How much is the silver of the past worth now?

Two histories of banks in China and China

Silver is a historical currency, which withdrew from the historical stage more than 60 years ago, and most people are quite unfamiliar with it. Silver coins have existed in China for 16000 or 700 years in the form of weighing money-not minting money. (1) Biography of Jin Shu Schleswig: "Happy to China, hungry. Gu Er appreciates two pounds of money, and a pound of meat is worth one or two. " The Western Jin Dynasty was established in 265 AD, and the Eastern Jin Dynasty was established in 3 17 AD. Historical and cultural heritage is profound, involving politics, economy, art, refining technology and even folk customs, which is worthy of in-depth study.

Silver is a weighing currency, and its shape does not affect its use. In different historical periods and regions, silver has different shapes. Silver cakes were cast in the Tang Dynasty, much like later silver dollars. The difference is that the weight and fineness of silver cakes are different, so they should be weighed and tested when used. The Song Dynasty (and the Northern Jin Dynasty) and the Yuan Dynasty cast a silver collar, a long silver block with a waist shape. The name of Yuanbao began in the Yuan Dynasty, that is, the treasure (goods) of the Yuan Dynasty, and its shape gradually evolved from a silver collar to an inverted horseshoe shape, which was the basic silverware shape in the Ming and Qing Dynasties and the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China. At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, geographically, this kind of silver ingot was circulated in most parts of the country. It weighs about 520 Liang and is oval. There are wings on both sides of the ellipse that are upturned outward and concave in the middle. In addition, the most local color is the archway ingot in Yunnan, also known as the saddle ingot. Beautiful appearance. It is a rectangle with two short sides protruding outward and a deep imprint in the middle. The prominent part of the brand is like a memorial arch, hence the name. Jiangxi silver ingots are square, with two of the top four sides upturned into a straight line and the other two upturned into a V-shape, with the middle recessed, which is called Bao Fang. Henan's waist ingots are also very distinctive, as cold as pig kidneys. There are twelve silver ingots in Sichuan, which are slightly oval in shape. The upper edge is upturned, the middle is sunken, and there is an upward protruding part in the middle of the depression. There are also places where Si Yuan silver ingots are cast. There are one or two, round or oval, with silk patterns on the round surface.

The casting process of silver is quite special. Knowing the casting process of silver is very helpful to identify the color of silver. Some silver ingots have silk patterns and various names, such as fine wire, thick wire, water wire, yuan wire and so on. The formation of stripes is not only related to the characteristics of silver metal, but also to the casting process. When casting, the silver material is first melted into silver water, and then poured into an oval mold more than twice the size of the silver ingot. You can't wait for it to cool naturally after it enters. Because after silver melts into silver water, it can absorb a lot of oxygen around it at high temperature. Oxygen should be released during cooling. It is said that all metals except silver have no oxygen absorption characteristics. ) natural cooling will cause oxygen to explode and form air jet, which will lead to uneven surface of silver ingot. In order to solve this problem, on the one hand, the mold should be tilted to both sides repeatedly, so that a part of silver water first adheres to both sides of the long side of the oval mold, and then cools and solidifies. Repeatedly tilted, so that the wings of the silver ingot form layers of silk patterns. This is the origin of the old name dumping of cast silver ingots. On the other hand, iron pipes should be used to continuously blow air on the surface of silver water, so as to accelerate the cooling and solidification of silver water and release oxygen evenly to avoid the formation of obstructed air jets. Because the cooling and solidification is carried out gradually from the outside to the inside, the silver solidified into a solid first shrinks sharply to form silk veins, and then another layer of solidification also forms silk veins. In this way, the surface of the silver ingot will form a spiral or coil silk pattern. The higher the fineness of silver, the finer the particles, the lower the fineness and the coarser the particles. When the fineness is less than 90%, silk grain cannot appear. Therefore, the silk pattern has become a symbol to identify the fineness of silver. However, there is also this kind of silver ingot, the fineness is above 90%, but there is no grain. Like silver ingots in Yunnan and Sichuan. The reason is that casting this kind of silver ingot is another method to eliminate oxygen in high temperature silver water. Or put charcoal powder and saltpeter into the silver water, or stir the silver water with a wooden stick. The similarity between the two methods is that the high-temperature oxygen in silver water is combined (burned) with wooden materials instead of oxygen evolution step by step, so that moire will not be formed. Therefore, it can't be considered that all silver ingots without grain are silver ingots with low fineness. It can only be said that the fineness of silver ingots with silk veins is low, and the fineness of silver ingots without silk veins may be low.

