Snowflake silver
First of all, let's briefly understand what snowflake silver is. It is reported
The word snowflake silver first appeared in the Song Dynasty, although it often appeared in the subsequent dynastic texts, but only the folk would call it "silver".
this
The unit of measurement of silver is two, and during the Qing Dynasty, the official use of silver as the standard purity of silver currency, the full name is "Hubu Kuping Full Of Silver".
Circulation of silver
Although silver was an important currency in ancient China, it was
People do not directly use "snowflake silver" when conducting daily transactions.
This is because
The value of snowflake silver is very high, unless it is some large transaction, otherwise it is not used at all.
Compared to snowflake silver,
The most commonly traded by the ancients was actually copper coins and broken silver.
Compared with snowflake silver, broken silver has the advantages of easy to carry and use, low value and so on.
Because
Size, weight and shape are not standardized,
The ancients would select the roughly priced pieces of silver according to the price of the commodity when trading.
And in order to avoid making up money, the amount of broken silver paid to the merchant during the buyer's transaction process is usually more, which is probably the reason why the small two in various costume film and television dramas directly pick up the broken silver and are not weighed.
But when we study history carefully, we will find that
When the ancients collected broken silver,
In fact
will use a special weighing tool,
To determine whether the broken silver given by the guest is worth the price.
Other than that
Because the silver content of broken silver is different, its value also varies greatly.
Sometimes there are even cases where broken silver of the same weight can be exchanged for more goods just because of its good quality.
The true appearance of the ancient "snowflake silver"
In view of the fact that there were fake "snowflake silver" and broken silver in ancient times, the ancients would take various means to identify the authenticity of silver when trading with silver, for example
Bite directly with your teeth.
And that also leads to
Ancient Chinese "snowflake silver" and broken silver are tooth marks, and with the circulation of silver these tooth marks are drilled into various dirt,
This makes the ancient real silver look very unclean.
Although in some old ideas, the gloss of silver should be very good, but here we just want to emphasize,
The old idea is one thing, the real silver is another.
In addition, silver will also oxidize during contact with air, which makes it impossible for silver to maintain a "silver sparkle" appearance all the time.
supplement
Finally, we may wish to add a little more knowledge about broken silver. It is reported
The production of broken silver is actually related to the fact that gold and silver were not used as circulating currency for a long time in ancient China.
Be aware
Before the middle of the Ming Dynasty, gold and silver were only used as valuables and circulated among the nobility
It was not until after the middle of the Ming Dynasty that gold and silver were treated as "precious metals" and exchanged for equivalent items under the principle of "barter".
That is to say, before the middle of the Ming Dynasty, when people traded large-scale commodities, they mainly used other large currencies, such as silver bills. After all, people did not have the concept of bartering gold and silver as "precious metals" before.