Foreign currencies in ancient and premodern China

Abstract

As currency is the representative and symbol of a sovereign country, the record and knowledge of foreign currencies have become indispensable parts of ancient China’s history of foreign exchanges. This chapter mainly summarises multidimensional knowledge of foreign currencies in ancient China from three types of historical documents: biographies of ethnic minorities; specialised records of money; and travel notes. A number of conclusions are reached. First, the records of foreign currencies in ancient China mostly relate to shape, structure and appearance, reflecting people’s most perceptual and intuitionistic understanding of foreign currencies. Second, currency ratio is also recognised and recorded in ancient China, but the issue of exchange ratio in the modern sense has not yet entered the public ideology. Third, policies for management of foreign currencies were set up in the Ming and Qing dynasties, including the management of foreign representative full-bodied monies, the supplement of domestic liquidity shortage and the imitation of modern currency on the basis of foreign currencies.