Yu's ANALYSIS OF CURRENCY 895the only scholar who viewed cash with a certain ambivalence. Lii Tsu-ch'ien
(1137-81) of the Southern Sung also felt that cash was necessary to the oper-
ation of market activities but was not an object of use in itself. Yu cited Ui's
argument that "currency was nothing more than something used for balancing
the prices of commodities" while grain and cloth were the only real forms of
wealth. For that reason the ancients always spoke of the necessity to accumu-
late a nine-years' reserve of food for every thirty years of normal production as
a defense against famine, never of accumulating "a reserve of twenty or thirty
thousand strings of cash," which would have been of no use in feeding the starv-
ing. Lii, evidently, was unwilling to acknowledge that a starving man might be
able to buy some food to feed himself.
Lii pointed out that in classical times taxes and tribute were collected for the
most part in grain and local products and only a small amount in cash, and that
salaries for officials were in land grants rather than the cash used currently in
Sung times. Because most of the people in ancient times were in fact agricul-
turalists settled on the land, there was little reason for many of them to be engaged
in the peripheral occupation of commerce. Even in the Han dynasty the ranks
of officials were defined by the number of piculs of grain they received in salary
until Emperor Wu departed from this norm by emphasizing the importance of
cash and requiring that all persons had to report their cash savings to the gov-
ernment. From this time on people began to accumulate cash by the thousands
of strings, and cash, which had functioned only as a balance or scale (lrnJin) to
enable the achievement of balanced prices, then became more important than
useful items like grain and cloth. In other words, Lii believed that cash was use-
ful as long as it was not treated as something that possessed value; only when
its possession became the end of economic activity did it possess a potential
for evil.
Nonetheless, Lii had no special admiration for Kung Yu of the Han who wanted
to abolish cash altogether and return to an economy of grain and cloth because
it was unrealistic to hope for a return to the past of antiquity. He agreed with
several others that when cash dropped out of use during the reign of Emperor
Wen of the Wei dynasty (220-26) the absence of cash did not eliminate cheat-
ing on commercial transactions.
Cash had become indispensable, but to perform its function as a medium of
exchange it had to be standard in weight and quality of manut~lcture lest debase-
ment and counterfeiting ruin its proper function. Unfortunately, only the five-
shu coin of the Han and the K'ai-yuan coin of the T'ang dynasties had met the
standard, and in the Sung dynasty during the reign of Emperor T'ai-tsung (r.
976-98) Chang Ch'i-hsien had wrecked the currency by issuing new coins that
were too light in weight and poor in quality, primarily because he was interested
mainly in the profits of seigniorage. LU preferred the solution of K'ung I of the
Southern Ch'i that the profit of seigniorage be reduced to zero to drive the coun-
terfeiters out of the minting business and leave the government in exclusive con-
trol of issuing cash and regulating prices by ever-normal market purchases.