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Asia and the China Trade Currency

Spanish trade routes to the orient were the initial driving force of the early explorers. Spices - Silks and other mystical Eastern potions were eagerly sought after by colonial Europeans.

After being validated for purity and content of the silver many were marked with chopmark notations.

Silver in ancient China was very rare and precious due to the lack of rich domestic mines. Silver deposits usually were found in the same ore bodies as minerals such as quartz, lead, and antimony, and the technology for refining and purifying silver was not mastered until the Tang Dynasty, a much later date than that for copper.

Spanish colonial cobs were imported and circulated in China from the latter part of the 16th century, and their introduction paved the way for other foreign milled silver coins to enter circulation during the next four hundred years. Given the great variety of cob specimens, the only way to determine which types were used in China is to look for examples which bear Chinese chopmarks.

Spanish colonial cobs were called "Cross Money" by the Chinese, and they were one of the earliest types of foreign silver coins used in the Chinese coastal areas, such as Kuangtung, Fujien, Chekiang and Taiwan by the Spaniards, Portuguese and Dutch for their trading with native people. These irregularly-shaped foreign silver pieces were adopted by the Chinese as a kind of "quasi-sycee" which were evaluated by their weight and silver content. They circulated in their original form, often with chopmarks, or in the form of Chinese sycee after they were consigned to the furnace and recast.

The process of chopping cobs during the the initial stages of Chinese contact with foreign silver demonstrates how merchants adopted and authenticated foreign trade silver and transformed them into native coinage--a chopmarked cob was no longer a cob, it was more like a sycee.

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