During the Northern Song Dynasty, the agricultural economy and urban economy flourished unprecedentedly, various commodities emerged one after another, and industries such as porcelain, textiles, papermaking, medicine, mining and smelting, shipbuilding, and printing developed rapidly. If you want to have a glimpse of the prosperity of the Northern Song Dynasty, you only need to look at the "Qingming Riverside Map" to get a glimpse of the leopard.
On the "Qingming Riverside Map", we can see the busy streets, the streets are very busy with people doing their jobs, and the streets are lined with rows of shops with various patterns. The reason why the Northern Song Dynasty was able to become the world's leading country at that time was naturally inseparable from the rapid economic development at that time, and the economic development also depended on the circulation of money.
China has an extremely long monetary history, and is one of the earliest countries in the world to use currency, with a long history of monetary culture. From shellfish to round square-hole money, there are countless currencies. In the Song Dynasty, when the economy was highly prosperous and commerce and handicrafts were developed, the first set of paper money in Chinese history appeared - Jiaozi.
The Song Dynasty had a wide variety of coins, which caused great inconvenience to the merchants. Especially in Sichuan at that time, Sichuan mainly circulated iron money, with a small face value and a large total amount, which was extremely inconvenient for merchants to conduct high-value transactions. Therefore, in the first year of Zhenzong of the Northern Song Dynasty, Jiaozi appeared, which can be circulated in the market, but also has the nature of checks, which is carriable, has little loss, and is very convenient to use, becoming the earliest paper money used in the world.
On the occasion of the millennium commemoration of the birth of Chinese banknotes, the People's Bank of China is scheduled to issue a set of 3 gold and silver commemorative coins of Chinese banknotes on April 22, 2024, including 2 gold commemorative coins and 1 silver commemorative coin, all of which are legal tender of the People's Republic of China. The issuance of this set of commemorative coins has important commemorative value for publicizing the importance of the invention of banknotes to the development of the world and highlighting the achievements of ancient Chinese financial innovation.
Among them, the obverse of the 150-gram rectangular gold commemorative coin is the national emblem of the People's Republic of China, and the name and year of the country are published. The picture on the back is composed of typical streets and alleys, scenes of commercial activities and regional characteristic landscapes in Chengdu in the Northern Song Dynasty, showing the background of the emergence of China's earliest banknotes in Chengdu during the prosperous era of commerce and trade in the Northern Song Dynasty, and the words "Millennium of Chinese Banknotes" and denominations are published.
The coin innovatively chooses a vertical rectangular layout, draws on the long axis of Chinese painting, and absorbs the perspective treatment method of traditional Chinese painting - a bird's-eye view, so that the scenery is arranged far and near without concealing each other, and the grand scene of the integration of cities, villages, rivers and mountains is cleverly displayed between the square inches of the commemorative coin. The close-up design intersperses the bustling cityscape with a number of vivid and vivid production and trade scenes, and the architectural and human details are referenced from the "Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival". The vision design extracts a number of regional characteristic landscapes from the poems of the Northern Song Dynasty, such as Jinjiang River, Wangjianglou, Dujiangyan, Qingcheng Mountain, Siguniang Mountain, etc., and integrates them through cloud and air connection. The overall formation of the virtual and real, ethereal poetic design style.
In order to commemorate the birth of Jiaozi in the Northern Song Dynasty for a thousand years, take the technique of the Northern Song Dynasty's "Qingming Riverside Map", and mint a Chinese banknote millennium gold and silver commemorative coin with the scenery of Sichuan such as Jinjiang, Wangjianglou, Dujiangyan, Qingcheng Mountain, and Siguniang Mountain. Such a thousand-year-old boomerang suddenly flew in front of our eyes, is there a feeling of a thousand years at a glance? Come, stare at the picture of this gold coin and appreciate the details first. Next: Appreciation of Chinese banknotes millennium gold and silver commemorative coins and 150-gram rectangular gold commemorative coins, let's focus on the details and tell the story in the details.