Money in Asia (1200–1900): Small Currencies in Social and Political Contexts eds. by Jane Kate Leonard and Ulrich Theobald (review)

Money in Asia, an anthology edited by Jane Leonard and Ulrich Theobald, is a result of research conducted from 2006 to 2012 by the international research group "Monies, Markets, and Finance in China and East Asia, 1600–1900," created and directed by Hans Ulrich Vogel. The book contains a preface by Mark Elvin, an introduction by Ulrich Theobald, and eighteen chapters by different scholars. I shall focus on four chapters that discuss monetary history in late imperial China, a subject of special interest to me. These chapters are: "'Silver is Expensive, Cash is Cheap': Official and Private Cash Forgeries as the Main Cause for the Nineteenth-century Monetary Turmoil," by Werner Burger; "Smoke on the Mountain: The Infamous Counterfeiting Case of Tongzi District, Guizhou Province, 1794" by Cao Jin and Hans Ulrich Vogel; "The Devastation of the Qing Mints, 1821–1850" by Man-houng Lin; and "Silver, Copper, Rice and Debt: Monetary Policy and Office Selling in China during the Taiping Rebellion" by Elisabeth Kaske. To begin, I shall give a brief historical background to put these studies into context.

In Qing China, copper cash and silver bullion were the two major types of money, but the state failed to maintain the fixed exchange rate (1 tael of silver to 1,000 copper cash) between them. Instead, exchange rates fluctuated and varied from one county to another. Owing to the lack of data, historians have known little about prices for copper cash, but they generally have agreed that copper cash began to become cheaper, as compared to silver, at the turn of the eighteenth century. The first three of these four chapters offer explanations for the depreciation of copper cash, and the last one indicates that cash notes, denominated in copper cash, still played an important role in fiscal policy in the mid-nineteenth century.

Burger's chapter, "Silver is Expensive, Cash is Cheap," investigates the reasons for the depreciation of coins in the early nineteenth century. Citing a study by Yang Duanliu, Burger suggests that there was an oversupply of copper cash while the supply of silver stagnated or even decreased due to the import of opium. He argues that the problem did not occur in the eighteenth century because the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1795) curtailed the supply of copper cash by halting the operation of all government mints and setting up nationwide collection centers, where inferior coins were bought up at the current copper price. However, these measures were discontinued by his successor, the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820), who also allowed the campaign against forgeries to lapse. Thus by 1808 the exchange rate moved above the 1,000 mark.

In contrast to Burger, Cao and Vogel, in "Smoke on the Mountain," question the success of the state campaign to buy up debased copper coins. The campaign was begun in 1789, and provincial collection centers collected tons of inferior coins, but the task seemed never ending. In 1791, the Qianlong emperor lost patience. He blamed the campaign for encouraging counterfeiting, realizing that outlaws could counterfeit coins to obtain silver or standard cash in exchange. Also, a criminal case in 1794 revealed that many people held onto their inferior coins instead of turning them in to the government. That year, Fukang'an 福康安, governor-general of Sichuan, informed the Qianlong emperor in a memorial that a large counterfeiting ring had been uncovered in the border region between Guizhou and Sichuan and that the scale of the bandits' operation increased daily. Although the counterfeiters paid less than the government would have for the debased copper coins they needed to make their fake coins, they attracted those sellers who lived far from collection centers.

Since the collection campaign had been unsuccessful, in 1796, when the Jiaqing emperor succeeded to the throne, he...