Yu's ANALYSIS OF CURRENCY 901
basing their business on calculations of current market conditions rather than
on some classical moral precepts about the use of money.
On the other side, it had become fairly common knowledge that the value of
money could be reduced by an oversupply of the currency either by purpose-
ful debasement of its content (whether cash, grain, or cloth), private minting,
counterfeiting, and excessive issuance by the government. Although many may
have regarded government minting of multiple denomination coins as just too
transparent a means of government profiteering, private minting and counter-
feiting were both deemed bad, not just because the private minters and coun-
terfeiters always debased coins, but because there was no control over volume.
In fact, some policy makers even proposed reducing the money supply and assert-
ing central control over minting or issuing money to restore its value and pub-
lic trust in it.
When paper money began to he issued in the Sung period and continued
throughout the Yuan, it reflected a progressive development in the Chinese econ-
omy and an attitude toward money that was closer to twentieth-century con-
ceptions of money as symbols of value that did not necessarily have to be
converted to bona fide objects of value on demand. When one considers that
Chinese scholars had been saying for centuries that money itself represented an
exercise in sage wisdom because the rulers of antiquity had purposely used objects
of "no value" to function as media of exchange, mainly to preserve items of usc
for consumption, Ch'iu Chun was not necessarily obliged to argue that using
paper for money was ipso facto immoral.
Why did Ch'iu Chiin, a Ming scholar, however, take such a conservative view
of multiple denomination copper cash and paper money in the Sung and Yiian
dynasties, especially when he appearcd otherwise to have been a progressive
statecraft writer? Judging individual opinion simply on the basis of trends in
historical developments and modes of thought is often a dangerous business,
but it has become conventional to think of the Ming regime as a period of con-
servative and nationalistic reaction to the more open and cosmopolitan economies
and policies of the Sung and Yuan eras.
Nevertheless. even in the Yuan dynasty the Mongol rulers restricted legal for-
eign trade to the government in 1284, and then stopped foreign trade in the early
fourteenth century. After Emperor T'ai-tsu of the Ming dynasty restricted trade
to tributary missions, further restrictions were imposed in the late fourteenth
century, and the large-scale foreign trade missions to South Asia and East Africa
that began in 1405 under the eunuch-admiral Cheng Ho, were brought to an end
in 1433.
Trade was probably hindered as well by the raids of the so-called Japanese
pirates (Wak6). who raided the China coast from the Yangtze delta south
between 1549 and 156 I. The ban on trade was lifted for Southeast Asia, Taiwan,
and the Philippines after 1567, but reimposed again toward the end of the Ming
and carried over into the Ch'ing period (1644), with the exception trading for
copper from Japan.