When I was a child, I often saw in various costume martial arts movies that a group of handsome guys and beautiful girls played "heroes", after eating and drinking in the restaurant, they took out a few scattered small silver grains from their bodies, and then threw them to Xiao Er, who came to settle the bill.
Removing the yearning for the free and easy life of the heroes, the operation of throwing silver grains makes me very curious, because we know that in costume movies and TV series, the common currency seems to be silver, whether it is a huge ingots or a few scattered silver horns, all of which illustrate the monetary attributes of silver.
The scale of silver, which once supported the market transactions on the mainland and once became one of the mainstream currencies, is quite large, so why haven't we seen these ancient silver ingots much in our daily life now?
1
Misleading from TV dramas
In fact, there is one thing that has to be said here, many costume TV series are actually limited by the historical and cultural level of the screenwriter, and many of the settings are seriously detached from specific dynasties, such as the use of silver, in fact, it also depends on the specific dynasty. After all, the mainland is not actually a country with a lot of silver production.
This means that for a long time, it didn't really exist as a "general equivalent". In fact, for a long time, silver was used as a precious metal reserve, that is, used to make jewelry, make ritual utensils and large rewards, in fact, it is more equivalent to a kind of luxury.
Under such circumstances, many landlords and magnates may not have much silver in their hands, and naturally there will not be too much silver circulation among the people, but more among the upper classes of the country. When silver was popularized to the people and began to be used on a certain scale, it was already after the Ming Dynasty, and a large amount of foreign trade brought huge silver imports.
It is precisely because of the large amount of silver that even the people began to use silver for some trade to a certain extent, which not only brought great prosperity to the market at that time, but also began to make the once "unattainable" silver begin to enter the homes of "ordinary people" to a certain extent.
The reason why there is such a big difference is that it was during the Age of Discovery, and European countries obtained a large amount of silver from the Americas, and this obtained silver was used in large quantities to buy tea, silk and ceramics from China. At that time, the Ming Dynasty only had silver for external demand, so it caused a huge silver surplus. At its peak, China, a country that does not produce much silver, has the largest amount of silver reserves.
2
The reason for the disappearance
And in this case, why is this happening? In fact, there are several situations. First of all, the reason for storage, after all, we have an old saying "calligraphy and painting in prosperous times, gold and silver in troubled times", due to the great changes in the political situation in ancient times, many far-sighted families will store precious metals such as silver and gold to keep their families alive, and such repositories are often easy to disappear in troubled times.
In addition, many ancient people liked large-scale burials, for example, when the princes and generals died, they often buried a large amount of gold and silver in their tombs, such as the tombs of the Marquis of Hailun discovered a few years ago, and there were a large number of precious metals and cultural relics to accompany the burial. Taken together, a large amount of silver has disappeared from the market for various reasons.
Another reason is because of the large amount of land reparations at the end of the Qing Dynasty, due to the defeat of many foreign wars at the end of the Qing Dynasty, a large number of foreign land reparations had to be signed. Since the Qing government was a silver-standard country at that time, this led to the loss of a large amount of silver reserves, and even brought the Qing government's finances to the brink of collapse for a time. We can see that a large number of agreements were signed at the end of the Qing Dynasty to make reparations, and a large amount of silver was lost.
The third most important reason is that at the beginning of world trade, silver was indeed the hard currency of many countries, but with the development of industry and the sharp increase in silver mining, many countries have given up silver as currency, but turned to the "gold standard", and even with the advent of the new century, simply gave up the link with precious metals, and completely moved towards the "no standard", or the "credit standard" world.
Silver, which has lost its "general equivalent" attribute and has risen sharply in reserves and development, has continued to depreciate in value. Just like now, even the price was 5-6 yuan a gram at one time, that is, one tael of silver is about equivalent to 200-300 yuan. Since it is no longer equivalent to wealth, silver has naturally disappeared from everyone's field of vision.
And because of its good thermal and electrical conductivity, it is currently used more as an industrial raw material, such as the contacts and cables of key parts used in various large industrial machinery, and we may also use it in precision electronic instruments such as mobile phones and computers that we use daily.
The fourth point that many people don't know is that the complete collapse of the mainland's silver standard monetary system actually occurred during the Republic of China, and the source of this "currency crisis" is actually a domestic law in the United States, which also made the government of the Republic of China experience what a financial crisis is.
