DAVIS. — CERTAIN OLD CHINESE NOTES. 253 



allusion was put forth in Paris in 1735 by Jean Baptiste Du Halde, a 

 Jesuit father. It consisted of a collation, made up from the relations 

 of the Jesuit missionaries who from China sent to the central office of 

 the order, observations on the geography, the zoology, the botany of 

 the country, and also on the manners, the customs and the life of the 

 people. At what date the relation accompanying the drawing of the 

 note was sent does not appear, but it seems probable that it must 

 have been in the latter part of the seventeenth century, or possibly 

 early in the eighteenth. When Du Halde's description of China 

 appeared, the financiers of Europe were no longer ignorant of the power 

 of credit and of the dangers of its use in the form of paper money. 

 France had just suffered from the miseries entailed by Law's Miss- 

 issippi scheme and England had but just emerged from the troubles 

 caused by the South Sea bubble. In Massachusetts Bay, paper 

 money, after nearly fifty years of use, was still the only medium of 

 trade in the Province. The value of Du Halde's book was recognized 

 in England and a translation with some abridgments was published 

 there as early as 1738. The brief account of the currency given by 

 Du Halde was preserved and appears in the translation in the follow- 

 ing words : 6 



"In the beginning of the reign of Hung-vu, Founder of the twenty-second 

 dynasty, called Ming .... Money was become so very scarce that they paid 

 the Mandarins and soldiers partly in Paper; giving them a sheet of paper 

 sealed with an Imperial Seal, which passed for a thousand little copper pieces, 

 or a tael of silver. Those sheets are much sought after by such as build, who 

 hang them up as a rarity to the chief beam of the house, the people and even 

 of the quality, being so as to imagine [sic] that it preserves them from all 

 misfortunes." 



Du Halde then goes on to state that this paper currency was aban- 

 doned by the same emperor who inaugurated or, perhaps I ought to 

 say, revived it. 



The works of a Chinese author which have been made use of by 

 writers on the topic of Chinese paper money, the characters in the title 

 of which have been anglicized as-" Tung Keen Kang Muh" and trans- 

 lated, "Condensation of the Mirror of History," were rendered into 

 French in 1779-1783 by Father Joseph de Mailla. 7 There was no 



6 A Description of the Empire of China, etc., from the French of P. J. Du 

 Halde. 1, p. 332 (1738). 



7 Histoire Generale de la Chine ou annales de cet Empire, traduites du 

 Tong-Kieng-Kang-Mou. Paris (1779-1783). 



