How did people who used silver in ancient times find money?

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With the popularity of Alipay and WeChat wallet, everyone can shop with only one mobile phone.

But in ancient times? 9? 9? 9? 9? 9? 9?

"Manned, here is s silver. Give us a pot of good wine with a few pounds of beef! " You must often hear this kind of dialogue in TV series, but have you ever thought about how much this fifty taels of silver is and how to change it?

Read A Dream of Red Mansions, and you may find the answer.

In A Dream of Red Mansions, Grandma Liu said, "Twenty taels of silver is enough for the cultivators to live for one year." It can be seen that the protagonists in TV dramas often take out 50 taels of silver, which is how "generous".

How on earth are you going to find the money? In A Dream of Red Mansions, Baoyu asked for a doctor, and Musk got the silver, but he didn't know its weight. She picked a piece and weighed it. She smiled and said, "I'm afraid there are one or two in this piece. It's better to have more, not less. Doby, a poor boy, doesn't mean that we don't know anything, but that we are small-minded. " The woman on the side said, "That's a five-tael spindle. There are at least two in this piece! There is no editing now, girl. Take this and pick a smaller one. "

In ancient times, generally speaking, one or two pieces of silver were equivalent to 1000 copper coins, so if you bought a commodity worth hundreds of copper coins with one or two pieces of silver, the stall owner still had to give you hundreds of copper coins, which took a long time to count and was inconvenient to carry.

Therefore, in the face of such a huge amount of money as silver, the ancients finally thought of a way to cut it with steel scissors to further reduce the weight of a single piece of silver and facilitate the exchange with copper coins. We can often see the ancients buying things with broken silver in TV dramas (it seems that they don't need to be changed in TV dramas), and these broken silver are cut out for convenient consumption. The ancient units of weight were converted as follows: 1 two = 10 yuan = 1000 minutes = 1000 minutes =1000 milli = 10000 mm. It can be seen that it would be much more convenient if silver can be cut small enough and then exchanged with copper coins.

A tool for cutting silver

How do you weigh the cut silver? At that time, the ancients invented weighing instruments accurate to the centimeter? Son (děng). After the cut broken silver is weighed with a shovel, the buyer and the seller agree and finally a deal can be reached. Therefore, some rich people need to carry steel scissors and barnacles in addition to silver when they go out shopping, which is convenient for merchants to exchange.

In addition to silver, barnyard grass is also used to weigh valuable medicinal materials, spices and pigments. Therefore, swallows are often found only in the homes of dignitaries, and even made of ebony and ivory, which has become today's collection.

Some people may say, can't you cut and weigh at home before you consume or let the merchants prepare these tools? In ancient times, silver was widely used in commodity trading, so commodity sellers might have steel scissors and barnacles, but some retail sellers or market vendors basically didn't have these things. If you spend money without barnacles, how much do you think it weighs?

Unless you are a hero in a costume TV series, you buy something and throw down a silver ingot, and then boldly say, "Store, keep the change."

If you also want to feel the cool feeling of the Great Xia throwing down the silver ingot to pay the bill, welcome to our mall to find a surprise!