Chinese burial money

Burial money was modeled after the many different types of ancient Chinese coinages, and earlier forms of burial money tended to be actual money.[5] Graves that were dated to the Shang dynasty period have been discovered that contain thousands of cowrie shells, for example, the Fu Hao-mu, dating to about the year 1200 BCE, was discovered containing 6,900 cowry shells.[8] Chinese graves dating to the Warring States period are found containing contemporary coinages buried as funerary objects such as spade money, knife money, ring-shaped coins, ant-nose coins, and Ban Liang cash coins.[5] But as the presence of real money and other objects of value would attract the attention of potential grave robbers, the Chinese started to manufacture clay imitations of real money.[5] This was done as the contemporary Chinese believed that if the grave was robbed then the spirit of the deceased person who laid inside of the tomb was disturbed by these robbers and the money that was formerly located in the grave that was meant to ensure his or her comfort in the afterlife was now gone, making their afterlife less comfortable.[5][9]

Chinese burial money has been discovered made from stones and bones (along with cowrie shells) in the earliest forms, later forms include thin metallic imitations of circulation currency during the Spring and Autumn period.[10] The imitation metal money found in these ancient tombs ended to be thin and fragile, and were typically made of lead and bronze.[10] Initially archaeologists believed that imitations of currencies were only used by the poor, but the discovery of imitation money in the tombs of the wealthy had changed this view.[10]

The Chinese custom of burying the deceased with coins can be compared to the ancient Greek and Roman customs of burying people with a coin to pay with a passage to the underworld.[11] In the Chinese afterlife burial coins could be used to purchase either less or no punishment for bad karma, or even for the purchase of luxury items.[11]

A cash coin-shaped "Laid to Rest" (入土为安) burial charm.

Chinese "Laid to Rest" burial charms are bronze funerary charms or coins usually found in graves. They measure from 2.4 to 2.45 centimetres (0.94 to 0.96 in) in diameter with a thickness of 1.3 to 1.4 millimetres (0.051 to 0.055 in) and they contain the obverse inscription rù tǔ wéi ān (入土为安) which means "to be laid to rest", while the reverse is blank. These coins were mostly found in graves dating from the late Qing dynasty period, though one was found in a coin hoard of Northern Song dynasty coins. The wéi is written using a simplified Chinese character (为) rather than the traditional Chinese version of the character (為). These coins are often excluded from numismatic reference books on Chinese coinage or talismans due to many taboos, as they were placed in the mouths of dead people and are considered unlucky and disturbing, and are undesired by most collectors.[12][13][14][15]

These existed some controversy to the attribution of this Chinese burial coin, this is because the wei is written using the simplified Chinese character "为" instead of the traditional Chinese variant "為".[12] The argument used to dispute its typical attribution to the Manchu Qing dynasty period was that because simplified Chinese characters did not exist in a standardised form prior to their introduction by the Communist government of the People's Republic of China in the year 1956.[12] This hypothesis has been debunked as research into the simplified form of this particular Chinese character has shown, however, that the simplified variant of it has existed at least from the time of the Ming dynasty period ending the controversy surrounding its origins.[12]

Clay money (traditional Chinese: 泥錢; simplified Chinese: 泥钱; pinyin: ní qián), or earthenware money (traditional Chinese: 陶土幣; simplified Chinese: 陶土币; pinyin: táo tǔ bì), was a special type of Chinese burial money that started appearing sometime during the Han dynasty period.[5] Clay money was created as an alternative to burying actual money with the deceased in the hopes of preventing the grave to be "disturbed" by graverobbers.[5]

In the book Han Material Culture written by the Sinologist Sophia-Karin Psarras it is stated that any representation of real life currency was considered legal tender that could be used as a medium of exchange in the afterlife.[5] This belief helped the transition of using real bronze, silver, and / or gold money in Chinese graves with surrogate forms of money made of clay.[5] As these imitations of money made from clay had no actual value in "the world of the living" they would deter grave robbers from breaking in and "disturbing" the dead.[5] Because clay money is so cheap to produce it was used by both the wealthy and impoverished, as the poor could afford to buy these clay imitations of actual coins to bury with their deceased relatives.[5]

Clay money for funerary uses could be based on "low money" or "low currency" (下幣), such as copper-alloy cash coins, or on "high money" or "high currency" (上幣). "High currency" is a term that referred to silver and gold currencies that were produced during the Warring States, Qin dynasty, and Han dynasty periods. While initially the aristocracy tended to buried with genuine specimens of "high currency", later clay versions of these coinages were also produced.

Paper burial money dates back to around the mid 3rd century CE.[11] These early forms of Joss paper were paper imitations of goods or coinage, intended as offerings to the dead.[11] They were intended to be used in the Chinese underworld known as dei yuk (which Christian missionaries translated as "Hell") where Yan Wang would judge the souls of those that appeared before him in his underworld court.[11] Dei yuk in Chinese mythology is not a place where the deceased suffer permanently but a place where the souls of the dead can "burn off" their bad karma before they are allowed to reincarnate into a higher plane of existence.[11]

Clay replicas of Jinbing (金餅) at the Mawangdui archaeological site that located in Changsha, Hunan.

