A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [180]
And it certainly is a work of art. In between the lines of cobalt blue enlivened with gold leaf are great loops containing riotous flowerbeds of swirling lotus and pomegranate, tulips, roses and hyacinths. This is magnificent Islamic decoration, rejoicing in natural forms while avoiding showing the human body. It is also a virtuoso demonstration of calligraphy, of sheer skill and joy in writing. The Ottoman Turks, like their predecessors and contemporaries in the Islamic world, held the art of writing in high esteem. The word of God had to be written with all the beauty of holiness. Calligraphers were important bureaucrats who staffed the Turkish chancery, the Divan, which gave its name to the official script of the Ottoman Empire, known as ‘Divani’. The calligraphers developed beautiful and extremely intricate forms of this script. It is notoriously difficult to read – deliberately so – and is designed to prevent extra words being inserted into the text and forgery of official documents. The calligraphers were artists as well as bureaucrats, often belonging to dynasties of craftsmen, passing skills from one generation to the next. In the Islamic world, red tape is often high art.
Modern politicians proudly announce their desire to sweep away bureaucracy. The contemporary prejudice is that it slows you down, clogs things up; but if you take a historical view, it is bureaucracy that sees you through the rocky patches and enables the state to survive. Bureaucracy is not evidence of inertia, as we saw in Chapter 15; it can be life-saving continuity – and nowhere is that clearer than in China. China is the longest surviving state in the world and it is no coincidence that it has the longest tradition of bureaucracy. My next object is a piece of Chinese paper that, like the tughra, is a powerful tool of the state: paper money.
72
Ming Banknote
Paper money, from China
AD 1375–1425
‘Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands!’
The famous moment when Peter Pan asks the audience to save Tinkerbell by joining him in believing in fairies is an unfailing winner. That ability to convince others to believe in something they can’t see but wish to be true is a trick that has been effective in all sorts of ways throughout history. Take the case of paper money: someone in China centuries ago printed a value on a piece of paper and asked everyone else to agree with them that the paper was actually worth what it said it was. You could say that the paper notes, like the Darling children in Peter Pan, were supposed to be ‘as good as gold’, or in this case as good as copper – literally worth the number of copper coins printed on the note. The whole modern banking system of paper and credit is built on this one simple act of faith. Paper money is truly one of the revolutionary inventions of human history.
This object is one of these early paper money notes, which the Chinese called feiqian – ‘flying cash’ – and it’s from the time of the Ming, around 1400. Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, has this to say on the reasons for this invention:
I think in some way the right aphorism is that ‘evil is the root of all money’! Money was invented in order to get round the problems of trusting other individuals. But then the issue was – could you trust the person issuing the money? So the state became the natural issuer of money. And then the question is, can we trust the state? And in many ways that’s a question about whether we can trust ourselves in the future.
Most of the world until this time was exchanging money in coins of gold, silver and copper that had an intrinsic value you could judge