Cash (Chinese coin)
The cash or qian was a type of coin of China and the Sinosphere, used from the 4th centuryBC until the 20th century, characterised by their round outer shape and a square center hole. Originally cast during the Warring States period, these coins continued to be used for the entirety of Imperial China. The last Chinese cash coins were cast in 1912, the first year of the Republic of China. Generally most cash coins were made from copper or bronze alloys, with iron, lead, and zinc coins occasionally used less often throughout Chinese history. Rare silver and gold cash coins were also produced. During most of their production, cash coins were cast, but during the late Qing dynasty, machine-struck cash coins began to be made. As the cash coins produced over Chinese history were similar, thousand year old cash coins produced during the Northern Song dynasty continued to circulate as valid currency well into the early twentieth century.
In the modern era, these coins are considered to be Chinese "good luck coins"; they are hung on strings and round the necks of children, or over the beds of sick people. They hold a place in various traditional Chinese techniques, such as Yijing divination, as well as traditional Chinese medicine, and feng shui. Currencies based on the Chinese cash coins include the Japanese mon, Korean mun, Ryukyuan mon, and Vietnamese văn.
Terminology
The English term cash, referring to the coin, comes from the Portuguese caixa which was derived from the Tamil kāsu, a South Indian monetary unit derived from the Sanskrit silver and gold weight unit karsa. The English name was used for small copper coins issued in British India, and also came to be used for the similarly small value copper coins of China.The English word cash meaning "tangible currency" is an older word, derived from the Middle French caisse, meaning "money box."
There are a variety of Chinese terms for cash coins, usually descriptive and most commonly including the character qián meaning "money". Chinese qián is also a weight-derived currency denomination in China; it is called mace in English.
History
Ancient China
Chinese cash coins originated from the barter of farming tools and agricultural surpluses. Around 1200BC, smaller token spades, hoes, and knives began to be used to conduct smaller exchanges with the tokens later melted down to produce real farm implements. These tokens came to be used as media of exchange themselves and were known as spade money and knife money.Imperial China
Qin to Sui dynasties
As standard circular coins were developed following the unification of China by Qin Shi Huang, the most common formation was the round-shaped copper coin with a square or circular hole in the center, the prototypical cash. The early Ban Liang cash coins were said to have been made in the shape of wheels, similar to other Ancient Chinese forms of coinage resembling agricultural tools. It is commonly believed that the early round coins of the Warring States period resembled the ancient jade circles which symbolised the supposed round shape of the sky, while the centre hole in this analogy is said to represent the planet earth. The body of these early round coins was called their "flesh" and the central hole was known as "the good".The hole enabled the coins to be strung together to create higher denominations, as was frequently done due to the coin's low value. The number of coins in a string of cash varied over time and place but was nominally 1000. A tael of pure silver in sycee form traded for a fluctuating price of approximately 1000 cash. A string of cash was divided into ten sections of 100 cash each. Local custom allowed the person who put the string together to take a cash or a few from each hundred for his effort. Thus a string of cash could contain 970 coins in one city and 990 in the next. In some places in the North of China short of currency the custom counted one cash as two and fewer than 500 cash would be exchanged for an ounce of silver. A string of cash weighed over ten pounds and was generally carried over the shoulder. Paper money equivalents known as flying cash sometimes showed pictures of the appropriate number of cash coins strung together.
Following the Ban Liang cash coins the Han dynasty introduced the San Zhu cash coins which in the year 118BC were replaced by the Wu Zhu cash coins. The production of Wu Zhu cash coins was briefly suspended by Wang Mang during the Xin dynasty but after the reestablishment of the Han dynasty, the production of Wu Zhu cash coins resumed, and continued to be manufactured long after the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty for another 500 years. Minting was definitively ended in 618 with the establishment of the Tang dynasty. Wu Zhu cash coins were cast from 118BC to AD618, a span of 736 years, which is the longest for any coin in human history.
Tang to Qing dynasties
The Tang dynasty introduced the Kaiyuan Tongbao, which would influence the inscriptions of cash coins, both inside and outside of China, minted from this period onwards.The Koreans, Japanese, Ryukyuans, and Vietnamese all cast their own copper cash in the latter part of the second millennium similar to those used by China.
