194 THE EVOLUTION OF 



manufactured. There is for the present discussion a 

 valuable reference to a currency in cloth in a letter from 

 John Jesse, dated July 20, 1775, to the East India 

 Directors. This old Oriental worthy writes : ' I was 

 informed the quantity (of pepper) that year (1774 in 

 Borneo proper) was 4,000 peculs, cultivated solely by 

 a colony of Chinese settled here, and sold to the junks, 

 at the rate of 17-2 Spanish dollars per pecul, in China 

 cloth called congongs, which for want of any other specie 

 are become the standard for regulating the prices of all 

 commercial commodities at this port.' This congong 

 then must have been a piece of cloth of an average 

 length and size, and therefore it belonged to the category 

 of carefully measured articles, domestically usable and 

 employed as a medium of exchange. In just the same 

 way a piece of cloth, highly ornamented with shells, 

 passed as currency in Formosa. 



A similar currency, both old and widely distributed, 

 in the Far East, in Burma, Yunnan, Shanland, Siam, 

 Malay Archipelago, and Borneo, among other places, 

 consists of glass jars and bottles. The Chinese noticed 

 this of the Burmans a thousand years ago, and in 1870 

 and 1874, during expeditions in Upper Burma, one 

 writer notes that 'what money could not secure empty 

 pint hock-bottles could. For four of these I got eleven 

 eggs and a brood of jungle- fowl chickens.' Another 

 noticed that the Shans placed ' an inordinate value upon 

 empty bottles.' Any kind of liquor bottle was good, 

 soda-water bottles were better, red hock-bottles best of 

 all. In the Consular Report from Yunnan for 1898 we 

 are told that in the hills these 'bottles are accepted 

 in preference to silver,' the bottles being 'good quart 

 bottles of clear glass.' Here we have a ready-made 

 careful measurement, which the users of the currency 



