Southern Song dynasty coinage

rdf:langString Southern Song dynasty coinage

rdf:langString center

rdf:langString The story relates that a patron bought a bowl of soup and paid for it with a "10 cash" coin. The soup seller did not have any small change and so encouraged the customer to eat more and more soup. The customer continued to eat but finally sighed and said, "it is fortunate that my coin is only a "10 cash". If it had been a "100 cash" it would have killed me!"

rdf:langString - Translated by Gary Ashkenazy of the Primaltrek website from Mandarin Chinese.

rdf:langString The Southern Song dynasty refers to an era of the Song dynasty after Kaifeng was captured by the Jurchen Jin dynasty in 1127. The government of the Song was forced to establish a new capital city at Lin'an (present day Hangzhou) which wasn't near any sources of copper so the quality of the cash coins produced under the Southern Song significantly deteriorated compared to the cast copper-alloy cash coins of the Northern Song dynasty. The Southern Song government preferred to invest in their defenses (as its incapable military easily fell to the Jurchens) while trying to remain passive towards the Jin dynasty establishing a long peace until the Mongols eventually annexed the Jin before marching down to the Song establishing the Yuan dynasty. Coins from the Song dynasty have appeared in variants written in either standard (top-bottom-right-left) or clockwise (top-right-bottom-left). The Southern Song dynasty saw the emergence of paper money, while coins were increasingly becoming a rarity. Iron cash coins also started to be used in greater numbers, at first due to the lack of copper, but later even as more copper was found the production of iron cash coins remained cheaper and an abundance of iron made it more attractive for the government to produce, while several problems such as the fact that iron is harder to inscribe, and that iron corrodes faster ensured the continued production of copper cash coins. Despite the chronic shortages of copper the Southern Song used special coins as a form of psychological warfare against Jin army defectors, and copper coins (and later silver sycees) would remain the standard of administration even for the newly introduced paper money.