Perhaps the best instance of the corruption of the {63} Chinese is their action with regard to the currency. In the good old days the currency of China was the silver shoe or ingot, which had no exact weight, and had therefore to be weighed at every transaction. Below that was the copper currency, which had no fixed relation to the silver currency, but only the relation of copper to silver. A copper cash, therefore, represented only its actual value in copper. It was naturally a most unwieldy coin. The old books of travel in China give lamentable pictures of the traveller riding about with huge strings of copper cash almost crushing him with their weight. When the whites began to trade in China they introduced the Mexican dollar with its subsidiary coinage, and this was the common currency in all the ports until a few years ago; but when the Chinese began to Westernise they considered it inconsistent with their dignity not to have a coinage of their own. Led by the Japanese, and assisted by several firms whose speciality was the erection of mints and mintage machinery, they started mints all over the country, and they have kept these mints busy with the most _funeste_ results. To begin with, they coined a dollar in imitation of the Mexican dollar, but even in this the mints did not agree. Some dollars are very light, some slightly below value, and some are nearly true. The first experience of the traveller is that he possesses in his pocket a set of coins which no one will accept, except at a great reduction. But the muddle goes further than that. It was very profitable coining light coins, {64} but it was still more profitable to do so in the lower denominations. The Chinese thought, or chose to think, that it did not matter what the intrinsic value of a 10-cent piece was as long as you wrote on it 10 cents. They have no bank or post-office where you have a legal right to get a dollar for ten 10-cent pieces, and the result therefore of recklessly coining the base 10-cent pieces has been not only to depreciate it with regard to the dollar, but to make it an uncertain value, so that you must go to the money exchangers almost every morning and ask for the rate of exchange between the dollar and the small silver pieces.