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Naturalist (ID: bowuzazhi)
At the end of the year, it's time to prepare some New Year goods to take home. Electronic payment methods make us unable to touch the money, buy and buy do not feel that it costs a lot of money, but in the blink of an eye, eh? How did the balance whizz down?
In today's era of electronic payment, many scholars have always insisted on the irreplaceability of cash. Where will such things as money go, we may as well trace back to the source and look at the past and present lives of money with the eyes of "naturalism".
You know, the world's first invention of the use of metal money, paper money is Chinese. Today, let's take a look at China's earliest currency.
Sea shells that stand out
Once upon a time... Long before the dawn of civilization such as cities, bronze, and writing, "exchange" was born.
In the beginning, it must be barter, each taking what is needed. But everyone's needs may be different: for example, someone wants to exchange fur for food, but the person who has food needs sackcloth, and the person with a surplus of sackcloth may want to eat fish... That's not easy.
Fighting is not good, especially bad
Therefore, the ancestors began to look for items that everyone was willing to accept as a medium of exchange, which was the "general equivalent".
In Chinese history, there have been many things that have been regarded as general equivalents: rice millet, livestock, cloth, leather, agricultural tools, turtle shells, mussel beads, animal tooth horns, and so on. After a long period of choice and elimination, the final standout is -
Sea shells!
Sea shells
The number of seashells became the measure of almost all goods—in economics, this special commodity, which is fixed as a general equivalent, is called money. With money, exchange officially becomes "buying and selling."
Why seashells?
In ancient times, the value of sea shells was not the same as today. First of all, it is beautiful and is a favorite decoration for everyone. For most of the ancestors, the sea shell probably also attached magical attributes - because the form fits the fertility cult, it became a rich and prolific amulet and mascot to ward off evil spirits.
In the traditional costumes of the Kikuyu people of Kenya, Africa, shells are used as decorations. Image credit: wiki
Secondly, they are small, lightweight and portable, and durable, not easy to wear.
In addition, their rarity is just right: that is, they are quite rare and difficult to grasp; but they must not be too small, and they cannot circulate in sufficient quantities.
Then you may ask, isn't there a lot of shells on the beach? Didn't the people who lived by the sea have sent a haircut?
Then you are wrong, although there are many kinds of shells in the sea, but based on the above conditions, the number of currencies that can be selected is quite limited. According to archaeological findings, the ancestors mainly focused on the members of the gastropod family (monococcupation, often called snails), of which "cargo shells" are the most common.
Living Cargo Shell (Huang Baoluo)
Image source: inaturalist.org
In modern biological classification, the shellfish is a genus, and the vast majority of shell coins excavated from ancient sites are two species in this genus, the shellfish and the ring shell.
Both are small sea shells, with adults up to a maximum of 2.8 cm, and most are 1.8 to 2 cm long. They are similar in size, equal in weight, and easy to count – and have the natural advantage of being a currency.
In addition to the two main cargo shells (Yellow Treasure Snail) and Ring Pattern Cargo Shell (Golden Ring Treasure Snail), there are some other kinds of shells in ancient Chinese ruins and tombs: tabby baby (black star treasure snail), Awen silk shell (Arabian treasure snail), black spot eyeball shell (first snow treasure snail), jujube shell (Love Dragon treasure snail), etc., which may also participate in circulation as shell coins.
Where do inland sea shells come from?
According to archaeological findings and documentary records, sea shells were used as a large amount of currency in China since the Shang Dynasty more than 3,000 years ago. The main areas where the shell coins were unearthed stretched from the coast in the east, to Guanzhong in the west, to the Yangtze River in the south, and to the Great Wall in the north, especially in the Central Plains generation, which was the most dense and huge in number.
The tombs of the Shang Dynasty nobles in Yin Ruins in Henan often buried tens, hundreds or even thousands of cargo shells. In the tomb of the famous woman Hao (wife of king Wu Ding of the Shang Dynasty), there are more than 6880 shells. At about the same time, in Sanxingdui, Sichuan, 5,000 sea shells were also found buried in two sacrificial pits.
A large number of sea shells were unearthed from the Sanxingdui tomb
Image source: Look at the news
The places with the largest amount of shell coins unearthed are the three sites of Yin Ruins in Henan, Sanxingdui in Sichuan, and ancient Dian in Yunnan. In fact, the scope of use of shell coins is quite wide, hundreds of places where shell coins have been excavated, almost all over the country: Yangshao ruins, Jiangzhai ruins, Erlitou ruins, Majiayao ruins, Siba ruins, Subutun ruins...