Some silver ingots have beehives on their lower parts and sides. This is also due to the formation of oxygen released when silver water cools and condenses during casting. If there is no honeycomb, it may be because the silver ingot is low in color and mixed with more base metals. Sometimes the mold used for casting has good air permeability (sand mold), and the released oxygen permeates quickly, or there may be no honeycomb. It is not accurate to judge the color quality simply by the presence or absence of honeycomb. As long as it is not a fake honeycomb, the silver ingot with honeycomb has a high fineness, and the silver ingot without honeycomb cannot be rashly judged to have a low fineness, only that it may have a low fineness.

Yinliang in Han dynasty

The record of using silver in Han Dynasty is three platinum products of Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty.

And cast platinum from silver and tin. Be a dragon in the sky with Mo Mo, a horse on the ground with Mo Mo, and a turtle inside with Mo Mo. Therefore, there are three kinds of platinum products: one is heavy eight, the other is long Wen, which is called "white selection", the other is small difference, the other is square, and its Marvin is straight 500; Triple, small, oval, turtle straight. Make the county magistrate sell half a tael of silver and continuously cast three baht, which is as heavy as a text. The crime of stealing all kinds of money is dead, but countless people steal platinum. "

However, there is no specific regulation on the fineness of silver, which leads to forgery. According to historical records: "Five years after platinum was made, hundreds of thousands of people died from stealing coins. He who doesn't find the murderer is invincible. There are more than one million people who forgive themselves, but if you don't give up half of them, the world will generally invest money without care. Offenders, collectors cannot take over ... "

"Platinum is a bit cheap, people don't cherish it, and it's no use for the county magistrate to ban it. After the age of 20, platinum will not be abolished. "

Three Kingdoms

"Three Kingdoms": "Wei Jiaping gave Guo Xiuzi thousands of cakes in five years."

Shuijing Note: "There is silver in the water stone house in Lingnan Forest, and slaves and thieves return three cakes."

Yinliang in Tang Dynasty

In the Tang Dynasty, the government began to collect silver from taxes and used a lot of silver in fiscal expenditure. According to archaeology, there were agent silver, tax merchant silver, mining silver and tax silver in the Tang Dynasty. In the Tang Dynasty, silver had two shapes: round neck and long collar. It is recorded in the Book of the Old Tang Dynasty: "There are 2,172 taels of Fiona Fang silver in the treasury." During the period of 1970, four Yong-stripe seals of Tang Dynasty were found in Xi 'an, which were round silver cakes engraved with a large number of characters and paid by Huaiji and other Lingnan counties. 1977, Shaanxi collected two silver ingots from tax merchants, and the silver-producing areas in Lingnan area also collected them. In 1950s, mining tax silver was unearthed in Xi 'an, a relic of Tianbao period in Tang Dynasty, weighing 50 taels, which was used for mining tax in Tang Dynasty. City silver is a kind of silver coin changed from collected materials. 1970 was unearthed in Xi' an and weighed 50 ounces.

At present, archaeology has also discovered the silver cake of the Tang Dynasty, which was unearthed in Luoyang on 1970, with the inscription "Twenty-three". Gold cakes were also unearthed in the Tang Dynasty, and four gold cakes were unearthed in Pinglujugou 1979, Shanxi.

Silver coins were unearthed in the Tang and Song Dynasties, but what were the silver coins in China in the Five Dynasties? Is there any use for silver? Liang Yin's physical object has not yet been discovered, but there are records about Liang Yin in the Five Dynasties in historical materials. "Song Miscellaneous Notes and Clear Waves" records the historical facts of five generations of silver ingots unearthed in Nanjing during the Southern Song Dynasty. At that time, the author of the book lived in Nanjing. When he swam backstage to the balcony, he saw the silver coins and Li Houzhu found by a nun in the Tang Dynasty in the temple, which was the capital that Princess Yongding made a net contribution to the monk Zhigong. It can be seen that the silver in the Five Dynasties was already a collar.

Yinliang in Song Dynasty

Zhu Yi's Uneasy Miscellanies in the Song Dynasty also recorded money, saying that children were born among the people, and someone congratulated him on getting 1000 yuan. It is recorded that Feng Zi, the leader of Lingnan, entered the court and offered money for a boat. It can be seen that the money in the Song Dynasty was cast in many ways. Silver has become one of the important contents of government taxation in Song Dynasty. During the Yuanfeng period of Xining, the silver income of the Song government reached 2,909,086 Liang.

The fineness of silver was already a very important thing in the Song Dynasty. In the early years of Southern Song Dynasty, Jia Zhen Bian recorded the historical materials in this respect. At that time, there were already more than a dozen names: Gold Lacquer Flower Silver (100%), Concentrated Flower Silver (99.9%), Brown Silver (99.8%), Big Hu Flower Silver (99.7%) and Fine Flower Silver (99.9%).

Now, it seems that silver coins in the Song Dynasty are also divided into official casting and civilian casting.

The shape of silver coins in the Song Dynasty is generally a silver collar, and the silver collars cast by the people are generally engraved with the shop number and the name of the craftsman, and marked with the fineness of the silver coins.

