Except where foreign coins such as American silver dollars are employed, all payments in silver and gold are made by weight, the only money being the copper cash. The Chinese metric system, like our own, is based on natural seeds or grains of plants. Thus ten of a kind of seed called fên (the Candarin) probably placed sideways make 1 ts'un (the Chinese inch[1]), just as our forefathers based the English inch on 3 barleycorns placed lengthwise. So with their monetary system,
10 li[2] (copper cash) = 1 fên (Candarin) of silver.
10 fên = 1 chi'en (mace).
10 chi'en = 1 liung (or tael or Chinese ounce).
This liung or, as it is more commonly called, tael is the maximum monetary weight. Hence we hear always of payments in silver as being 1000 or 2000 ounces and so on, but never in the higher commercial units of the catty or pound, and pical or hundredweight, to which we shall come immediately. But though the Chinese never employed any coinage of gold or silver, beyond all doubt they have possessed and employed both metals for almost an incalculable time in the form of ingots of rectangular shape, and of very accurately fixed dimensions. The maximum unit employed in commercial relations between China, Cochin-China, Annam and Cambodia is the nên or bar. It is of course among her less advanced neighbours that we can best see how the system developed and worked. For whilst China herself now reckons exclusively by the tael or ounce, Annam and Cambodia still employ ingots of fixed weights and dimensions as metal units almost to the present time. Thus when Msg. Taberdier in 1838 published his account of the money of Annam, they had no coins except the ordinary cash or sapec with a square hole in its centre, and which is there made of zinc and called dong[2], they had no coinage in the proper sense of the term. However they employed ingots of gold and silver of a parallelopiped shape. Five sizes of ingots were employed for both gold and silver alike.
