I tried to find a good image on Google and couldn’t find one. Basically they’re boat shaped ingots approximately 2 to 3 inches wide and 1 to to 2 inches deep. It seems to me it would be easier to carry around silver coins.
Yes, but ingots are easier to store, just like with gold.
What terms did you use? I just used Chinese silver ingots and got tons of photos. (With this Wikipedia link being the first hit.)
They may have originally literally indicated the value of a boat. (See spade money, knife money, even the “round coin with a hole” may have originated from bronze cowrie money. The shapes may have started out like old gold and silver certificates in the US–something that can be exchanged for one boat, spade, knife, or cowrie shell.)
The more crude varieties look like they could have been made simply by pouring molten silver into a die shaped like an oval mortar, and then pressing down the pestle.
I bet the boat shape somehow facilitated manufacture!
With a convex part on top of the boat, and a convex bottom, I wonder whether the shape makes it easy to make a stack of ingots with greater stability, and also to carry a stack of ingots with two hands?
They’re more commonly known as taels/liang, a standardized unit of measure still in use today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tael
When carried, they were sometime strung up on a cord for transportation.
Edit: Miniature versions are sometimes used for Chinese bracelets.
I can’t find images on-line, but there are several images in the 1980s movie Tai-pan.
Here you can see a pile of Chinese boat-shaped silver ingots from Tai-Pan at 14 seconds in:
Goole up ‘taels’ and ‘taels liang’ and are several good pics of them.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them used in Chinese herbal medicine shops where they still use handheld scales to measure the ingredients.
As the Wiki article I linked to stated, they’re still used as a unit of measure in some countries.
I’ve been thinking (and my head hurts! <grin>), an alternate reason (other than a unit of measure) is that unlike coins or paper currency, they’re less political and less subject to value fluctuation. If you’re trading with a foreigner, would you accept that their currency is worth what they/the exchange says it’s worth and/or made of the metal it’s claimed to be or would you rather have a gold/silver ingot which you could easily confirm by weight is worth a known amount?
If you want to believe the “Legend of the Eagle-Shooting Heroes” (Chinese pulp fiction), certain (moneyed) individuals were walking around with stacks of these, using them to pay for huge meals at restaurants, etc. Think of it as a $100 bill.
Yes, that’s a general property of commodity currencies. The downside is that you have to be aware of things like clipping and sweating (for coins) and the evergreen problems of plating and alloying.
You’re also holding a very illiquid asset which has to be converted to something else before it will accrue interest, but that’s hardly a problem for short-term transactions.
This makes the most sense to me. It was the type of money used by people rich enough to hire bodyguards to carry around their money.