space fisherman

Chapter 88 Ancient Currency
After comparing a lot of information, Ye Yuan learned that these silver dollars are standard 50 taels of official silver.

The 50 taels here is not the current 50 taels. There is a big difference between ancient and modern weight conversions.

The ancient weight unit "two" is completely different from the current "two".

It is not equal to the current 50 grams at all.

Similarly, the ancient "jin" is completely different from the current market jin, not equal to 500 grams.

The ancient "two" is not a very strict standard unit, and it varies from dynasty to dynasty.

In the same period, there were different standards such as "Fuping" and "Kuping", with slight differences between them.

If you take the most commonly used standard and compare it with the current weight unit:

"Kuping one or two" in the late Qing Dynasty is approximately equal to 37.31 grams.

1 "jin" is equal to 16 "liang", which is about 597 grams.

As for the "city catty" (500 grams) we are talking about now, it was re-defined after the founding of the People's Republic of China for the convenience of conversion with kilograms, and has nothing to do with the ancient "jin" at all!

As for the issue of compensation in the last years of the Qing Dynasty, it cannot be compared with the thousands of tons of silver now.

Now all countries use gold as hard currency, while silver is only used for industrial and decorative purposes, and its actual market price has been greatly reduced.

At the end of the Qing Dynasty, silver was the hard currency for foreign trade in many countries in the world. In addition, the total amount and annual output of silver at that time were smaller than now, so its actual purchasing power was much higher than it is now.

When Ye Yuan was looking for these materials, he also saw an interesting thing, that is how the ancient people made change.

In the silver standard system of the Ming and Qing dynasties, "liang" was the main unit.

Money, cents, cents, and cents below two are fairly common.

However, silk, suddenly, micro, fibrous, sand, dust, dust, slender, desert, and mold are rare in the folk.

As quantifiers, these ten Chinese characters all mean tiny.

There are idioms in Chinese, such as Siwei, Weixian, Weimo, as well as Haoli, Shimo and Dust.

The fifteen units below two are all in decimal.

Ten silks make one centimeter, ten suddens make one thread, ten sands make one fiber, ten dusts make one sand, etc.

Real silver is very inconvenient to use, there is no fixed face value, and special scales (戥子) must be used to weigh it.

"戥子" is a relatively precise scale, the largest unit is two, and the smallest is cent or centimeter.

In addition to silver, it is also used to weigh precious medicinal materials, spices, and pigments.

Therefore, often high-ranking officials and nobles only have pegs, and they are even made of ebony, ivory, etc.

There are also cast silver ingots with a fixed weight. In the Yuan Dynasty, a large silver ingot of 50 taels was cast, which was called "Yuanbao", that is, "treasures of the Yuan Dynasty".

Later, the name was used.The shape of the ingot is raised at both ends, in order to make it easier to wrap around the waist. In the past, it was said that "the waist is entwined".

There are also smaller silver ingots, 25 taels, [-] taels, and even smaller silver ingots.

Scattered silver is used to buy small items.Silver is relatively soft, so it is cut with scissors, and it is called a scorpion.

The fineness of silver is also different. The best silver is called "pattern silver" because of the wrinkles on the surface.Bad silver is called "low silver".

Copper coins are used in normal commercial and ordinary transactions. Small coins are half and two coins are five plants and 120 coins are consistent, which are usually enough.

Only large-scale commercial transactions will use silver.If there is a large amount of silver used in trade, it will be traded in the silver house of the bank, and there will be professional money customers to check the silver.

As for scattered silver, if it is used outside the bank, the general inspection is to use it to check the fineness and weigh it with your hands. On the other hand, the purchasing power of silver taels was 3500 qian in the Tang Dynasty, and 3000 qian in the Song Dynasty. North Korea is about 2500 yuan.

In some scenes in many costume dramas, people who eat a meal in a small restaurant and pay the bill with a piece of silver are pure nonsense.

Ancient people generally used copper coins, and if the consumption was high, they would use silver, and it would be inconvenient to carry a large piece of silver ingot on the body. Maybe a corner was knocked off on the road, and the food expenses would be gone for many days.

So what will you do at this time?Of course, I brought some broken silver, so there is another question, how did the broken silver come from?

The method is to cut up the whole silver ingot and use it.

There are many people who will directly crush the whole silver, or pinch off this small corner on the whole piece of silver.

In terms of trading, if it is a small market or a stall, it is basically traded with copper coins, and there is no way for others to use silver for you, unless you are very rich and don't want a fraction.

But if you go to a place where you need to use silver, most stores have scales, and places like this are relatively high-grade.

For example, some teahouses, restaurants and so on.

However, the fineness of broken silver circulating in the market is not exactly the same, so the merchants have to convert the fineness and then calculate it. If you meet some powerful merchants, some people can tell how much your broken silver is almost based on experience. So you can feel how powerful it is.

In fact, the fineness of broken silver circulating in the market varies, and the fineness has to be converted one by one. Of course, if the paying consumers cannot trust the store, they can also ask the public appraisal bureau to act as an intermediary to evaluate the fineness of the silver.

In ancient times, if a businessman left local A to trade in a foreign place B, the silver he brought to B and minted in A would be "illegal" to use directly in B. Then the merchant had three ways to use the silver minted in A. silver
One is to go to the silver building and furnace bureau recognized by the local chamber of commerce in place B, and recast silver according to the local customary fineness and weight standards.

In another way, he went to the chamber of commerce of A in B and exchanged the money he was carrying in A for local currency.

Another kind is that the merchant can use a certain ticket number, bank draft, bank note, and money ticket, but he needs to pay the ticket number and the bank's handling fee.

But ordinary people seldom use large ingots of silver in their daily transactions, at most they use scattered silver.

This is also the reason why there are warehouse silver and market silver. Treasury silver is of uniform weight and not circulated, while market silver can be circulated and can be cut to size at will.

According to the calculation on the Internet, the ingots that Ye Yuan obtained weighed about 1850 grams.

According to the current silver price, it is about 4 yuan/gram.

That is to say, Ye Yuan's ingots are only 7400 yuan each at the price of ordinary silver. There are 200 such ingots in the two big boxes, and they can only be sold for about 150W. Ye Yuan is a little disappointed.

But this is also calculated according to the ordinary silver price. From the perspective of antiques, the price of a silver ingot should not be this price.

Ye Yuan looked for the price of ingots on the Internet again. The price of ingots varies greatly. It is also 50 taels of Qing Dynasty official silver. Some websites offer 3 to 5 yuan, and some websites say that they can be sold for 10,000+.

Ye Yuan doesn't know much about antiques, but even if calculated based on the minimum of 3 each, these ingots are worth 600 million, which makes Ye Yuan very satisfied.

Ye Yuan took out some porcelain fragments found in the sunken ship, as well as those broken silver and copper coins.

It was found that these had been corroded by sea water, many silver coins had changed color, and the words on the copper coins could not be read clearly.

Ye Yuan thought to himself, these should be the coins that those pirates carried with him, they should be of little value, so he casually threw them into a big box in the corner of the study.

Thanks: lianjianming book friend for the reward.

Today is the first day of the price increase, and my fingertips are very nervous. I have never written a book before, and I have never issued a VIP ticket. I can’t wait to get up and code this morning. After the code is completed, I will upload it for a look. This chapter will be updated in advance at noon today .The next chapter will be updated on time at 17:[-].

Here at the fingertips, I would like to thank all the book friends who have subscribed to this book for their support.

(End of this chapter)