File:William L. Sachtleben (right) with a Russian friend “loaded with enough Chinese ‘cash’ to pay for a meal at a Kuldja restaurant” (1892).jpg

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Summary

Description
English: An old photograph showing two men carrying Qing Dynasty era cash coins who travelled through China on their bicycles used to pay at a local restaurant in Kuldja (Yining City).

Quotes:

“And now the money problem was the most perplexing of all. “This alone,” said the Russian consul, “if nothing else, will defeat your plans. “We thought we had sufficient money to carry us, or, rather, as much as we could carry…for the weight of the Chinese money necessary for a journey of over three thousand miles was, as the Russian consul thought, one of the greatest of our almost insurmountable obstacles.

William L. Sachtleben (right) with a Russian friend “loaded with enough Chinese ‘cash’ to pay for a meal at a Kuldja restaurant”. “In the interior of China there is no coin except the chen or sapeks (referring to qian 钱 or “cash coins”), an alloy of copper and tin, in the form of a disk, having a hole in the center by which the coins may be strung together. “The very recently coined liang, or tael (referring to Chinese minted ‘silver dollar’ coins), the Mexican piaster (referring to the Mexican silver coin) specially minted for the Chinese market, and the other foreign coins, have not yet penetrated from the coast.  For six hundred miles over the border, however, we found … the Russian money… serviceable among the Tatar merchants, while the tenga (a silver coin of Russian Turkestan), or Kashgar silver-piece, was preferred by the natives even beyond the Gobi, being much handier than the larger or smaller bits of silver broken from the yamba bricks. “All, however, would have to be weighed in the tinza, or small Chinese scales we carried with us, and on which were marked the fün, tchan, and liang of the monetary scale. “But the value of these terms is reckoned in chen (Chinese cash coins), and changes with almost every district.  This necessity for vigilance, together with the frequency of bad silver and loaded yambas, and the propensity of the Chinese to “knock down” on even the smallest purchase, tends to convert a traveler in China into a veritable Shylock. “There being no banks or exchanges in the interior, we were obliged to purchase at Kuldja all the silver we would need for the entire journey of over three thousand miles. “How much would it take?” was the question… That our calculations were close is proved by the fact that we reached Peking with silver in our pockets to the value of half a dollar. “Our money now constituted the principal part of our luggage… “Most of the silver was chopped up into small bits, and placed in the hollow tubing of the machines to conceal it from Chinese inquisitiveness, if not something worse.

“We are glad to say, however, that no attempt at robbery was ever discovered, although efforts at extortion were frequent, and sometimes…of a serious nature.”
Date
Source “Our money now constituted the principal part of our luggage…” - cycling across China in 1892 HT (Twitter). Originally hosted on Cycling Across Imperial China by Gary Ashkenazy on September 6, 2013 (Primaltrek).
Author Gary Ashkenazy (@manymore) / (@primaltrek) uploaded it to Twitter, Helen Wang / ChineseMoneyMatters (@Huobishi) retweeted it.

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