the God of longevity, a pair of crossed Ruyi scepters, or a pair of crossed writing brushes, which are known as bibao (筆寶).

The other known type of Zhangtai silver coins featured both ornaments and inscriptions, the first type of these inscribed silver coins featured the inscriptions Daoguang Nian Zhu (道光年鑄) and Zuwen Yinbing (足紋銀餅), and the indication of the value of the coin, namely the inscription Kuping Qi-Er (庫平柒弍, "0.72 Kuping tael"). The reverse side of these coins featured a tripod with a Manchu language inscription indicating the mint where it was produced. The coins without images were inscribed with the Chinese characters for "Junxiang" (軍餉), this inscription being a rather clear indication of the method that the government of the Qing dynasty used to throw money on the Chinese local markets. The ornaments on the second type of silver coins were mostly imitations of the decorations that are depicted on the various foreign coins that circulated in the region at the time, but sometimes these ornaments just merged Chinese characters, like jinshen (謹慎, "reverentially").

These silver coins were brought into general circulation through military salaries (Junxiang), and unlike the earlier attempts were accepted by the local Jiangsu market. The date when these modern silver coins of southeast China were exactly produced remains unclear today, but they were certainly not produced before the 19th century.

Government produced silver coins during the Xianfeng era
During the Xianfeng period the government did not issue its own silver coins, but it did issue a series of banknotes that were nominally worth silver in weight (taels).

Government produced silver coins during the Guangxu era
Prior to 1 tael being standardised at 50 g. by the government of the People's Republic of China in 1959, the weight "tael" differed substantially from province to province, the Qing government maintained that 1 tael equals 37.5 g. and this measurement was referred to as the Kuping tael, and by official Qing government standards 1 Kuping tael = 10 Mace = 100 Candareens. Under the Guangxu Emperor several Kuping tael coins were struck in Tianjin from 1903 until 1907, and mostly served as salary for the soldiers. Despite the central government's attempts at unifying the standards provincial coinage remained the de facto standard across China.

Since the 1870s, silver was used both as an official form of currency in Qing China and a commodity in the international market, for this reason the international price of silver was considered to be indicative of the international exchange rate of the Chinese currency. When the global price of silver experienced a lot of fluctuation the unstable exchange rate of the Chinese currency made pricing on the Chinese market much less predictable and therefore the volatility in the pricing of silver at the time had discouraged trade.

In the year 1903 the imperial Chinese government had issued a decree that was intended to standardise the Chinese silver coins in circulation, but in actuality the government decree was never really implemented. The highest standard of indigenous Chinese coinages produced under Qing rule was probably achieved by the gold, silver, and copper coins produced in the city of Tianjin between the years 1906 and 1907.

Government produced silver coins during the Xuantong era
Only as late as 1910 was it decided by the Qing government to have a unified national currency that would be produced in Wuchang and in Nanjing. The government of the Qing dynasty had issued a number of new regulations that would create a uniform national silver currency system.

Under the Xuantong Emperor another attempt at standardising the Qing dynasty's silver coinage was made in 1911 (Xuantong 3) a large amount of "dragon dollars" bearing the inscription "" (yīyuán) were minted, these were the only Qing dynasty coins with that inscription and also featured the English legend "One Dollar". These coins were all cast at the Central Tianjin Mint.

The coin was called yuán (圓 or 元, in this context meaning "dollar") and they had a standard weight of 0.72 tael. It was inscribed with the words Da-Qing Yinbi (大清銀幣) and was introduced into the Chinese market in October of the year 1910.

After the fall of the Qing dynasty sycees were demonetised in 1933 and Qing dynasty silver coins in 1935 as they were replaced with paper money.

Provincial silver coins based on foreign coins circulating in China


During the early days of the Qing dynasty silver Spanish dollars, known to the Chinese as "double balls" because of the two globes featured on the coins, continued to circulate in the coastal areas of China, while sycees were regularly manufactured inland. Trade with the Spanish Empire continued as Chinese junks brought on average 80,000 pesos from Manila on every voyage, and by the mid-18th century the amount rose to 235,370,000 pesos. A lot of silver from Portugal, the Dutch Republic, and Japan continued to enter China during this period. After Mexico had become independent Mexican pesos (or "Eagle coins", ) replaced the old Spanish dollars while the old Spanish dollars still remained important in China, the Treaty of Nanking ending the First Opium War in 1842 had its payments accounted in Spanish dollars.

In the year 1857 the Jiangsu provincial mint also produced "silver cake" coins made with steel dies. In the decades that followed various other Chinese regions also started to produce Yinbing with differing dimensions and denominations, and these silver coins tended ti only circulating locally and for rather short periods of time. The first true Chinese mechanically produced coins were silver coins made in this period by the mint in Jilin.

