China; Its History, Arts and Literature Volume 2 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter III FINANCE LIKE all Chinese matters involving reference to statistics, facts about the national revenue and expenditure are difficult to obtain. Great variations appear in the statements of European writers who undertook to discuss the subject between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The earliest estimate, that of a French missionary ? Pdre Trigault, writing in 1587 ? put the Central Government's income at twenty millions of taels, or about eight millions sterling, taking the tael at its then value of eight shillings, approximately; and sixty-eight years later, another authority computed the figure to be five and a half times as large. Then, after a short interval, there appeared estimates the lowest of which was five millions sterling, and the highest (Barrow's in 1796), forty-nine millions. On the whole, however, the consensus was that the revenue actually reaching Peking aggregated from twelve to fifteen millions sterling annually, and that the revenues collected for local purposes totalled about thirty-five millions. A word must be said here about the manner of expressing these figures. The use of a sterling unit appears convenient at first sight, and certainly does not involve any inaccuracy prior to the appreciation of gold in the nineteenth century. Thus, speaking of revenues or expenditures in bimetallic eras, it is arithmetically a matter of indifference whether sums be expressed in silver taels1 or in the latter's then unvarying gold equivalent. But after the demonetisation of silver and its consequent debacle, which took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, the choice of an unit demands closer consideration. Gold has, of course, the advantage of stability. Such have been the fluctuations in the sterling value of silver that t...