As one of the four ancient civilizations with the oldest history, China not only used writing early, but also one of the earliest countries in the world to know how to use money. The currency in circulation in China is now a paper currency issued by the state, while in ancient China, silver was one of the main circulating currencies.
Silver can be used as a universal currency, and its amount can be imagined to be countless. However, in real life, we can often see various jewelry made of silver, but we rarely see silver dollars that were used as currency in ancient times.
Why did the ancient silver dollar disappear in modern times as if it had disappeared? Where did all this thousands of pieces of silver go?
Silver that is different from what you imagined
Silver dollars in ancient times are actually very different from the silver dollars we know, maybe you don't know the real silver, if you don't understand silver, then we won't know why silver disappeared.
In ancient times, silver was divided into official silver and municipal silver. Official silver is silver used for public use, has mandatory specifications, and is generally located in the national treasury, mainly for military salaries, official salaries, and so on. The city bank is the circulating currency used by ordinary people in their daily lives.
In film and television dramas, we can sometimes see that after the government discovers that the private person has a silver two with an official seal during the investigation, it will put this person in prison. This is because official silver and silver are not allowed to be used privately, and once discovered, they will be convicted of the crime of embezzlement and head-killing.
Although silver was used as an ancient circulating currency, in the daily life of the people, the general consumption did not need silver. In film and television dramas, the protagonist needs to spend a few silver to eat a meal and buy something at a stall vendor or in a shop, and even some characters are actually unrealistic when they shoot silver ingots.
First of all, according to the price of the most prosperous Tang Dynasty in the historical dynasty, the value of one or two pieces of silver is now equivalent to several thousand yuan, and more than two thousand catties of rice can be purchased. Even in the Qing Dynasty, the most economically underdeveloped and backward, one or two pieces of silver were equivalent to the current 600 yuan.
Then look at the income of people at that time, the average person's income a day is about 100 yuan, they have to work for ten consecutive days and they can only have one or two pieces of silver without eating, drinking or consuming. Even as a courtier of the emperor and an official in the dynasty, the year of Feng Lu was only nearly a few tens of taels of silver. Therefore, the scenes shown in the TV series are completely different from the situation in reality.
Due to the misleading of film and television dramas, everyone thinks that silver two can be seen everywhere in ancient times, but the value of silver two is not low, and people do not often use silver two as currency in life. In daily transactions, the type of currency that ordinary people use more is copper coins.
In fact, there is another reason why people do not often use silver in trading, because the city silver that the people can use has no special requirements in size and shape, so ordinary broken silver is different in weight. When paying for broken silver, people will need scissors and scales, and sometimes wax blocks.
You must know that the vast majority of people are very calculating for money, and there are very few people like the rich who do not need to find change, and there will be no one who directly pays for silver ingots without broken silver.
In order to trade and buy and sell goods, people will first cut a whole piece of silver ingots into broken silver with scissors, although people often use scissors to cut silver, the accuracy is very good, but it is still necessary to measure the weight of silver with a scale. It is said to be one of the great inventions of the ancient times on the mainland, and the emergence of the name solves many problems in people's lives, including determining the specific weight of silver to measure the value of silver.
Because silver chips are inevitable when cutting silver, it is necessary to use wax blocks, and the collected silver chips are integrated into silver chips with melted wax blocks.
Because the value of silver is high, there will also be malicious and unscrupulous human fraud. In ancient times, silver was allowed to be made by the people, and the melting and reorganization process of silver was not complicated, which caused some unscrupulous people to add lead to it in order to increase the weight of silver.
In order to distinguish the true and false of silver two, the most common way of distinguishing people is simply and rudely biting with teeth, some experienced people can also identify the authenticity by observing the color of silver two, sometimes people will also cut silver through scissors to check the true and false, if the silver two add other impurities, then the silver is cut open after the fault appears, which can distinguish the authenticity, here have to admire the wisdom and talent of the ancients.
The silver two circulating in the market because people often bite with their teeth, so there will be many bite marks, not as smooth and tidy as in the TV screen, so good-looking, on the contrary, a silver covered with tooth marks can be said to have no beauty at all.