Many other forms of silver coins circulating in China caused the Qing government to eventually start producing its own silver coinage ( or ) in 1821 with the first machine-struck silver coins being made a year later by the Jilin Arsenal in 1822. The Jilin Mint produced Guangxu Yuanbao (光緒元寶) with a weight of 5 qián, the reverse of these coins are inscribed with the inscription "Changping" (廠平) and the name of the mint in both traditional Chinese characters and Manchu script. Furthermore the Jilin Mint produced Western-style coins, namely a 1 tael standard, or Changping Yi Liang (廠平壹兩), silver coin dated 1882, and it was made in silver and in copper, and a set of coins from the test 1884, inscribed in both Chinese and Manchu script. These coins were produced with the denominations 1.5 qián, 3 qián, ½ tael, 7 qián, and 1 tael.

In 1887 Zhang Zhidong, the Viceroy of Liangguang started producing silver coinage in Guangzhou, these coins weighed 0.73 taels and had the English inscription of "Kwang-tung Province, 7 Mace and 3 Candareens" and were decorated with a large Dragon earning them the nickname "Guangdong Dragon dollars" or they were referred to simply as "Yuán", an abbreviation of Yuánbǎo (元寶) which was featured on the inscription, though this design was similar to silver Japanese coins circulating in China at the time which also featured a Dragon. This earliest successful indigenous Chinese silver coin is ommonly known under the name of Qi-San Fanban (七三番板, "0.73-tael coin according to the Western model"). The weight of 0.73 tael was chosen because it would then be 0.01 tael heavier than the Mexican peso, the government of the Qing dynasty had hoped that the Guangdong Longyang would then be able to drive out foreign coins from the Chinese market by being heavier. The expectations of the Qing government weren't fulfilled and the weight of the Guangdong Longyang was quickly lowered than 0.73 tael. The English language inscription of the coin was moved to the reverse side during a re-design.

When viceroy Zhang Zhidong was transferred to the city of Wuchang, Hubei (present-day Wuhan), in the year 1893, Zhang also founded a modern mint in Wuchang where the "Hu-peh Dollar" (湖北洋) was produced.

These provincial silver coins proved popular and soon other provinces started to cast their own variants of these silver coins. These coins were manufactured independently by each province and it wasn't until 1910 that the government of the Qing dynasty standardised them at 0.72 taels. Some provinces did not produce silver coins of larger denominations.

The usage of silver coins was more common in Chinese trading ports after these were opened to foreign traders, eventually the usage of foreign paper money to exchange silver also became popular as foreign banks like The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation began issuing banknotes denominated in taels for the Chinese market.

In the year 1897 the Beiyang Mint in the city of Tianjin produced a modern silver "dollar" for circulation in the province of Zhili. Unlike the earlier Dragon dollars this coin had a denomination of 1 yuan. The design of this Beiyang dollar would change several times in only a few years.

The city of Nanjing produced its first modern silver coin also in the year 1897. The Nanjing coin carried the Chinese cyclical signs of the year of its production, and the design was also altered several times over a short period of time. The province of Anhui also started the native production of provincial silver coinage in the same year, Sichuan followed suit in the year 1898 with the famous "Szechuan rupee". Furthermore the provinces of Hunan, Taiwan, Shanxi, and Heilongjiang also started issuing their own silver coinages around this era.

The most diverse of these silver coinages were the Dragon dollars of Jilin, Manchuria. From the year 1899 the provincial mint of Jilin added the Chinese cyclical name of the year to denote its year of production. After the year 1901 all Jilin silver dragon coins showed the image of the Taiji (太極圖), or yin and yang symbol, yet other silver coins from Jilin were decorated with the image of a Rohdea plant, known locally as the wannianqing (萬年青) and bore inscriptions in Mandarin Chinese, Manchu, and Uyghur (using Arabic script).

Yunnan issued modern silver coins as the latest province of the Qing to do so, namely in the year 1907.

The imperial mints in Beijing just made some silver pattern coins as tests, but never issued them.

These modern European-style silver "dollar" coins, issued by each Chinese province independently from each other, did not reach the same standard in weight, homogeneity, and fineness as the actual foreign silver "dollars", and were therefore less accepted by the local markets in China than the original foreign silver "dollar" coins were. The Chinese money-exchangers would treat these provincial silver coinages the same way as they did Chinese silver sycees, and assessed their value by weight rather than by any stated denominations.

1910 Yunnan "spring dollars"
In the year 1910 the provincial government of Yunnan issued a Chinese dragon dollar coin that is commonly known as the "Yunnan Spring dollar", the coin was issued after the government of the Qing dynasty had enacted the "Currency Regulations" on April 15, 1910. The Yunnanese government had quickly took the coin dies that they had been using to make the silver coins they issued in 1909 and would then engrave these new coins with an additional inscription at the top stating "Made in the Yunnan Province in the spring of the year Gengxu (1910)". This the only coin in the numismatic history if China that features a season of the year as part of the date. This was done because according to the traditional Chinese calendar that was in use at the time, the "spring" was a time that referred to the first 3 months of the year, January, February, and March. The centre of the obverse of the Yunnan Spring dollar contains the inscription "Xuantong Yuanbao" (宣統元寶), while on the bottom it contains the denomination of the coin as "Kuping Qi Qian Er Fen" (, “Treasury Standard 7 Mace and 2 Candareens”). The reverse side of the coin features prominent dragon. The Yunnan mint deliberately wrote down that the coin was issued in "the spring of 1910", because the new regulations set by the imperial government wouldn’t take effect until April 1910. However, the imperial Chinese government soon discovered the scheme at the Yunnan mint and quickly ordered that all these of these new "spring dollar" coins were to be withdrawn and later melted down. In 1920 during the early Republican era it was discovered that an extremely small number of these coins had escaped being destroyed and these surviving specimens that are now known are commonly referred to as the "Yunnan Spring dollars" by Chinese numismatists and coin collectors. Only two genuine specimens are known to exist making it among the very rarest of China's coins.


