In 2017, CCTV's financial channel produced a documentary called the Silk Road Economic Belt. In the fourth episode of the film, it is said that Chengdu is the birthplace of the world's earliest paper money "Jiaozi".
At first, the nature of the depositor was that the depositor delivered the currency to the merchant who was engaged in the cash custody business, and the shopkeeper filled in the deposit amount on the deposit and charged a certain storage fee, and the depositor could exchange the cash currency in different places with the depositor.
Because the shopkeepers abide by the credit, the jiaozi has the characteristics of a credit currency and becomes a real paper money.
As a result, many merchants began to frequently use jiaozi in large transactions, so shoppers began to print jiaozi with a unified shape and denomination as a new means of circulation to the market.
But to put it bluntly, the ancient jiaozi, which included various other types of silver tickets, was nothing more than a piece of paper. Coupled with the backward scientific conditions in ancient times, there is no tool to distinguish the authenticity of banknotes such as money detectors and purple pens, so how can these shopkeepers ensure that the jiaozi they make will not be maliciously imitated by other people with ulterior motives?
During the Northern Song Dynasty, residents who wanted to buy a Shu brocade worth 20 yuan needed to carry 130 pounds of copper coins with them. Bulky copper coins are inconvenient to carry and cannot meet the market's demand for currency circulation. Thus, a new currency (jiaozi) came into being.
The "History of Song" records: "Taste the Shu, see the iron money used to light, the city Luo one horse, for the money twenty thousand" "Small money weighs sixty-five pounds per ten consecutive, folded large money consistently, weighs twelve kilograms, street market trading, to three or five consecutive texts, that is, it is difficult to hold." ”
Compared with copper coins, the advantages of jiaozi are very obvious. In the first year of Tiansheng (1023), Yizhou established the official jiaozi service, and in the second year of Tiansheng (1024), the official jiaozi was officially issued.
Guan jiaozi first issued 1256340 guan, with a reserve of 360,000 yuan of iron money, the denomination was fixed to ten guan, and the state seal and edict were stamped.
During the reign of Emperor Renzong of Song (from 1039 onwards), the term "official communication" was changed to five and ten consecutive, and by the time of Emperor Shenzong of Song (from 1068 onwards), it was changed to two types: consistent and five hundred texts.
In the first year of the Great View (1107), Jiaozi stopped issuing and changed it to "Qianyin". By the second year of Baoyou (1254), the total amount of money had reached 1.2 billion to 1.6 billion, and the monetary system of the Northern Song Dynasty was collapsing.
Dynasties such as the Ming and Qing dynasties also followed the example of the Northern Song Dynasty, and were officially promoted to issue paper money similar to Jiaozi. From the birth of the paper money system in the Northern Song Dynasty to today, the birth of paper money has greatly promoted the development of human economic history.
Since the ancient silver bills undertook the important responsibility of the circulation of goods and the basic trust between merchants, would some outlaws see the intention of getting rich and recklessly go to the business of imitating silver bills?
The answer is no! Looking at the historical documents, it is not difficult to find that silver bills actually have a variety of anti-counterfeiting means, coupled with the official crackdown, basically eliminating the possibility of private individuals wanting to imitate silver tickets.
First of all, the raw materials for making silver tickets are relatively special and rare, and it is difficult for ordinary people to obtain them, and this first point alone is enough to deter many people.
In 2018, there was a Very Popular Hong Kong movie called "Peerless", which brought together Chow Yun Fat, Aaron Kwok, Wang Yaoqing, Liao Qizhi and other powerful film stars.
The play mainly tells the story of a criminal genius "painter" and a counterfeit genius who teamed up to create super US dollar bills. Through this movie, audience friends learned that the paper used in the banknotes of various countries in the world belongs to the control resources that are strictly prohibited from circulation and trading.
In the movie "Peerless", Aaron Kwok and Chow Yun-fat used connections and a little luck to get the paper to make US dollar bills.
In the same way, the raw material of ancient silver bills is not ordinary paper. For example, the jiaozi currency circulating during the Northern Song Dynasty, its raw material is Sichuan paper.
Sichuan paper is made of squeamina, which has good flexibility and toughness. The banknotes circulating in the Ming Dynasty used mulberry paper, and the raw material of the Qing Dynasty banknotes was a special material mixed with Koryo paper and white table paper produced in Zhejiang.