The official silver ingots are as follows:

One is cast by the local government, such as the silver ingot of the Song Dynasty unearthed in Bortala, Xinjiang in recent years, on which only the words "Nanjianzhou" are cast. Nanjian County was a county of Fujian Road in Song Dynasty.

The first is to tax silver. For example, in 1960, a batch of silver coins of the Song Dynasty were unearthed in the southern suburbs of Xi 'an, one of which had the words "salt tax" on it. During the period of 1975, a batch of "money-making" silver ingots of the Southern Song Dynasty were unearthed in Fangcheng, Henan Province, which increased the income of the Song government. There is also a word "customs duty" on this batch of silver ingots, which shows that a lot of taxes have been paid with silver in the Song Dynasty.

The third kind is folk silver, some of which have no words on it. From the Southern Song Dynasty to the end of 1980s, some scholars counted that nearly 350 ingots had been found in China at that time. One is Junyin; One is commercial silver ingots, most of which are store names, and some of them are used in the circulation field. There are only two kinds of silver on the surface of the ingot, true flower silver, ten-point silver and silver infiltration.

The grading system of silver ingots was clearly defined in the Song Dynasty. During the Qingyuan period of the Southern Song Dynasty, it was ordered that "gold and silver should be presented, and gold and silver should start with straight colors". The silver sheath is quite tall and straight, the big one is fifty taels and the small one is twenty-two taels. If it is not normal, those who make up the numbers will listen. "

Jin dynasty silver beam

In the second year of Jin Zhangzong Cheng 'an (1 197), the first officially minted silver coin in China was ordered to be minted, that is, the "treasure of Cheng 'an" silver coin, which was divided into five grades: twelve to twelve. This is the first kind of silver coin in the history of China that has been separated from simple weighing and marked with its currency value.

198 1 year, four Cheng 'anbao silver coins were first discovered in Heilongjiang, and 1 coin was discovered in1year. Through the study of these silver coins, people think that they are divided into one or two, one and a half, three or two, five or two, and the Twelfth Five-Year Plan.

There are two kinds of silver ingots in Jin Dynasty: salt-soluble silver ingots and tax silver ingots. Tax silver, such as two-year silver collar, four-year silver ingot of Taihe, four-year silver collar of Wang Zhongnan of Taihe, seven-year silver collar of Taihe, etc.

After the Jin government collected the salt tax, it cast the income into silver ingots with the words "salt dissolving part", which accounted for a large proportion in the discovery of silver ingots in the Jin Dynasty. Up to now, the unearthed titles of the Jin Dynasty include five titles: Tianhui, Dading, Mingchang, Cheng 'an and Tai 'an, but dissolved salt accounts for about one third.

Finally, on May 20th, 1986, on/kloc-0, three silver collars were unearthed in Taobuyao Village, Datong Kiln, the southern suburb of Xinghe County, Inner Mongolia. The No.2 collar was stamped with three seals: "Yi Hui Wuliang", "Pedestrian Karmia" and ". Yi Hui Wu, Jin and Yuan dynasties all had this mechanism to cast silver collars. This collar should have been cast by Hui Jinyi Wu, because the word "Bao" on the silver ingot in the Yuan Dynasty has been abbreviated to the present word "Bao", and this collar has the word "save the pen", which is also fifty taels of Yi Hui. Therefore, it is undoubtedly the Jin Dynasty.

Yinliang in Yuan Dynasty

Add the year here.

One of the larger silver varieties in Yuan Dynasty was Yangzhou Silver and the other was Pingping Silver. In recent years, another kind of Mengshan silver has been discovered.

Yangzhou Silver Coin is the most famous silver coin in Yuan Dynasty, and now some such silver ingots have been found. Silver coins from the Yuan Dynasty to the 14th year of Zheng Zheng were unearthed in 1956+0988, generally engraved with the place of casting, time, weight and inscription, with a large ingot on the back. Another example is the silver ingot unearthed in the Yuan Dynasty 1988, on which the words "Yangzhou treasurer Meng × silver treasurer Wu Wu", "Zhongshu Province" and "silversmith Hou Junyong recovered 520 silversmiths in the 14th year of Yuan Dynasty" were cast.

1956, unearthed in Jiangsu province, the silver coin of Zhiyuan 14 year was cast with the words "Yang Liang X was promoted to the official position", "Pingyuan 14 year silver coin was collected by Wu Liang" and "silversmith Peng Xingzu, Liu Qing and Han Yisheng".

After the mining of Mengshan silver mine, the Mengyuan government cast Mengshan Yin Ke into silver ingots and gave them to the government.

In recent years, the silver beams of the Yuan Dynasty were discovered in Taiyuan.

