Chinese Cash--Why Are High Denominations So Rare?

This is like scratching one's head over the scarcity of Two Cent Pieces in an economy built exclusively on cents, missing the contribution of dollars in silver to the mix. Behold the Mandarin Sycee. They accompanied bronze Cash pieces in the Chinese economy. An ancient,odd but traditional custom was to trade silver of high fineness by weight without the need to strike coins as the lower classes use. Think of doing business with one, ten, and hundred ounce silver bars and ingots. Often they had drum, saddle, or boat shapes with assay marks and other assurances of content. Weight would be determined with each transaction.

Ancient Chinese cash coins do have interesting history behind them including sycee. I think we need to split them into two different topics.

Chinese cash coins were officially under the control of the Board of Revenue to ensure that they were cast with the right amount of metal in them, in particular high copper content. When prices of copper did become too expensive or some provinces did not have much copper mines to start off with, they added higher amount of tin, zinc, antimony etc to make their cash coin more brass like. Some even cast coins in iron or lead. This was obviously discouraged by the Board of Revenue as the value of such cash coins were worth less. Of course, there were some mints that were after profits so you do see some dodgy practices.

During various rebellions throughout the history, there had been attempts to issue coins in higher denomination due to a shortage of metals. While they are significantly lighter, if you put their face value worth in terms of cash coins - the public feel that they were ripped off. Therefore, regardless of how unpractical it was to carry strings of cash coins, the public felt more secure.

Sycee is also another interesting field to look at. Being cast in silver, they are worth more than copper coins. However from time to time, silver can be difficult to procure and were not used in commerce in certain dynasty. To make things more complicated, as these were cast by privateers, silver contents can vary vastly. It is up to the merchants to decide what it is worth. This of course made it very difficult to decide fair value which may led to disputes. In the late Qing dynasty, there were attempts to modernize sycees but this has come too late. As such, official counterstamped sycees are quite scarce and will cost a decent fortune if you can find one to start off with.