3
The "currency wars" and the collapse of the silver standard
The cause of the incident was that in 1929, due to the impact of the Great Depression, the life of the people in the United States was in trouble, and even caused the common people to start a difficult life for a time. Then, in order to revitalize the economy, then President Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, but in the game with Congress, he had to compromise with interest groups such as the Silver Group, which at that time demanded a higher price of silver in exchange for their support for the New Deal.
At that time, after weighing the pros and cons, he decided to agree to this request for the smooth implementation of his new policy. However, no one could have predicted that what was supposed to be an exchange of interests would have a disastrous impact on the Nationalist government at the time. Because at that time, only China was still implementing the silver standard system among the major countries, and the US government's expansion of acquisitions would lead to a surge in international silver prices.
In that era of change, such a large-scale acquisition made the finances of the Republic of China, which was already precarious at that time, instantly fall into trouble. For such an operation, they called Lao Mei really not martial arts, because this acquisition directly led to a surge in international silver prices, which caused China's exchange rate to rise sharply at that time, and the competitiveness of export products fell instantly.
At this time, the London Economic Conference was held as scheduled, and countries sought solutions to stabilize the value of their currencies. However, for the silver group in the United States, the meeting turned out to be a great opportunity for extortion. Against this backdrop, representatives of China and the United States engaged in a fierce confrontation at the meeting, and the Chinese side was represented by Soong Ziwen.
Before leaving, Song Ziwen had publicly expressed his opposition to the United States' behavior of violently raising the price of silver through a large number of purchases, but what was unexpected was that after meeting the Americans at the meeting, he suddenly changed his position, proposed that excessively high silver prices were not necessarily harmful, and even declared that the Chinese delegation's position on the silver issue was consistent with US policy.
This change undoubtedly shocked and disappointed the Chinese people at the time, who accused Soong Ziwen of betraying national interests. Amid the public outcry, people have speculated about Soong's true intentions, one possibility is to attract American aid to China through this move. However, for the Silver Group, their long-cherished wish has finally come true.
The meeting went on smoothly as a result of a change of opinion on the main opponent, and they signed the London Silver Agreement in England, vowing to gradually stabilize the price of silver over the next four years. The most important of these was the commitment of the United States to buy more than 20 million ounces of silver a year, which was almost equal to the amount of American production in 1932.
After this news broke, the American representative instantly became the savior of the related industry, after all, he not only succeeded in raising the world silver price, but also skillfully made the US government the largest buyer of silver mines in the country. With this agreement, the U.S. government was forced to further increase its silver purchases, so that the price of silver per ounce was guaranteed to be $0.2, and at the same time, the international price of silver rose in response.
Just one month after the implementation, the domestic immature financial industry capital was completely unable to withstand it, and they completely underestimated the final effect of this initiative, because they seriously underestimated the greed in human nature and overestimated their own management ability. Due to the huge interest rate differential, there was a large amount of silver flowing out of the country every year at that time.
And anyone with a discerning eye can see that the government's subsidy of the silver industry at distorted prices is actually a disguised profiteering by relevant interest groups from government spending. In order to avoid the influence of public opinion, the silver group had to go further and buy silver from all over the world, artificially driving up the price of silver in order to make the distorted purchase price of silver seem more reasonable, so as to achieve their ultimate goal of subsidizing the American silver industry.
However, the rate of outflow has begun to widen due to the continuous surge in prices. At this time, some people wondered, was there no means to manage the outflow at that time? At this time, it can only be said that at that time, from the so-called "central bank and treasury" to the local scattered money banks, were engaged in crazy silver arbitrage, especially those who were the main oligarchs who exported abroad, and even the government at that time did not dare to offend.
Even the Japanese, seeing this, quietly made a move, not only making a lot of profits, but also collapsing a number of greedy banks by the way. What were the consequences of this frenzied outflow of money? That is, the drastic shortage of money supply, coupled with the drastic appreciation, dealt a heavy blow to many national industries at that time, and the consequence was that a large number of production enterprises were forced to go bankrupt, and finally they were forced to carry out the reform of the monetary system.
Resources:
Qilu One Point - Where did the large amount of silver that circulated in ancient times of the "Daily Social Science" go?
The Paper - How did silver change be used in ancient times?