884 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
forth replace metallic cash as the main media of exchange. The emperor ignored
the proposal when Kung Yu's opponents argued that trade currently depended
on the circulation of cash, and that cloth could not be readily subdivided into
smaller units for small transactions. II
Yu Hyongwon was only too happy to introduce into his essay a rebuttal of
Kung Yu's bias against cash written by one of his favorite Ming dynasty author-
ities, Ch'iu Chlin, who pointed out that cloth and grain were simply no match
for the convenience of metallic coins as a medium of exchange. He also quoted
K'ung Lin of the Chin dynasty (late third century A.D.) who praised the sages
of antiquity for having chosen materials that were of no value as articles of con-
sumption to function as media of exchange for goods that had some utility. Not
only were they able to avoid wasting useful goods for the function of transac-
tion exchange, but by using items that were smaller and lighter in weight than
bolts of cloth and bags of grain they also economized on transportation costs.
In addition, dividing up bolts of cloth or bags of grain into small parts to cover
small transactions was just too difficult and burdensome to be practical. In any
case, if the people had attempted to substitute cloth and grain for cash, the offi-
cials at the time would not have allowed it. 12
Ch'iu Chlin, of course, was living in the midst of the cash economy of the
Ming dynasty when arguments in favor of the preferability of grain and cloth
over cash (let alone silver in the bimetallic currency system of China in the six-
teenth century) as media of exchange must have appeared like an exercise in
obscurantism. Yu Hyongwon used Ch'iu to counter the obscurantists in Korean
society who wanted to prevent progress to the level of the Han or Sui dynasties,
let alone the sixteenth-century Ming dynasty.
Ts'ao P'i's Reversion to Grain and Cloth. Kung Yu, of course, launched his
attack on cash in the middle of the Han dynasty when the amount of cash in cir-
culation had reached unprecedented heights, but after the Han dynasty fell the
commercial situation deteriorated markedly with deleterious effects on the role
of metallic cash in the economy. Yu recounted how Ts'ao P'i, who established
the Wei dynasty in northeast China in 220, abolished the five-shu cash and allowed
only grain and cloth to be used as media of exchange. This policy failed not
simply because using grain and cloth meant that items of consumption had to
be withdrawn from the market to function as currency, but because bags of grain
could be debased by sprinkling water over them to increase their weight, or bolts
of silk cloth by reducing the number of warp threads in the weave. For these
reasons grain and cloth were abandoned, and at the suggestion of Ssu-ma Chih
the five-shu coin was minted again and continued into the Chin dynasty (West-
ern Chin, 265-317; Eastern Chin, 3I7-420).
The debate over the advantages of cash versus grain and cloth was continued
in the Chin dynasty when Hslian Hslian (during the period from 397 to 419)
proposed to abolish cash. Yu cited the rebuttal of K'ung Lin that money had been
no less important than food in the Great Plan of antiquity because of its neces-