"Nanxi Xiaopi": The immortal family has an incomparable medicinal world, and can dry mercury as silver. But the old man melted the crystal ring into a stream of water in the South Stream.
The continental feudal era and the Western feudal era are very different in many ways. In terms of economy, China's feudal era was based on the silver standard, while the West generally practiced the gold standard
。 The difference between the so-called silver standard and the gold standard is which metal is their main circulating currency. Western countries use gold as their main currency, while China uses silver as the main currency in circulation because China's silver production is relatively high.
The real silver is actually not as beautiful as in the film and television drama, the ancient silver looked like this, it was full of dirt and tooth marks
And white send you are dirty.
Silver became the main circulating currency
Why is there dirt and tooth marks on this silver? There is dirt to understand, silver ingots have undergone the baptism of history, so there is some dirt. So why are there tooth marks?
In fact, these tooth marks were left by the ancients, and they judged whether the silver was real or fake by biting into the silver.
Before the Ming Dynasty, China's silver reserves were not much, so the value of silver was very high, and the probability of people using silver in peacetime was not too large. Later, in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, silver flowed along the route to China, and people began to use silver in large quantities in daily life, which became the main circulating currency.
In ancient times, ordinary people mainly used silver and copper coins for trading, and few people had the opportunity to use gold for trading. For some people with ulterior motives,
Since silver has such a wide range of uses, they will of course forge it.
But in ancient times, people counterfeited not as we think, and some modern traders will use some electrolytic aluminum to pass off silver in order to counterfeit silver.
The price of aluminum in ancient times was very high, so if the ancients faked silver, they would generally add some lead or tin to the silver
The silver thus made looks particularly like the real thing. As the saying goes, the devil is one foot high, the road is one foot high, someone makes forged silver, then the ancients will have some ways to identify the authenticity of silver, the ancients mainly have these three methods.
A method of identifying authenticity
The first way to do this is to judge from the appearance of silver
In fact, observing the appearance of silver is also observing the production process of this silver in a certain sense. Ancient silver has two characteristics,
Honeycomb and silk.
If it has these two characteristics, this silver is generally real. In addition to this method, people will also listen to the sound of silver, and from the sound to distinguish whether this color is real or false.
If you take the silver you suspect and hit each other with another silver that you are sure to be real, and make a hollow sound or a broken sound, it is fake silver, or silver in a shell.
In addition to the method of observing and listening to sounds, the ancients also had a very common method, and we often saw people in film and television dramas identifying the authenticity of silver in this way.
The ancients would feel the softness and hardness of the silver by biting the silver with their teeth, so as to judge whether the silver was real or fake
。 Because the texture of silver is relatively soft, we can use our teeth to bite it to determine whether this is real or fake silver.
Mo said that in ancient times, sometimes people now in the absence of other instruments, may also use the method of biting to judge whether the silver in their hands is real silver,
This is a very generic approach. For silver circulates not only in the hands of one person, it circulates in the hands of many
Many people want to try whether this silver is real or fake.
Slowly, time accumulated, resulting in a lot of tooth marks on this silver.
There are many silver tooth marks, and to a certain extent, it also leaves a hiding place for those dirt
。 So we sometimes look at the relics of silver handed down in ancient times, which have a lot of tooth marks on them and a lot of dirt. Don't think that this silver is dirty because of these tooth marks and dirt,
In fact, in a certain sense, it has really experienced the baptism of history and witnessed generation after generation.
epilogue
When we went to the museum, we saw the silver, which, although it had been washed and treated by the staff, could still see the black residue on the silver.
In a certain sense, these residues are also the manifestations of silver's historical weather. Ancient silver was very dirty, and those who loved to be clean, Mo said, regarded it as a treasure, and may not be willing to take it.
For the ancient people, let alone biting with their teeth, even if they use other methods, as long as they can prove that this silver is true, their labor is not in vain, so it is very worthwhile. Those ordinary people are very simple, they believe in a piece of hard work, a harvest, and only take what they deserve. It is precisely such simple Chinese people, it is their growth from generation to generation, the development of generation after generation, that has created today's brilliant Chinese culture.
Reference: Nanxi Xiaopi