Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Currency Conditions In Modern China The currency of modern China cannot, properly speaking, be called a system. It is composed of a number of systems. There is the cash coinage; the currency of silver bullion based on the tael unit; silver coins, the dollars of foreign as well as of provincial mintage; and finally there are the minor silver coins, fractional parts of the dollar circulating independently of the unit and with no limitations upon their legal-tender quality. We may, however, regard the currency as on a bimetallic basis with the copper cash and the silver tael as the units. This must not be mistaken for real bimetallism. Bimetallism in the sense in which it is understood in the West requires free coinage of two metals (gold and silver) both of which are legal tender, with a fixed ratio between the units of coinage. The two metals in the Chinese currency, on the contrary, are independent of each other and circulate without a fixed exchange- ratio between them. The cash is a standard coin; the tael an uncoined unit of weight. There is a tradition that the cash was intended to be in value the equivalent of one-thousandth of a silver tael, but such a notion has at no time any practical validity since the exchange between the two units depends generally upon their values as metals in the market. I. The Cash. According to one authority the standard weight of this coin should be 57 grains of the metal of which it is made—copper and as much spelter or zinc (sometimes lead) as the copper will take up.1 According to another writer2 the cash is described as a circular coin rather more than an inch in diameter with a square hole in the middle for the convenience of stringing. It should consist of an alloy of copper, 50%; zinc, 41 )4; lead, 6% ', tin, 2; or...