In the back garden of the more than 300-year-old Bank of England, two mulberry trees were planted. It is said that the paper on which the interleaves are printed is made of the bark and leaves of mulberry trees, which were planted to commemorate the birth of the world's earliest paper money intercourse.
Since ordinary people have no access to these raw materials for making silver tickets, how can they imitate silver tickets?
Secondly, whether it is a shop or an official silver ticket, it is painted with exquisite patterns, including the anti-counterfeiting means of "handwritten writing".
The printed pattern on the silver ticket is well understood, and the silver ticket pattern issued by each shop is different. The main reason why the pattern is drawn on the silver ticket is to prevent someone from making a fake.
If you get a silver ticket from a formal channel and get it to the designated place to trade, there will be a special person to identify and ensure that the transaction is correct before the transaction is completed.
Because the patterns on the genuine silver tickets look different in line, or they paint landscapes or exotic animals. When it comes to the real or a detail, the lines are still very different.
Only the shopkeepers who make these silver tickets will know the method of identification, and the layman does not understand the doorway at all, so it is impossible to imitate.
In addition, there are also paintings stamped by the management organs, and the autographed pledges added separately by the shopkeepers, forming a complete set of anti-counterfeiting marks.
For example, Jin Shang, who walks the world, extracts 324 words from the "Lanting Collection Sequence" and uses it for silver ticket anti-counterfeiting technology, and the sorting order will be changed every two years. Similarly, this set of typesetting order is also a secret that is not passed on.
In this way, Jin merchants were not afraid that the silver tickets issued by themselves would be counterfeited, which was also a solid foundation for Jin merchants to grab a lot of wealth in the middle and late Qing Dynasty.
Finally, the production of counterfeit currency throughout the ages has been a felony. In the thirty-second year of Shaoxing in the Southern Song Dynasty (1162), the official clearly stipulated that the production of fake silver tickets would be punished, and the Yuan Dynasty also had similar punishments.
In the Ming and Qing dynasties, if someone made a fake silver ticket and was discovered, not only would he be asked to be beheaded, but he would also have to connect his family.
Such a severe sentence has completely dispelled the thoughts of many people who want to forge silver tickets. After all, the production of fake silver tickets, once caught, is a disaster for the entire family.
Some people may say: whether it is a complex pattern, including text comparison, it seems that there are traces to follow. If a well-thought-out person wants to crack it, it is not difficult to ask the painter to draw a pattern.
It's like in the movie "Peerless", the fallen painter and the counterfeit tycoon combined swords to produce counterfeit money that even the bank could not identify.
But everyone has thought about it, even if someone can see the pattern on a certain kind of silver ticket, and at the same time master the text typesetting, and the internal "secret bet" order, he must also get the raw materials for making the silver ticket first.
Taking a step back, he got all the raw materials for making silver tickets, and found painters who could imitate patterns to cooperate, and he was not afraid of being caught, and successfully copied a silver ticket. However, counterfeit silver tickets also cost a lot of money.
In the first two years, there was a very hot passage on the Internet, where the police in a certain place successfully smashed a group of criminals who made counterfeit money. When the suspect was interviewed by reporters, he actually poured bitter water, saying that he had made more than 1 million yuan of fake yuan, and the cost of using it was as high as 2 million.
This paragraph made countless netizens laugh, but it is indeed a real thing. In the same way, if someone in ancient times had mastered all the techniques of imitating silver tickets, including being able to obtain raw materials, he must have been an extraordinary person.
Instead of risking being killed to counterfeit silver tickets, it is better to do something serious honestly, at least not to be afraid and lose your life. If the head of the item is gone, then what is the purpose of so much money?
After the issuance of the Northern Song Dynasty, there will always be a large number of counterfeit banknotes at the end of the four dynasties in the future. It was all gang crime, and if individuals wanted to make counterfeit money, it was difficult to ascend to the sky.
In general, the emergence of paper money was premised on the fact that the money in circulation at that time could no longer meet the needs of economic development, and it was only used in large transactions.
In ancient times, if someone wanted to imitate a silver ticket, it had to have superior ability. Not only to get the raw materials, but also to crack the internal anti-counterfeiting technology. Therefore, it is not that the ancients did not want to imitate, but they did not have this ability.
What's more, after the successful imitation of the silver ticket, its economic benefits are not high, the cost is too large, and it has to lose its head when it is caught by the government. In this way, the ancients would not take such a big risk to make imitation silver tickets that were not proportional to the cost input.