In contrast, copper plates have no real and false troubles because the cost of counterfeiting is higher than the actual value, and the size value has clear regulations, and it does not need to be as troublesome as silver and cut and weighed.
Not only that, silver cannot be pierced in the middle like a copper plate and fixed with a rope, so carrying silver can only be packed with cloth bags or sachets. If you lose your drop because you are not careful, it will be a big loss.
Because the use of silver is time-consuming and laborious, and it is not easy to keep, most of the copper plates used by people in the daily consumption process are copper plates, and the value of copper coins is relatively more complex than the price level at that time.
Silver as a currency is mainly used for storage, and some large households with silver two usually store silver in safe money houses or hidden places in their homes. This is somewhat similar to how modern people keep cash in a bank or in a safe at home.
As a non-renewable resource, silver is limited in quantity and not inexhaustible. Due to the limited mining conditions at that time, the amount of silver was not much, and the amount of silver circulating in the market was even less.
In ancient times, most of the silver was stored except for ornaments or utensils. Even if the amount of silver is not as much as imagined, it will not lead to the modern market of silver to the point where it is scarce and expensive.
Silver underground
Although the common people in ancient times could not afford to use real money and silver, the silver in the homes of the dignitaries and dignitaries in ancient times was tens of thousands, but why in modern times, the amount of silver is left?
In ancient times, it was impossible for a man to spend all his possessions before he died, leaving nothing behind. Therefore, after death, people will hope to use a part of their property as a funerary to follow them for a lifetime, so that they can also have wealth in another world.
In ancient times, people attached great importance to funeral culture, and some large families would use a large amount of wealth as funerary goods in order to satisfy their vanity of eternal life and eternal enjoyment of glory and wealth, including silver.
Therefore, in archaeology now, it is often possible to judge the status of this person before death and the material level of life by the scale and value of its funerary objects.
Among those who died recently, the famous Empress Dowager Cixi of the Qing Dynasty was a person with an extremely rich funerary product. It is said that just to build the mausoleum, Cixi spent more than 3,000 taels of gold, including tens of thousands of funerary items.
When Empress Dowager Cixi was buried, she took away most of the gold and silver treasures and rare treasures of the Qing Dynasty at that time, such as the priceless Night Pearl, Jade Lotus, and Emerald Watermelon, which alone are worth hundreds of millions of yuan now. The number of other pearls, agate, gold, silver and jade is in the thousands.
In addition to the sharp decline in the amount of silver caused by the fact that Empress Dowager Cixi took most of the silver with her when she was buried, Empress Dowager Cixi also spent a lot of silver during her lifetime.
You know, almost no woman in the world can resist the exquisite ornaments, including the most honorable Empress Dowager Cixi at that time. During cixi's lifetime, she was very keen on gold and silver jewelry, and used most of the silver to smelt and make jewelry, resulting in the small amount of silver that was in short supply.
In addition to Empress Dowager Cixi's use of silver as a funerary object, almost all the relatives of the emperor and the generals in history would bring a large amount of gold and silver into the ground after their death, so that they could enjoy wealth in another world.
According to statistics, there are more than 400 emperors in Chinese history, and there are countless other princes, grandchildren, concubines and courtiers. And these people need a large amount of gold and silver jewelry as funerary goods, which leads to the passage of time, more and more gold and silver jewelry and exquisite utensils disappeared in front of the public's eyes. Except for some of the treasures that have been seen again for archaeological or tomb robbery reasons, the rest have been buried in the ground forever.
The last silver
After the outbreak of the Opium War and the forced opening of China's doors, due to the backwardness of the country at that time, China was constantly bullied by foreign countries, became a foreign colony, and signed many treaties that humiliated the country.
The content of the treaty is either the cession of land or the reparations, and the amount of silver reparations due to these unequal treaties is as high as 1.3 billion. In addition to the treaty's reparations, foreigners continued to loot and loot everywhere in China's territory.
The backwardness of the country has caused a large number of gold and silver treasures and antique cultural relics to be lost overseas, and these silver two have since been like stones sinking into the sea without a trace.
