A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [181]
At first glance, this note doesn’t look at all like modern paper money. It is paper, obviously enough, and it’s larger than a sheet of A4. It’s a soft, velvety grey colour, and it’s made out of mulberry bark, which was the legally approved material for Chinese paper money at the time. The fibres of mulberry bark are long and flexible, so even today, though it’s around 600 years old, the paper is still soft and pliable.
It is fully printed on only one side, a woodblock stamp in black ink with Chinese characters and decorative features arranged in a series of rows and columns. Along the top, six bold characters announce that this is the ‘Great Ming Circulating Treasure Certificate’. Below this there is a decorative border of dragons going all round the sheet – dragons of course being one of the traditional symbols of China and of its emperor. Just inside the border are two columns of text, the one on the left announcing again that this is the ‘Great Ming Treasure Certificate’ and the one on the right saying that this is ‘To Circulate for Ever’.
That’s quite a claim. How permanent can for ever be? In stamping the promise on to the very note, the Ming state seems to be asserting that it too will be around for ever to honour it. I asked Mervyn King to comment on this brave assertion:
I think it’s a contract, an implicit contract, between people and the decisions they believe will be taken in the years and decades to come, about preserving the value of that money. It is a piece of paper – there is nothing intrinsic in value to it – its value is determined by the stability of the institutions that lie behind the issuance of that paper money. If people have confidence that those institutions will continue, if they have confidence that their commitment to stability can be believed, then they will accept and use paper money, and it will become a normal part of circulation. When that breaks down, as it has done in countries where the regime has been destroyed through war or revolution, then the currency collapses.
And indeed this is exactly what had happened in China around 1350, as the Mongol Empire disintegrated. So one of the challenges for the new Ming Dynasty, which took over in 1368, was not just to reorder the state, but to re-establish the currency. The first Ming emperor was a rough provincial warlord, Zhu Yuanzhang, who as a ruler embarked on an ambitious programme to build a Chinese society which would be stable, highly educated and shaped by the principles of the great philosopher Confucius, as the historian Timothy Brook details:
The goal of the founding Ming emperor was that children should be able to read, write and count. It was an idea that he had that everyone should be literate, and he thought literacy was a good idea because it had commercial implications – the economy would run more effectively – and it had moral implications: he wanted school children to read the sayings of Confucius, to read the basic texts about filial piety and respecting elders, and he hoped that literacy would accompany the general re-stabilization of the realm. I would imagine a quarter of the population could read what’s on this note, which by European standards at the time was remarkable.
As part of this impressive political programme, the new Ming emperor decided to relaunch the paper currency. A sound but flexible monetary system would, he knew, encourage a stable society. So he founded the Imperial Board of Revenue and then, in 1374, a ‘treasure note control bureau’. Paper notes began to be issued the following year.
The first challenge was fighting forgery. All paper currencies run the risk of counterfeiting, because of the enormous gulf between