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APRIL, 1899.] DEVELOPMENT OF CURRENCY IN THE FAR EAST.
able to reduce the conflicting and endlessly varying standards and systems that the traders and adventurers had to confront. The necessity was met, commercial fashion, effectively and practically at a very early period in the history of the dealings, for we find the existing international commercial weight system for the Far East partially in existence, in the notes of ra ders of the fifteenth century, and in full swing, substantially in the form in which we now have it, as early as the days of the first voyage to the East of the Dutch East India Company in 1595-97. Perhaps it is rather late in the day to do so, but still I think it necessary to point out even now, that this international system is neither in form nor in nomenclature Chinese, but entirely Malayan in origin, being, I believe, based on the Malayan nomenclature of a commercial system of weights used in the Malayo-Chinese trade of the Middle Ages, found to be in existence by the Europeans on their arrival, and eventually modified by them to suit their own requirements.
The international commercial terms are nowadays also used to suit the exigencies of a popular general scale so different in principle from that hitherto described, as I will presently explain, that I feel obliged to exhibit a longish table, which will very clearly bring out its Malayan origin.
RISE OF INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL TERMS.
Old Malay Forms.
Kondari, kundart Kupong, kúpang Mayam, mås Tahil, tail Bangkal Katt ...
Pikal
*
...
DIAGRAM VI.
***
***
...
International Commercial Forms.
107
Candareen.
Cobang, copang.
Mace, mas.
Tael, tale. Buncal.
...Catty.
... Picul, pocul.
So far as it deals with matters Malayan, and distinctly in its origin, the international commercial scale, therefore, constitutes the latest development of the ancient India. scale of 320 raktikas to the pala.
Now, while I was endeavouring to trace the history of the Troy weight system of modern India, I had very little to say about the literary scale, and had it not been for the excursions Eastwards we have just been making together, it might have been thought that it had died So also, in considering the Far Eastern systems, it might be thought that the Indian popular scale of 96 ratis to the tôld had failed to commend itself beyond the Indian borders. But all uch institutions die hard, and research will show that the literary scale of India has failed to kill its rival, the popular scale, in more than one most interesting instance.
It is the Indian popular scale that has found its way among the wild tribes on the Indian and Tibeto-Burman border the Chins, the Lushais, the Nagas, the Singphos, the Kachins and that, too, despite the eclecticism, with which these untrained populations have borrowed their fiscal terms from their neighbours on both sides the borders. Perhaps one of the most interesting instances existing of the evolution of ideas is to be found in the cumbrous and complicated attempts of the most civilized of these border peoples, the Manipuris, to engraft the ideas embodied in the Indian popular scale on to the terminology of their own previously acquired monetary scale also by the way originally Indian. That scale had no reference to weight at all, but related to the counting of cowries when used as currency.
This point has more than an academic interest, for it is on the basis of dividing the upper Troy denomination into 400 parts,. as a survival of the method of counting cowries for currency, that the Indian popular scale has been carried into Nepal, and from Nepal, through its trade with Tibet, far into all sorts of regions, East and North, in Central Asia. And not only