Except for foreign aggression, a large amount of silver flowed overseas without a trace. Chiang Kai-shek during the Republic of China period used the excuse of avoiding the outflow of silver as a reason to collect a large amount of silver and silver products in the people, and after the defeat of the Kuomintang civil war, he fled to Taiwan with these silvers.
According to the records of the time, the Kuomintang took away more than 2 million gold and more than 10 million silver, and took them away from the mainland in three batches. In this way, the only remaining silver in China was also taken away.
After the founding of New China, in order to develop the basic industry after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the government once recovered a large amount of silver, so that silver completely withdrew from the historical stage of money and disappeared into the people's trading tools, and the last silver dedicated itself to the construction of China.
Some people may think that although the previous silver is gone, it does not mean that it cannot be re-mined, but the resources on the earth are limited, and people cannot consume the earth uncontrollably for their own selfish desires, and in china's thousands of years of history, the resources of the earth have been mined almost, as early as the Qing Dynasty, the last silver mine that can be mined has been hollowed out. This means that there is no longer any hidden silver in China, and if the silver disappears now, the silver will no longer exist.
Another form of silver
Although silver is no longer our currency, and now we can only see real silver dollars in mobile phones and museums, silver is only a different form that exists in our lives, although its role is no longer for trading, but because of its metallic nature and beautiful appearance, we can often see its shadow on jewelry or some utensils.
In addition to being used as an ornament, silver also protects our health as a material in medical supplies, and the eye drops we use in our daily lives contain silver nitrate extracted from silver.
At the same time, because silver is a material with good photosensitivity, silver plays an indispensable role as one of the materials in some medical equipment such as X-ray machines. In addition, the photosensitive function of silver is also used in the soft sheets of photography and the film of printing.
As early as ancient times, there was a saying that silver needles were tested for poison, and the use of bowls and chopsticks made of silver for a long time helped to reduce the residual toxicity in food. An accidental poisoning incident, so that people found that the imperial relatives in the incident than the ministers of the probability of food poisoning is much smaller, one of the important reasons is that the imperial relatives use silver chopsticks, and silver can reduce the toxins in the food, so that people eat when eating the food, less toxic than the original food.
Silver serves our health as well as our technology. Due to the excellent electrical and thermal conductivity of silver, it has appeared in many electronic products. Parts containing silver are found in the mobile phones and computers we use every day, as well as some other electronic devices.
As the times changed, so did the value of silver. In the past we used to trade silver or use it as decoration, but now we use silver to improve our lives and improve our technology. With the development of our science and technology and the progress of the times, we have used silver to do things that we could not do in ancient times, or even dare not think.
Silver is not only sought after by many people in ancient times, but also used as an investment product in modern times and is still loved by everyone. Silver continues to contribute its value to mankind, and the public's eyes never seem to leave this metal, and everyone believes that the value of silver will go to a higher level in the future.
epilogue
Good things are always limited and need to be cherished by everyone. Silver is just one of the non-renewable resources. Forests have become deserts due to the frenzied mining practices of humans, and many animals have become endangered species because they have lost their habitat.
On closer inspection, it is not difficult to find that the frequency of natural disasters in recent years is much higher than that of the previous ones. If natural disasters are sudden diseases, acid rain and the destruction of the ozone layer, as well as the melting of glaciers, are chronic diseases. People who have been sick know that if there is a disease, it must be cured, although the earth has a self-healing system like human beings, but if you encounter a disease that cannot heal itself, blindly dragging on, the situation will only get worse and worse.
It's not too late to make amends. The cliff is pulled back, and the back is the shore. If humans do not stop in time and do not understand the importance of protecting the environment, then the consequences caused by human behavior will be directly fed back to ourselves. Parents know how to love their children and leave the best things to their children and grandchildren, but if we don't stop taking from the earth, what will our children and grandchildren take to survive. So from a macroscopic point of view, how long can humans survive?
While silver protects our health and provides us with benefits, we must also cherish it and love it, avoid making it disappear, and let it serve us forever. So cherish the resource in front of you, because you never know how long it can serve us, and if we cherish it a little more, it will survive longer.
The animals and non-renewable resources on the earth, the family and friends around us, these are the people and things that have dedicated their own value to us and are worth cherishing.