252 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



counterfeiting these notes and finally had asserted that their circula- 

 tion was compulsory. 



It is somewhat singular that Ibn Batuta should have touched upon 

 six of these nine points in Polo's description, omitting only the method 

 of manufacture of the fabric of the notes, which he merely mentions 

 as paper without stating the color, and omitting also any reference to 

 the edict against counterfeiting, as well as any account of the com- 

 pulsory nature of the circulation ; although he does say that a traveller 

 was obliged to convert his foreign coin into notes in order to make use 

 of it in the market. He speaks of only one size of notes and those the 

 small notes not larger than the palm of the hand. This omission may 

 be explained by the fact that when he was there, Kublai Khan was 

 no longer on the throne. He had been succeeded by Ch'ing Tsung, 

 and the emissions during the reign of the latter were, we have reason 

 to suppose, uniform in size. 



Both Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta were in China at a time when the 

 notes were greatly depreciated. Some writers have expressed wonder 

 at their not being impressed with the fact of this depreciation. There 

 is no occasion for wonder at this. The travellers were unfamiliar 

 with paper money and were surrounded by conditions of life never 

 before seen or heard of by them, but even had they been familiar with 

 the currency and had they possessed such knowledge of prices as would 

 have enabled them to measure the reduction of the purchasing power 

 of the currency, they would probably have been impressed only with 

 the high prices and would not have been likely to attribute them to 

 the degradation of the currency, precisely as we see our government 

 to-day investigating the question of high prices and simultaneously 

 emitting emergency currency — thus adding fuel to one of the causes 

 of high prices. 



What was known in the Eighteenth Century. 



The next allusion in European literature to the old Chinese notes 

 did not come from one who had seen them in circulation, nor did it 

 contain within itself any description of the notes or of their current 

 use, which would make it of value to us, unless an allusion to the 

 abandonment of paper currency should prove of assistance in fixing 

 the date of that event. What was of value, however, in this connec- 

 tion, was an illustration giving the inscriptions on the one kwan Ming 

 notes, 1368-1398, with a translation. The work containing this 



