1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [78]
I am oversimplifying. The currency did function—intermittently, unpredictably. Each emperor produced coins with his name stamped on the face. When he died, the succeeding ruler would quickly declare that his predecessor’s coins were valueless; only new coins minted by the new emperor would be valid currency. Merchants suddenly saw “their capital evaporate in a single day, often silently mourning their losses before committing suicide,” according to the Ming Shi, the official history of the dynasty.
Needing something to pay with, merchants and their customers would use old coins from earlier reigns until the new emperor’s money arrived; given the lack of copper and dynastic inefficiency, this frequently took years, even decades. Then they would use the new coins until the government suddenly banned them. The result, according to the Taiwanese historian Quan Hansheng, was a constant game of financial hot-potato, with everyone trying to use their coins until just before they lost all value—at which point they would try to unload them onto some hapless sucker.
“Virtually from morning to evening the rules change, and still there is no set policy,” moaned one sixteenth-century imperial chancellor. “The people fear that the money they get today will be useless tomorrow and they will no doubt starve. Thus the more the coins change, the more chaos ensues, and the more restrictions there are, the more people panic, so that stores dare not open for business, there is no buying or selling, and cries of anguish ring out.”
“Coins received in the morning couldn’t be used by evening,” explained a central-China gazetteer in 1606. Shopkeepers would suddenly refuse them en masse.
One person would suggest it, and everyone else would agree. Although such actions were strictly forbidden, they had no regard for the law. Before long, merchants from other regions would come to buy old coins, and they would exchange them at a ratio of three to one and cart them away. This is what you call monopolization at its extreme, the power of devious people. Wealthy merchants and powerful brokers sit back and reap heavy profits while the average person suffers. It never ends.
Were these complaints exaggerated? In 1521 the Jiajing emperor began his reign. Still a young man, he was decades away from his prostitute-fueled pursuit of immortality and fiercely determined to regain control of the nation’s money supply. He decided to issue new coins that would be of such high quality that the people would reject the old coins and counterfeits. The results were described a century later by the geographer and historian Gu Yanwu in a grandly titled compendium, The Strategic Advantages and Weaknesses of Each Province in the Empire. Gu looked at Zhangpu County, about ten miles south of Yuegang. As the Jiajing reign began, Gu reported, the currency preferred by county merchants was, unbelievably, coins from the Song dynasty—the Yuanfeng reign, to be precise, which had ended more than four centuries before, in 1085 A.D. During the next decade, the Jiajing emperor established mints and punched out coins as fast as possible. The effort made not a jot of difference in Zhangpu County. Year after year, Gu wrote, the preferred money flipped arbitrarily from one Song emperor to another. After each switch, people stuck with the previously favored coins were left high and dry. Not until 1577, five years after the Jiajing emperor’s death, did Zhangpu County use legal currency. For the first time in decades, people used coins minted by the current ruler, the Wanli emperor. The reprieve was brief, Gu wrote. “Only one year later, they stopped using Wanli coins.”
Silver had long been recognized as a store of value, though rarely used for ordinary, small-scale transactions because it was too scarce and costly. But the uncertainty over bronze coins