 * In April of the year 2002 the first genuine "Yunnan Spring dollar" to appear at public auction was sold in Beijing, at the Hua Chen auction.


 * In 2007 the same "Yunnan Spring dollar" as above was re-sold in a Cheng Xuan sale in Beijing where the coin was sold for ¥3,192,000 ($468,000).


 * In August of the year 2010 the same "Yunnan Spring dollar" as above was sold at a Hong Kong auction by Michael Chou, of Champion Hong Kong Auction for $1,035,000.

Private production of silver coinage


Despite silver making up the other half of the bimetallic system of the Qing dynasty's coinage it wasn't officially produced by the government until the later period of the dynasty where the silver coins would be based on the foreign coins that already circulated in China. Government ledgers used it as a unit of account, in particular the Kuping Tael (庫平兩) was used for this. For most of its history both the production and the measurements of silver was in the hands of the private market which handled the exclusive production of silver currency, the greatest amount of silver ingots in China was produced by private silversmiths (銀樓) in professional furnaces (銀爐), only a very small amount of silver ingots was issued by government-owned banks during the late 19th century. While assayers and moneychangers had control over its exchange rates, for this reason no unified system of silver currency in place in China but a series of different types of silver ingots that were used in various markets throughout the country. The most common form of silver ingots (元寶 or 寶銀) in China were the "horse-hoof ingots" (馬蹄銀) and could weigh as much as fifty taels, there were also "middle-size ingots" (中錠) which usually weigh around 10 taels, "small-size ingots" (小錠) that weighed between one and five taels, and "silver crumbs" (碎銀 or 銀子). All freshly cast ingots were sent to official assayers (公估局) where their weight and fineness were marked with a brush. However, these determinations were only valid on the local market and nowhere else do silver ingots were constantly reassessed which was the daily business of Chinese money changers. In fact, silver ingots were weighed in each single transaction.

Silver ingots were traded at different rates that were dependent on the purity of their silver content, the average ones were known as Wenyin (紋銀) or Zubao (足寶) which had (theoretical) purity of .935374, meanwhile specimens that were of higher quality and content were referred to by true surplus that was to be advanced on changing. Exempli gratia a silver ingot known as an "Er-Si Bao" (二四寶) with a weight of fifty taels was valued at 52.4 taels. Likewise other silver standards in China were all geared to the Wenyin such as the Shanghai tael that used in the foreign concession of the city, for instance, was called the Jiuba Guiyuan (九八規元) because it had 98 per cent of the purity of the Shanghai standard tael (規元). The standard tael of Tianjin was called the Xinghua (行化) and that of Hankou was known as the Yangli (洋例).

During the Xianfeng period a series of "silver cakes" (銀餅) was issued in 1856 by three private banks in the city of Shanghai, namely the Wang Yong Sheng (王永盛), Jing Zheng Ji (經正記), and Yu Sen Sheng (郁森盛). Their cakes were manufactured by steel matrices and they tended to have a weight of 1 tael and 0.5 tael.

Names of weights and standards of Chinese silver ingots
The most commonly used English term to describe Chinese silver ingots is "sycee" (細絲), which comes from a Cantonese term meaning "fine weight" where the "weight" (絲, sī) represents 0.00001 tael. However a large number of regional terms and names for these silver ingots existed throughout China, these names include:

Among the aforementioned regional names other designations for sycees were Qingsi (青絲), Baisi (白絲), Danqing (單傾), Shuangqing (雙傾), Fangcao (方鏪), and Changcao (長鏪) among many others.

Aside from the large number of names for sycees that existed in China there was also a wealth of different weight standards for taels that existed that were different from market to market. One of the larger variants of the tael was the Kuping Tael (庫平兩) which was used by the Chinese Ministry of Revenue for both weight measurements as well as a unit of account used during tax collections. In 1858 a new trade tax was introduced which used the Sea Customs tael (海關兩) as a unit of account, meanwhile in Guangdong the Canton Tael (廣平兩) was used when trading with foreign merchants. Another unit of account that was used was the Grain Tribute Tael (漕平兩) which was used for measuring and accounting the tribute the imperial Chinese government received in grain.

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First expansion diff
Added this version:


 * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Donald_Trung/Silver_currency_in_the_Qing_dynasty_(2020_Xun_Yan_expansion)&oldid=946333560

In this expansion:


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More sources

 * ✅. --Donald Trung (talk) 22:15, 21 April 2020 (UTC).
 * ✅. --Donald Trung (talk) 22:15, 21 April 2020 (UTC).