Yinliang in Ming Dynasty

China people didn't expect that Columbus's discovery of America brought great changes to China's monetary system. Mexico in Latin America, from16th century to the beginning of 20th century, was the largest producer of silver and the largest exporter of silver coins in the world. These silver coins are transported from the United States to the Philippines through Spain, and then from the Philippines to China through trade.

Generally speaking, there are two kinds of Mexican silver coins. One was cast and issued during the Spanish rule, and it was first cast and issued in 1536. Since then, this silver coin has become a traditional export commodity of Mexico. The silver coin is round, with the heads of Spanish kings in different periods cast on it, and the pattern of sunshine on one side, with a fineness of over 93%. China people call it the Primitive Ocean, Buddha's Head, Double Pillars and so on. The other is in the third year after Mexico's independence, that is, from 1823, silver coins with eagle stepping on cactus and snake patterns were cast, with a fineness of 90%, which China called Eagle Ocean.

From the middle and late Ming Dynasty to the middle Qing Dynasty, the Spanish traded with China and exchanged silver coins for China's silk and porcelain. Because of this, China, which originally produced little silver, actually began to use a lot of silver in the circulation field-a kind of ingot that melted a lot of Mexican silver coins and recast them into a boat shape.

How many American silver dollars have been shipped to China? We can quote some information. About 30,000 yuan before 1586, more than 500,000 yuan before 1586, 800,000 yuan before 65438-1000000, and about 2 million yuan before 1602. About 2 million before 1633, about 3 million to 4 million before 1729, and about 18 15. /kloc-After the Spanish arrived in the Philippines in the second half of the 6th century, the American silver dollar imported from the Philippines to China every year was several hundred thousand dollars at first, and then more and more. By the end of16th century, it had exceeded one million dollars, increased to more than two million dollars in17th century, and increased even more in18th century, possibly reaching three or four million dollars.

Today, American silver dollars are not only collected by many families in China, but also unearthed a lot of news. For example,1June 7, 990, a large number of American silver dollars were dug up next to the site of Jiuhuashan Reconstruction Runwheel Temple, and 937 pieces were collected, all of which were cast by Spain in America and Eagle Ocean after Mexico's independence.

This is because since Columbus discovered the New World, colonialists have mined a large number of silver mines in South America, and most of the world's silver is produced in this area. Before the Opium War, when the old colonialists were doing business with China, nothing could open the market in China, while China's ceramics, silk and tea became hot commodities in western countries, so the western countries had to trade with China and bring silver from South America, which made the monetary system in China undergo great changes since the Ming Dynasty. In this way, year after year, China people made a lot of money from overseas trade, and changed their single copper and paper money standard into silver and copper standard, which had a great impact on the society and economy of China at that time.

First of all, China's traditional single currency system, which combines copper coins and paper money, has undergone fundamental changes. Although silver has been a member of the monetary family for a long time in the past, its monetary attribute is mostly limited to savings. Rich people in China buried silver as the treasure of town houses, and its mobility and circulation media did not occupy its due position in traditional social and economic life. Since the American silver dollar flowed into China in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the role of silver in China's monetary system has been greatly enhanced. The government's policy of taxing silver has further increased the importance of silver in China's social economy. Silver plays an irreplaceable role in block trade and government finance.

Secondly, the shape of China silver has also changed greatly. During the Song and Yuan Dynasties, silver in China was generally cast into waist-shaped blocks. Since the Ming Dynasty, China's silver has generally been cast into a boat shape that people are now familiar with in movies. People usually call it Yuanbao. The reason for this shape change has not been thoroughly studied, but this change is definitely related to the influx of silver into China.

Li Yu, a beginner in the late Ming and Qing Dynasties, described silver as: "Silver is shining and precious colors are thousands of miles apart. Dayuanbao is like a donkey, but no one crosses the field; Bend like the moon and dissolve like water reflecting the sky. The surface is silky and as thin as a spider web; Feet are as dense as beehives. ……"

In the Ming Dynasty, there were the largest silver ingots at all times and in all countries. Tan Qian, a historian in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties, recorded in Travel Notes to the North that there were gold and silver ingots in the treasury of Jie Shen in the Ming Dynasty, which were the treasures of the town treasury in the Ming Dynasty. People had to climb the ladder, which was engraved with the words of the first year of Yongle.

In addition, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, Xi's silver purity was very low. At that time, Xi 'an called all-color silver a bucket.

As for the casting of silver ingots, a dream book in Ming Dynasty recorded the silver ingot manufacturing industry in Kaifeng in Ming Dynasty. At that time, this business was called dumping. At that time, there was a silver shop, two silver shops and one silver shop in Kaifeng. In addition, "at the south exit of Xinjie, pass by inns and hotels, and go to the south end of Banjie. Lunan is a big garbage dump, specially made into ingots. " It is worth noting that one of them, the Fan Siyin family.