During the Qing dynasty, the court minted official copper coins (制錢) both to provide an everyday medium of exchange for the people and to reinforce the legitimacy of the ruling house. However, because the minting system was concentrated in the cap...
During the Qing dynasty, the court minted official copper coins (制錢) both to provide an everyday medium of exchange for the people and to reinforce the legitimacy of the ruling house. However, because the minting system was concentrated in the capital (京師) and could not meet the broad demand for coinage in the provinces, various unofficial coins—such as older issues (舊錢), foreign coins (外國錢), and privately minted coins (私鑄錢)—came to be widely circulated. Although the Qing government tried to facilitate the smooth distribution of its official coins (often viewed as emblems of dynastic legitimacy) by attempting to recall private or small-denomination coinage from the populace, this effort proved unsuccessful. For ordinary people with limited resources, these non-official coins were both valuable assets and essential means of daily transactions, rendering such recall measures ineffective.
Despite the Qing authorities’ strict prohibition against damaging official coinage, as well as the production and distribution of privately minted coins, and their imposition of punishments varying according to the severity of each crime, these actions did not fundamentally resolve the underlying imbalance between soaring demand and inadequate supply of copper coins. In fact, reports of private minting emerged frequently throughout the empire, revealing that privately minted coins often acted as a type of auxiliary currency driven by grassroots needs.
The rich copper (銅) and lead (鉛) resources in Yunnan and Guizhou provided ideal conditions for large-scale production of low-quality coins by illicit minting groups, who then sold these coins to other regions. In these areas, privately minted coins became a commoditized product that was funneled into the Jiangnan area via water-based transport routes, causing ripple effects on coin values that extended well beyond any single locality. This phenomenon underscores the dynamic nature of currency in the Qing period, transcending the rigid dichotomy between silver circulating interregionally and copper coins supposedly confined to specific localities. From this perspective, the nation-wide rise in the silver-to-copper exchange rate in the early 19th century cannot be attributed solely to the outflow or inflow of silver tied to foreign trade; rather, the large-scale movement of privately minted coins and their interplay with the overall circulation of silver must also be taken into account.