The "Pre-Qin Currency Script" in the exhibition hall on the second floor of the Chinese Character Museum in Anyang City, Henan Province. (Wang Jian'an Photography)
"Shang" character empty first cloth coin, era: Spring and Autumn, Chinese Character Museum collection. (Wang Jian'an Photography)
Sanchuan 釿 (jīn) slanted shoulder empty shoubu coin, Era: Eastern Zhou Dynasty Korea, Collection of the Museum of Chinese Characters. (Wang Jian'an Photography)
"Anyang" Pingshoubu, era: Spring and Autumn, when the three kingdoms of Han, Wei, and Zhao all had places called Anyang. (Wang Jian'an Photography)
"Brig (yǐng)" cloth, Lu Shi Bai ne (yǐng), gongzi cloth, era, Warring States. (Wang Jian'an Photography)
Walking into the currency and culture exhibition hall on the second floor of the Chinese Character Museum located on the north side of the east section of Renmin Avenue in Anyang City, Henan Province, you may be attracted by the strange ancient coins inside, which often arouse the curiosity and questioning of many visitors. "Money" is actually evolved from the ancient agricultural tools of the mainland, why did the ancients call this kind of shovel-shaped agricultural tools a metal called cloth coins? Why did ancient Chinese currencies only cast characters, not patterns? Why are there fewer words inscribed on ancient mainland currencies?
Money, commonly known as "money", can be said to be the most ordinary and most magical thing in the world! Since its birth, money has undergone several major transformations in physical currency, financial currency, and credit currency. In today's world, it is unimaginable without money. You might say that money hasn't always existed! Indeed, money arises from the need for human beings to exchange goods for subsistence. In human history, exchange has gone through two stages of development, first barter and later through media. With the development of commodity production, a commodity is gradually separated from the commodity that alternately acts as a general equivalent, and this particular commodity is money.
Having money can make ghosts grind. The Western Jin Dynasty literary scholar Lu Zhen once wrote an article entitled "The Theory of Money Theory", describing money as an omnipotent god, saying that money "can make peace in danger, death can make life, expensive can make it cheap, and life can make it kill." "Money is not omnipotent, but it is impossible without money." It must also be recognized that the irreplaceable role played by money in socio-economic operations.
Qian, pronounced jiǎn, originally meant an ancient farm tool, similar to today's shovel, used to shovel the ground and weed. Money, as agricultural tools,
"Money" was the title of money after the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, but was the name of the instrument before the Eastern Zhou Dynasty. Money, as a farm tool, is often used in conjunction with the "hammer" that is also a weeding tool. Poetry? Zhou Song? Minister: "Command me all, and the money is the money." In modern Chinese, "money" refers specifically to money. When "money" is used as a quantifier or surname to refer to monetary expenses, it is pronounced as qián.
Ancient agricultural tools were not only tools of production, but also a medium for people to exchange other means of production and subsistence, and in ancient times productivity was low, and people regarded the means of production as a valuable personal wealth. In the long barter, some farm tools formed the original currency. Why is it called "cloth"? For example, knife coins and cloth coins are the evolution of ancient agricultural tools knives and cadmiums, because of the harmonic sound of nephrotypes and cloth, and later directly called currency as cloth coins.
Cloth coins were shovel-shaped metal coins in the early days, and plutonium and money were both shovel-shaped, so cloth coins were also called coins, shovel coins or shovel coins. In the early days, there was a kind of shovel coin called "empty shoubu", which was shaped like a hollow top and raised miniature copper shovel, but the main popular one during the Warring States period was "flat shoubu". During the Spring and Autumn Warring States period, the currency system was relatively chaotic, and the shovel-shaped cloth coins were mainly popular in the Areas of the Three Jins and Zheng Wei. After the unification of the six kingdoms of Qin, the unified currency system, the whole country used circular square hole round coins as money, the word "money" has been completely changed to the name of the currency, no longer refers to agricultural tools. Because round coins are easy to carry, circulate and collect, to this day our coins still retain the circle prescribed by Qin.
Pre-Qin monetary script refers to the writing cast or engraved on the physical object of pre-Qin currency, which belongs to a branch of ancient Chinese script, spanning two weeks. Bu coin is one of the main metal currencies of the pre-Qin period of the mainland, is a kind of metal coin shaped like a shovel-shaped agricultural tool, mainly popular in the Three Jin Dynasty and its surrounding areas. Ancient Chinese currencies generally do not cast patterns, and their main decoration is the text and its calligraphy art, so the calligraphy art of the numismatic script is the essence of ancient money culture. There are many kinds of pre-Qin currencies, including cloth coins, knife coins, round money, ant-nose money, gold plates, etc., and the words engraved on them are mostly small due to limited scope, and most of them are place names and numbers, and because of the large amount of minting lines, the minting places are different, and there are often different ways of writing. The configuration of pre-Qin monetary characters has its own characteristics, such as reducing the province of form, borrowing pens, wearing and contracting strokes, and increasing pens.