DAVIS. — CERTAIN OLD CHINESE NOTES. 267 



Moreover, it was plain from the pains taken by the North China Herald 

 to trace the ownership of specimens of those notes, that even in China, 

 it was a matter of interest, among the English residents, to follow up 

 the destination of such specimens, in the evident belief that they were 

 the only existing representatives of the great paper money experience 

 of China in early days, which were likely to be found outside Chinese 

 collections. 



In the year 1912, my interest was greatly stimulated by receiving 

 by mail a cutting from the Sunday New York Sun of an article on 

 Chinese paper money, which was illustrated by a picture of a one kwan 

 Ming note, having the legend on the vertical panels enclosing the 

 characters which state the denominational value of the note and also 

 enclosing the pictorial representation of the ten strings of cash, written 

 in ordinary Chinese instead of square seal characters. My efforts to 

 ascertain whether this was a picture of an actual note or if it was from 

 a drawing, in which the artist had substituted a translation for the 

 ancient seal characters proved fruitless. I was, however, told from the 

 Sun office that the original came from and was returned to the Ameri- 

 can Bank Note Company. The photograph of the note in possession 

 of that company shows that their note does not differ in any way 

 from the ordinary one kwan Ming note described by Morse; depicted 

 by Chaudoir; a sketch of which is given by Du Halde; and of which 

 so many photographic copies can readily be obtained. The proba- 

 bility that the substitution of ordinary characters for square seal 

 characters in this inscription was the work of a draughtsman and that 

 there was no note bearing the inscription . in ordinary characters is 

 strongly reinforced by the fact that Chaudoir says that " in all poste- 

 rior emissions" — that is, after the one kwan note was put forth by 

 Hung Wu — the form of that note was preserved, "for," says he, 

 "the minister of finance having asked the Emperor Tching Tsou in 

 1403 to change the form of the eight tchouan characters [the square 

 seal] could not obtain permission." 



In the summer of 1914, 1 met at York Harbor, an English gentleman, 

 Mr. James Orange, who had spent many years in China, who had 

 collaborated with a friend in the publication of an illustrated work 

 on certain specimens of Chinese porcelain and who himself was evi- 

 dently an authority on matters which interest the ordinary collector. 

 My interest being keen on the subject of the notes, I asked him if he 

 had any. He told me that he had not, but that a friend of his in 

 London, Mr. A. W. Bahr, had a number, some of which were very 

 old. Mr. Bahr had himself lived many years in China, was in 1910 



