898 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
string of cash, theoretically a thousand coins. One might well speculate that the
main stimulus to the use of paper money was the expansion of trade and com-
merce that rendered the penny cash too cumbersome a vehicle to maintain a grow-
ing market.
Because a number of unspecified difficulties occurred, there was a debate over
whether the paper money should be withdrawn from circulation. Emperor Jen-
tsung (r. 1023-63) decided to adopt the suggestion of a transportation com-
missioner, Hsieh T'ien, to prohibit private printing of paper money, and to
establish an agency to print the money and oversee its use. Paper money was
continued after the Sung was forced into south China by the J urchen Chin forces
in the twelfth century, and the name of the paper money was changed to hui-tzu
and administered by the Board of Taxation. At first paper money was backed
up by full convertibility to metallic cash, but convertibility was later dropped.
In the Chin dynasty in north China and Manchuria, the government adopted
its own paper money, called chiao-ch ao, and in the Yiian period the Mongols
printed its own paper note in the Chung-fung era (1260-64) called the Chung-
t 'ung yiian-pao-ch ao. All paper money from the Sung period on was stamped
with a seal denoting its value, but by the end of the Yiian convertibility to cash
been suspended. The value of the paper money itself plummeted in value as com-
modity prices inflated steeply, but Yu did not make clear whether he thought
that the lack of convertibility was the cause of the depreciation of paper money
or not.
Paper Money: Ch'iu Chiin on Paper Money. Yu then appended Ch'iu Chiin's
view that paper money was a preposterous invention, far inferior to copper cash.
During the T'ang dynasty, a man named Wang Yii had once used paper to sim-
ulate copper cash to bum for sacrifices to the spirits, but no one at the time had
had the remotest inkling that it would ever be used for real money. Ch'iu stig-
matized Chang Yung, the originator of paper money, as the equivalent of the
man who first used wooden models for human beings in Shang sacrifices, one
of the favorite epithets of Confucius for the man whose ingenuity later led to
human sacrifice itself. And he condemned Hsieh T'ien for preserving the sys-
tem at a time when others had called it into question.
Ch'iu argued that Heaven in its graciousness had conferred on Earth the birth
and procreation of living and growing products to supply the needs of man, and
had granted to the rulers of states the ability to use money to achieve a balance
among the values of products, but the purpose of these gifts was to benefit the
people of an empire as a whole, not to create profit just for the benefit of the
ruler alone. For a ruler to fail to balance the relative supply of goods and money
was tantamount to a violation of Heaven's trust. It was an even greater betrayal
of his responsibility to use trickery and deceit by converting something that had
no intrinsic value into something that was given value or utility just to gain profit
for himself.
Ch'iu was not arguing that all money was bad, but that the nominal value of
money had to bear some relation to its material content and the amount of skill