CURRENCY AND COINAGE 193 



when we come to study our old friend Marco Polo's 

 sayings about ' Tebet ' in the thirteenth century we find 

 the same thing : ' The small change is made in this way. 

 They have salt which they boil and set in a mould, flat 

 below and round above, and every piece from the mould 

 weighs about half a pound. Now eighty moulds of this 

 salt are worth one saggio (say a sixth of an ounce) of fine 

 gold, which is a weight so called/ In other words, eighty 

 moulds of salt of a definite size made a Hang or Chinese 

 tael of the period. The experience of the Dutch in the 

 Malay Archipelago in 1596 was much the same in the 

 matter of cakes of sago. In 1710 Alexander Hamilton, 

 the traveller, found bees-wax in oblong moulds used 

 as currency in Borneo. These had a fixed weight of 

 a quarter pecul of 34 Ib. and a fixed value of 2} mace, 

 or ten shillings in gold. Tea in bricks and cakes is an- 

 other similar form of currency in natural produce, which 

 has been widely noticed by travellers and others, and 

 has what naturalists call a wide distribution, for it is 

 found from Shanland and China to Russia. The use of 

 tea-bricks and their close approach to money is well put 

 by the traveller Baber, who wrote in 1882 that 'a brick 

 of tea is not only worth a rupee, but in a certain sense is 

 a rupee.' Some twenty years earlier Clement Williams, 

 a name once well known in Burma, wrote : ' The only 

 kinds apparently known in the market at Bamo are the 

 flat discs of China tea and the balls of Shan tea. The 

 discs weigh 20 tickals each : seven piled together make 

 a packet, which used to sell at if to 2 tickals (of silver, 

 say 5 shillings).' These parallel instances from widely 

 differing regions are excellent evidence for our purpose. 



The next progressive step is an easy pass from the 

 use of natural produce in conventional cakes, bricks, 

 balls, disks, and what not, to articles that are entirely 