Chinese cash coins were usually made from copper-alloys throughout most of Chinese history, before 1505 they were typically made from bronze and from 1505 onwards they were mostly made from brass.
Chinese historian Peng Xinwei stated that in the year 1900 traditional cast copper-alloy cash coins only made up 17.78% of the total Chinese currency stock, privately-produced banknotes made up only 3%, and foreign trade dollars circulating in China made up 25% of the total Chinese currency stock by the 1900s. The context of traditional Chinese cash coins in the Chinese economy during the 1900s and its late stage in the monetary history of China is comparable to that of Western Europe's tiered currency systems used prior to the steam-powered mints, struck coinage, and territorial nation-state currencies between the 13th and 18th century. Helen Dunstan argues that the late-Imperial Chinese polity was much more preoccupied with maintaining national grain reserves and making the price of grain affordable to the Chinese people and the attention of the government of the Qing dynasty to the exchange rate of copper and silver would have to be viewed in this light.
The last Chinese cash coins were struck, not cast, during the reigns of the Qing Guangxu and Xuantong Emperors shortly before the fall of the Empire in 1911, though even after the fall of the Qing dynasty production briefly continued under the Republic of China.
Cash coins after the fall of the empire
After the fall of the Qing empire, local production of cash coins continued, including the "" coins in 1912, but were phased out in favour of the new Yuan-based coins. During Yuan Shikai's brief attempt at monarchy as the Empire of China, trial cash coins are reported to have been minted as part of the series in 1916 but not circulated. During the Republican period cash coins with the inscription were produced in Fujian, these had the denominations of 1 and 2. Trial coins with,, and a Fujian Tong Bao with a reverse inscribed with were also cast, but never circulated. The coin continued to be used unofficially in China until the mid-20th century.Vietnamese cash coins continued to be cast up until the early 1940s. The last Chinese cash coins in Indonesia circulated in Bali until 1970 and are still used for most Hindu rituals today.
Manufacture
Traditionally, Chinese cash coins were cast in copper, brass or iron. In the mid-19th century, the coins were made of 3 parts copper and 2 parts lead. Cast silver coins were periodically produced but considerably more rare. Cast gold coins are also known to exist but are extremely rare.Early methods of casting
During the Zhou dynasty period, the method for casting coins consisted of first carving the individual characters of a coin together with its general outline into a mould made of either soapstone or clay. The casting process in these early moulds worked in a way that two mould-sections were placed together, then the core of the mould was placed into the top area, then the bronze smiths would pour molten metal into an opening that was formed by a cavity that was located in its centre. As this was done without using a prior model, early Chinese coinage tends to look very diverse, even from the same series of coins as these all were cast from different moulds bearing the same inscriptions.During the Han dynasty, to gain consistency in the circulating coinage, master bronze moulds were manufactured to be used as the basis for other cash moulds.
Later methods of manufacture
From the 6th century and later, new "mother coins" were cast as the basis for coin production. These were engraved in generally easily manipulated metals such as tin. Coins were cast in sand moulds. Fine wet sand was placed in rectangles made from pear wood, and small amounts of coal and charcoal dust were added to refine the process, acting as a flux. The mother coins were placed on the sand, and another pear wood frame would be placed upon the mother coin. The molten metal was poured in through a separate entrance formed by placing a rod in the mould. This process would be repeated 15 times and then molten metal would be poured in. After the metal had cooled down, the "coin tree" was extracted from the mould. The coins would be taken off the tree and placed on long square rods to have their edges rounded off, often for hundreds of coins simultaneously. After this process, the coins were strung together and brought into circulation.In Korea cash coins are known as yeopjeon because of the way that they resemble leaves on a branch when they were being cast in the mould.
From 1730 during the Qing dynasty, the mother coins were no longer carved separately but derived from "ancestor coins". Eventually this resulted in greater uniformity among cast Chinese coinage from that period onwards. A single ancestor coin would be used to produce tens of thousands of mother coins; each of these in turn was used to manufacture tens of thousands of cash coins.