Whether it's coins from China that pique your interest, or coins from Japan that you collect, or any other combination of coins from the provinces that make up East Asia, this 2012 Coins of the World digital download is one source you will be glad you have. In 2012 Coins of East Asia you'll find detailed descriptions, current values for multiple condition grades, actual-size illustrations, mintage and date of issue, among other important details.
In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver. Yet China had no unified national currency; there was not one monetary standard but many. Silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an "encounter of wits." China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937 focuses on how officials, policy makers, bankers, merchants, academics, and journalists in China and around the world answered a simple question: how should China change its monetary system? Far from a narrow, technical issue, Chinese monetary reform is a dramatic story full of political revolutions, economic depressions, chance, and contingency. As different governments in China attempted to create a unified monetary standard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States, England, and Japan tried to shape the direction of Chinese monetary reform for their own benefit. Austin Dean argues convincingly that the Silver Era in world history ended owing to the interaction of imperial competition in East Asia and the state-building projects of different governments in China. When the Nationalist government of China went off the silver standard in 1935, it marked a key moment not just in Chinese history but in world history.
This volume, by offering a score of new insights derived from a wide variety of recent archaeological and textual sources, bring to life an important overseas trading port in Southeast Asia: Quanzhou. During the Song and Yuan dynasties active official and unofficial engagement in trade had formative effects on the development of the maritime trade of Quanzhou and its social and economic position both regionally and supraregionally. In the first part subjects such as the impact of the Song imperial clan and the local élites on these developments, the economic importance of metals, coins, paper money, and changes in the political economy, are amply discussed. The second part concentrates on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of archaeological data and materials, the investigation of commodities from China, their origins, distribution and final destinations, the use of foreign labour, and the particular role of South Thailand in trade connections, thus supplying the hard data underlying the main argument of the book.
The volume is a collection of studies discussing aspects of the political economy and raison d'etat of East Asian countries, especially against the background of East Asia's integration into the "international" trade. The contributions progress from the general to the particular, the first contribution, above all, taking a broad perspective, intended as a general outline of the political and economic history of this macro-region. The other contributions examine the "East Asian world order" in ideology and reality, long perspective, supra-regional . ows of money between China and the outer world, the role of castaways and sea routes between Korea and China, Sino-Japanese relations in the mid-sixteenth century, the trade between China and Nagasaki, aspects of Sino-Ryu-kyu-an relations and the role of translators in the East Asian maritime world. The eighteenth century plays a key role in many contributions, and time and again the reader will meet with groups of persons who played a particular role within the exchange networks of this early modern period, such as monks acting as diplomats or interpreters.
East Asian countries were notably uninterested in regional monetary integration until the late 1990's, when the Asian financial crisis revealed the fragility of the region's exchange rate arrangements and highlighted the need for a stronger regional financial architecture. Since then, the countries of East Asia have begun taking steps to explore monetary and financial cooperation, establishing such initiatives as regular consultations among finance ministers and central bank governors and the pooling of foreign exchange reserves. In this book Ulrich Volz investigates the prospects for monetary cooperation and integration in East Asia, using state-of-the-art theoretical and empirical tools to analyze the most promising policy options. --
In World Trade Systems of the East and West, Geoffrey C. Gunn profiles Nagasaki's historic role in mediating the Japanese bullion trade, especially silver exchanged against Chinese and Vietnamese silk. Founded in 1571 as the terminal port of the Portuguese Macau ships, Nagasaki served as Japan's window to the world over long time and with the East-West trade carried on by the Dutch and, with even more vigor, by the Chinese junk trade. While the final expulsion of the Portuguese in 1646 characteristically defines the “closed” period of early modern Japanese history, the real trade seclusion policy, this work argues, only came into place one century later when the Shogunate firmly grasped the true impact of the bullion trade upon the national economy.
This substantial work explores the impact of monetization in premodern Southeast Asia from the third century BCE to the rise of Maleka in the early fifteenth century. The author explores why concepts of money developed unevenly throughout the region. He considers trade policies, price controls, exchange ratios, monopolies, variant standards of value, and the administrative structures required to support such a complex economic innovation.
The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity’s diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon but rather as an embodiment of greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion—as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn’s study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture. Surveying Chinese religion from 1000 BCE to the beginning of the twentieth century, The Sinister Way views the Wutong cult as by no means an aberration. In Von Glahn’s work we see how, from earliest times, the Chinese imagined an enchanted world populated by fiendish fairies and goblins, ancient stones and trees that spring suddenly to life, ghosts of the unshriven dead, and the blood-eating spirits of the mountains and forests. From earliest times, too, we find in Chinese religious culture an abiding tension between two fundamental orientations: on one hand, belief in the power of sacrifice and exorcism to win blessings and avert calamity through direct appeal to a multitude of gods; on the other, faith in an all-encompassing moral equilibrium inhering in the cosmos.
