Silver as a precious metal, in human history has been a thousand years of unchanged hard currency, in ancient Chinese feudal society, since the Song Dynasty, all dynasties and generations have tried to issue paper money to replace silver and copper coins, but because of the technical limitations at that time, in addition to the late Qing Dynasty became a relatively small scale system, have failed.
That is to say, in the past, copper coins and silver were still the most important currencies, but what makes people curious is that in the past TV series and novels, we often saw that the characters often took out a few pieces of silver to consume, and now, silver is a very precious metal, so much silver in ancient times, why are they gone now?
First of all, the first point, we must understand in our hearts, the ancient metal refining technology is rough and inefficient, the output of gold and silver is very low, before the Han Dynasty, "gold" does not simply refer to gold, but includes brass, which is very difficult to refine metals, because of its rarity, it can also be used as a preservation product.
In the "Chinese", it is mentioned that "the US dollar is used to cast swords and halberds", which shows that the "gold" mentioned here is actually copper, and the history of Han records that Han Gaozu appointed Confucian uncle Sun Tong as a too common order, "giving gold 500 jin", which should also be brass, otherwise 500 kg of gold is too exaggerated.
The Han Dynasty scholar Ban Gu believed that gold had three grades: gold was upper, silver was medium, and red gold was lower. The red gold mentioned here is brass. Silver, like gold, was very scarce in the past, and in the 289 years of the Tang Dynasty, a total of 15 million taels of silver were developed.
In the Song Dynasty, the smelting technology of silver was improved, and the average silver mine could provide 200,000 taels of silver per year, but these silver did not stay too long in the Song Dynasty, and most of them were paid to the countries of Jin, Liao, and Western Xia as annual coins. By the Time of the Ming Dynasty, silver and silver mines were depleted due to excessive mining, and the production of silver and silver in China began to slowly decrease.
It is worth mentioning that it was not until after the Ming and Qing dynasties that China generally used silver for trading, this is because during this period, most of the European countries embarked on the continent of colonial expansion, mined a large number of silver mines in the Americas and Africa, and the world's silver production was doubled, and China and the West had always had a tea silk trade, because of the trade surplus, a large number of silver dollars flowed into the Ming Dynasty. The number of private silver in China began to increase.
However, in order to solve this trade surplus, Westerners have thought of many ways to obtain the Chinese market, but whether it is European nylon fabrics, or clock glass and other utensils, can not make Chinese cold, the British began to use opium dumping.
From 1840 to 1911, the great powers of various countries looked at China with a tiger's eye, and historians explained the mystery of it, they explained that in modern China, including annexes, the Republic and the Qing government signed more than 1600 unequal treaties. During this period, the reparations reached a staggering 1.37 billion taels of silver.
It has also lost almost all of China's old silver reserves, which is the main reason why there is so little silver today. The truth was finally revealed, coupled with the fact that ancient people had the habit of tombs, a large amount of silver was taken down by the aristocratic class to accompany the tomb, which was also a factor.
However, modern countries have basically issued relatively stable paper money, silver as a currency function lost, although it still maintains the value of hard currency, but more is still used as an ornament or a metal material conductor. Therefore, it does not matter if the amount of silver decreases or increases. Seeing this, I think everyone understands why there is so little silver now!