Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them

by Mrs. Archibald Little

"Oh—I didn't say anything,"—with the instinctive horror of being detected in possibly a false tone.

"Yes—yes, you said something as you turned away and took leave. And I do so want to know what it was, that I may know what to say."

"Oh, I said——" mumbling very much, so that it was impossible to hear what he said. "I don't think it was the thing to say to a man of his station and quality. I think I should have said—— Let me see— I really don't know what was the right thing for me to say."

And so now she is giving it up—giving up being polite in Chinese, giving up ever ascertaining the value of money or the price of anything. For how can things have fixed prices where money has none? There is only one comfort to her soul: if any one looks offended, or if a too sensitive conscience makes her fear she has given cause of offence, she promptly says Tetsui—"I am to blame, I apologise." No one has yet made distinctly evident that he does not understand her, nor has any Sinologue yet told her she is wrong. Tetsui is therefore the one golden word for her. And while she is in China she foresees she must live in one constant state of being to blame.

In this manner I at the time recorded my first impression of the coinage and language of China. But the matter of payment is even more complicated than I then fancied. The only coinage of China is copper cash, of which about forty go to a penny. They are round, with a hole in the middle, and generally about a thousand are strung on two strings and tied together; and when carried, hanging over the shoulder, they look like so many snakes. But I say about a thousand advisedly; for there are generally a number of small and comparatively worthless cash in every string, the average amount of these varying in different parts. The lumps of silver with which my friends threatened me are made up into what are called "shoes," but what look like very large coarse thimbles. These are of various degrees of purity, and their purity has to be tested before they are weighed or broken up. In Chungking there were three different degrees of purity in different parts of the city; therefore it made quite a considerable difference whether you agreed to pay a sum of money in the upper, lower, or middle town. And the result of so much difficulty about payment is that every one is in debt to every one else, keeping a sort of running account going.

Of late years foreign mints have been started in several places; and lest this chapter should seem altogether too frivolous, I here subjoin the essay that gained the prize, when, at the Polytechnic Institution in 1890, the Governor of Ningpo started an essay competition, giving as his theme:

"The south-eastern provinces now have much foreign money in circulation, and the natives consider it a great convenience to trade. Should China set about coining gold and silver money? Would it circulate freely? Would it be advantageous to the country, or the reverse?"

The Governor himself looked over the essays, and awarded the palm to the composition of Mr. Yang, a B.A. of Kwangtung Province, of which the following is a translation:

"Those who treat at the present time of the causes which are draining away the wealth of China to foreign countries are, as a rule, in the habit of confining their observations to two of these causes: the importation of foreign opium, and the purchase of foreign ships and munitions of war. They appear to be ignorant, indeed, for the most part, that there is another cause at work, persistent, insidious, whose effects are more far-reaching than either.

"The first silver money brought to China from abroad was the so-called 'Luzon Dollar,' coined by the Spaniards from the product of the mines which they had acquired in America, a new country first settled by them. The Spanish dollar was followed by others, made in the same style—first the American, and then the Japanese. From Kwangtung and Fukien these invaders spread to Kiangsu and Chekiang, Kiangsi, Anhui, and Hupeh, in the order named, with great rapidity. Their beauty and convenience were soon in everybody's mouth, and the loss to the country became heavier and heavier as their importation increased.