Chinese paper money, in particular the banknotes issued by the People's Bank of China beginning in 1949, have been among the fastest growing and most popular areas of collectible world paper money. All dealers and collectors of world paper money will find this reference highly useful.

As China emerges as a global powerhouse, this title examines its economic past and the shaping of its financial institutions.

This is the first book to document in English the evolution of modern Chinese banking, from the establishment in 1897 of the first Chinese bank along a Western model, to the abrupt interruption of professional banking by the Japanese invasion in 1937. Drawing from original documents of major Chinese banks, Linsun Cheng explains how and why the banks were able, despite a succession of foreign and domestic crises, to grow into viable and self-sustaining institutions in China. Rich with new, unpublished historical details, this book offers an original, comprehensive narrative of the origins and growth of professional banks.

This book collects detailed knowledge and techniques on the identification and authentication of various Chinese antiques, including ancient coins, porcelain, bronzes, gems, calligraphy, ancient paintings, etc. The book is very detailed and authentic, providing readers with in-depth analysis of Chinese antiques, so that readers from scratch become proficient experts in the field.

China's currency, the renminbi, has taken the world by storm. This book documents the renminbi's impressive rise to global prominence in a short period but also shows how much further it has to go before becoming a major international currency. The hype about its inevitable ascendance to global dominance is overblown.

Any non-Asian who has tried to study Chinese characters can tell you that a ti ny line or dot makes a diff erence to the meaning. The same is true in life. Every event makes a diff erence, even if that diff erence is too small to appreciate at the ti me. This story refl ects one couple’s att empt to observe and comment on China and Chinese culture, one event at a ti me, as they spent a “gap year” not between high school and university but between work and reti rement by living and working in Kunming.

For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of demons and divinities. Although frequently denigrated as wasteful and vulgar and at times prohibited by governing elites, today this venerable custom is as popular as ever. Burning Money explores the cultural logic of this common practice while addressing larger anthropological questions concerning the nature of value. The heart of the work integrates Chinese and Western thought and analytics to develop a theoretical framework that the author calls a “materialist aesthetics.” This includes consideration of how the burning of paper money meshes with other customs in China and around the world. The work examines the custom in contemporary everyday life, its origins in folklore and history, as well as its role in common rituals, in the social formations of dynastic and modern times, and as a “sacrifice” in the act of consecrating the paper money before burning it. Here the author suggests a great divide between the modern means of cultural reproduction through ideology and reification, with its emphasis on nature and realism, and previous pre-capitalist means through ritual and mystification, with its emphasis on authenticity. The final chapters consider how the burning money custom has survived its encounter with the modern global system and internet technology. Innovative and original in its interpretation of a common ritual in Chinese popular religion, Burning Money will be welcomed by scholars and students of Chinese religion as well as comparative religion specialists and anthropologists interested in contemporary social theory.

In Marco Polo was in China Hans Ulrich Vogel undertakes a thorough study of Yuan currencies, salts and revenues, by comparing Marco Polo manuscripts with Chinese sources and thus offering new evidence for the Venetian’s stay in Khubilai Khan’s empire.