However, cargo shells mainly grow in tropical shallow seas, where did the shell coins from the Central Plains and Western Shu come from?
Some scholars speculate that some of them are from the South China Sea on the mainland, and some are from the Bay of Bengal and even the Maldives Islands. They were collected in economic and trade centers such as Yin Ruins through tribute or re-trade, processed by craftsmen, and then circulated through trading and rewards.
What can a bunch of shells buy?
Since the Shang Dynasty, with the economic prosperity, shell coins have gradually changed from one flower to a bunch of use. At first, people just punched a hole in the shell to make it easier to thread the rope. In the later period, the back of the shell was simply flattened to make it a flat "coin", which was undoubtedly more convenient to carry and use in large quantities.
Early people punched shells, and later flattened the top surface of the shells
Image source network
In the Shang Zhou Dynasty, the unit of string shell coins was "Peng", and a string of 10 coins was a friend.
The original meaning of the Chinese character "peng" in oracle bone and gold scripts is two strings of shell coins, which are used as a unit of currency. Later, because of the state of the Bebe coins tied together, the semantics such as party and friendship were derived.
What can a friend buy?
There are many accounts of different eras. For example, the inscription of the Shu Si Zi Ding unearthed from the Yin Ruins says: The Shang King rewarded 20 pang pei, and shu Si Zi used this as a capital to make this bronze ding dedicated to his father.
The value of Ding is not easy to estimate, but looking at the WeiLu (hé, wine vessel) between the Western Anniversary, two land transactions are recorded: 10 fields were exchanged for 80 peng of "Jin Zhang" (jade) and 20 peng of "Chi Hu" (Qiu Fu) was exchanged for another 3 fields. Using ancient and modern units to convert, a friend can buy 7.5 to 9 acres of good land.
Western Zhou bronze wine vessel "Wei Lun"
It is also written in the Book of Poetry: "Seeing the gentleman, tin (giving) me a hundred friends." "If in the Western Zhou Dynasty, 100 friends can buy seven or eight hundred acres of land, it is estimated that it is only a poetic exaggeration, and the reward of this magnitude is rarely seen in the real literature."
What should I do if I don't have enough shellfish?
After all, the number of natural sea shellfish is limited, the productivity continues to develop, and the cargo shellfish is becoming more and more insufficient. As a result, many substitutes for imitation shell coins - "imitation shellfish" came into being: stone shells, bone shells, mussel shells, green pine shells... Lots of tricks.
With the development of metallurgical technology, copper shells also began to appear. For example, in the 1960s, Shanxi Baode found a 3,000-year-old late Shang Dynasty cellar, excavating 109 bronze imitation shells - Baode copper shells are the world's earliest known metal coinage.
All kinds of imitation shellfish
Copper shells have almost all the functions of shell coins, and they can also be cut and cast independently, which is obviously better to use. From the Spring and Autumn Period onwards, metal money prevailed and gradually replaced shell coins. By the Warring States period, the shell coins of the various princely states had basically withdrawn from circulation. By 221 BC, the Qin Dynasty unified China, and the Bei coin era officially came to an end.
However, in some remote areas of the mainland, sea shells still maintain local circulation. Among them, Yunnan is particularly prosperous, and many places in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties can still use goods as pocket money (of course, official acts such as paying taxes must use silver copper plates).
The picture shows the bronze shell vessel of the Yunnan Dian State in the Western Han Dynasty. Shell vessels are the characteristic luxury vessels of the ancient Dian Kingdom, which are specially used to store shell coins and are also used to sacrifice ancestors. Yunnan's ancient poison road is an important passage for the sea shells of South Asia and Southeast Asia to enter China, and the long-term use of shell coins in Yunnan may be related to the enrichment of shellfish.
In the Nu River Gorge, where traffic is blocked, sea shells have been used until the Republic of China period: a civilian shell can buy a bowl of cold powder or a bowl of liquor; 10 can be exchanged for a liter of grain; 50 are a pig; and 80 are a cow. It was not until 1949, when the deep mountains were directly switched to the renminbi, that the shell coin was completely withdrawn nationwide.
In addition to ancient China, many civilizations (ethnic groups) in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania and Africa also used sea shells as currency. Finally, let's see what you can buy from shell coins in other places.
The purchasing power of the shell coin
(Market prices in the Kingdom of Dahomey, West Africa in March 1850)
Written by | Wang Yongsheng Li Xiao Falcon
Photography | Qiu Jianming Arterial Shadow Tang Zhiyuan
Drawing | Su Yi Meng Fanmeng
WeChat Editor | What a cool
This article was originally published in the January 2021 issue of Naturalist magazine