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NOVEMBER, 1897.) CURRENCY AND COINAGE AMONG THE BURMESE.
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CURRENCY AND COINAGE AMONG THE BURMESE.
BY R. C. TEMPLE. (Continued from p. 235.)
II. I WILL now pass on to facts of perhaps still greater interest concerning the use of special 1 articles as intermediaries in barter or exchange.
Natural Produce. - It will have been observed that, in the instances quoted, the observers who noted them have been careful to state the articles by name they saw used in trade by barter. As a matter of fact, even the naked Kükis would not take everything, but restricted the articles they accepted in exchange for their own produce to certain customary things, of which they were habitually in great need. From this first glimmering of the idea of wealth represented by a conventional currency to such a currency itself in terms of natural produce is but a short, though an important step.
(1) Bice. - Yale potes in his Embassy to Ava, p. 259, that "rice is often used in petty transactions among villagers." 59 It is still used in some parts of Upper Burma, but the rice so nsed is not food-rice, nor seed-rice, but useless, broken rice. It is in fact a conventional currency, like the imitation hoes, hatchets, knives, etc., of the Chinese and other races in the world. As this use of rice in Barma throws an important light on the subject before us, I may as well describe it in greater detail. Rice has been so used elsewhere in the East, as the following facts will shew. Mr. E. H. Parker informs me that, in Annals of the T'ang Dynasty of China, a book a thousand years old, it is stated that the Shâns of old paid a tax of two measures of rice a year for each man who worked a plough, and it took three men to keep a plough going, one to drive, one to lead and one to poke up the ox! As I have observed already, taxes are pretty sure guide to barter values. Rice, again, formed an important part of the fines inflicted on the Lushais in the Expedition of 1871-2, as Wood thorpe informs us in his Lushai Experlition, p. 223, and elsewhere. Friar Odoric, in the early XIVth Century, in describing & rich man of Manzi in China, says - "Now this man hath a revenue of xxx tuman of tagars (Turki and Persian, taghdr = sack) of rice. And each tuman is ten thousand and each tagar is the amount of a heavy ass-load.” On this text Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, p. 153, remarks: - "Revenues continued to be estimated in China in sacks of rice until lately, if they are not so still (1866). In Burma they are always estimated in baskets of rice."
In the XVIth Century we find in the Ain Akbari, Gladwin's Ed., Vol. II. p. 156, that, it Kashmir, "every coin and even manufactures are estimated in kharwars of rice." Even in the remote, but by no means uncivilised, Maldives, Pyrard de Laval found, in the early XVIIth Century (Hak. Soc. Ed., Vol. II. p. 473) that "these islands are a great emporium for all parts and the Moors of India frequent them, bartering their salt and earthenware, which are not made at the islands, and also rice and silver."
(2) Salt. - Holt Hallett, Thousand Miles on an Elephant, p. 164, states :- "Dr. M'Gilvary said that up to 1874 salt was used as currency for purchases in Zimme Market," and we thus find ourselves started in the neighbourhood of Burma on another conventional article of barter. In the XIIIth Centary, Marco Polo found that the people of the "Province of Tebet " ased "salt instead of money," and in the Province of Caindu" "the small change again 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 80 moulds of this
5 Cox, Burhan Empire, p. 811, remarks in his diary on July 21, 1797, that the people of Ava had to tse rice in place of lead for small purchases, in consequence of the pranks that King B'Oddp'ay played with his currency. C. Raffles, Java, Vol. II. p. li. So cloves, the staple produce, were used as currency in the Moluccas-in 1596 - Dutek Voyages, 1708, p. 292. In 1820 the people of Palo Seruni carried fish to fairs "in barter for rice and salt." Malayan Miscell., Vol. I., Bencoolen, 1820, in Moor's Indian Archipelago, Appx., p. 2..
* Aymonier, Voyage dans le Laos, Vol. I. pp. 75, 111, 132, 159, alludes to barter in salt.