During the Western Han dynasty period it is estimated that over 1,000,000 catties (斤), which is over 248 metric tons, of gold currencies and coinages was in circulation in China at the time.[5] Among the gold currencies that circulated during the Western Han dynasty period was the Jinbing (traditional Chinese: 金餅; simplified Chinese: 金饼; pinyin: jīn bǐng), which was shaped as a "cake" or "cookie" and are variously referred to in English as a "gold pie", "gold cake", "gold biscuit", "gold bing ingot", "gold button ingot", etc.[5] These Jinbing tend to weigh between 210 grams and 250 grams with most weighing about 248 grams or one Han dynasty period catty and had a gold content of between 97 and 99% gold.[5] A single Jinbing was equivalent to about 10,000 cash coins.[5]

Han dynasty Jinbing can display Chinese characters which have been identified as reading 齊 (qí), 土 (tǔ), 長 (cháng), 阮 (ruǎn), 吉 (jí), 馬 (mǎ), 租 (zū), 千 (qiān), 金 (jīn), 王 (wáng), and "V".[5] Other Chinese characters found on Jinbing require further research to be deciphered.[5] Clay imitations of Jinbing (traditional Chinese: 陶質"金餅"; simplified Chinese: 陶质"金饼"; pinyin: táo zhì "jīn bǐng"), or mingqi (Chinese: 冥器; pinyin: míng qì), are also at times found in tombs that date to the Han dynasty period.[5] Like the actual Jinbing, some clay imitations also feature Chinese characters at the bottom.[5] Some inscriptions that have been found on clay Jinbing include feng nian tian (豐年田, "fields of bountiful harvest") and Zhiqian Baiwan (直錢百萬, "has a nominal value of 1,000,000 cash coins").[5]

In the Western world clay imitations of Jinbing have in the past been mistakenly misidentified as "glazed plates of food".[5]

Chinese money trees (Traditional Chinese: 搖錢樹; Simplified Chinese: 摇钱树; Pinyin: yáo qián shù), or shengxianshu, ("immortal ascension trees"),[17] are tree-like assemblies of charms, with the leaves made from numismatic charm replicas of cash coins. These money trees should not be with coin trees which are a by-product of the manufacture of cash coins, but due to their similarities it is thought by some experts that they may have been related. Various legends from China dating to the Three Kingdoms period mention a tree that if shaken would cause coins to fall from its branches. Money trees as a charm have been found in Southwest Chinese tombs from the Han dynasty, and are believed to have been placed there to help guide the dead to the afterlife and provide them with monetary support. According to one myth, a farmer watered the money tree seed with his sweat and watered its sapling with his blood, after which the mature tree provided eternal wealth; this implies a moral that one can only become wealthy through their own toil. Literary sources claim that the origin of the money tree lies with the Chinese word for "copper" (銅, tóng) which is pronounced similar to the word for "the Paulownia tree" (桐, tóng). The leaves of the Paulownia become yellow in autumn and take on the appearance of gold or bronze cash coins. Chen Shou (陳壽) mentions in the Records of the Three Kingdoms that a man named Bing Yuan (邴原) walked upon a string of cash coins while strolling and, unable to discover the owner, hung it in a nearby tree; other passersby noticed this string and began hanging coins in the tree with the assumption that it was a holy tree and made wishes for wealth and luck. The earliest money trees, however, date to the Han dynasty in present-day Sichuan and a Taoist religious order named the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice. Archeoloigsts uncovered money trees as tall as 1.98 metres (6 ft 6 in), decorated with many strings of cash coins, little bronze dogs, bats, Chinese deities, elephants, deer, phoenixes, and dragons, with a bronze frame and a base of pottery. Both the inscriptions and calligraphy found on Chinese money trees match those of contemporary Chinese cash coins, which typically featured replicas of Wu Zhu (五銖) coins during the Han dynasty while those from the Three Kingdoms period had inscriptions such as "Liang Zhu" (兩銖).[25][26][27][28][29]

Silk funerary money discovered at Tomb No. 1 (the tomb of Xin Zhui) at the Mawangdui archaeological site in Changsha, Hunan.

Silk funerary money (traditional Chinese: 絲織品做的冥幣; simplified Chinese: 丝织品做的冥币; pinyin: sī zhī pǐn zuò de míng bì) has been uncovered in tombs and other burial sites dating to the Han dynasty period. Silk fabric was considered to be a valuable form of commodity in China during ancient and imperial times and bolts of silk could also be used as a type of currency because of its high market value.[5] The Silk funerary money that was recovered from Tomb No. 1 (the tomb of Xin Zhui) at the Mawangdui archaeological site. The silk funerary money that was recovered from the Mawangdui site was moved to be on display at the Hunan Provincial Museum, as of March 2015.[5]

Because of this discovery, it is now believed by some Chinese archaeologists that the Warring States period State of Chu's rather distinctive looking sheet form of gold coinage, which in the modern era is known as Ying Yuan, with the closely linked small squares that might have in fact been inspired by this ancient type of Chinese silk money.[5] This hypothesis linking the silk currency to the Chu gold coinage would further explain the reason why the clay imitation version (or burial variants) of the Chu State Ying Yuan that has been uncovered in tombs have a surface design that looks like the fabric of clothing.[5]

The Chinese customs of burial money has also been observed by other Chinese cultured countries like Korea and Vietnam. Examples include Wang Mang's Xin dynasty era hwacheon (貨泉, 화천) cash have been unearthed in tombs in modern Korea there is minor evidence that these coins might've been used for the international trade of the time.[30][31] And a Tây Sơn dynasty cash coin issued under Nguyễn Nhạc was found inside of the tomb of Thoại Ngọc Hầu and his two wives.[32][33] This discovery is considered significant because Thoại Ngọc Hầu was a high-ranking Nguyễn dynasty official and as Tây Sơn dynasty coinage was banned from circulating by the Nguyễn government.[32]

Chinese burial coins are typically not included in Chinese coin catalogues.[12] While Chinese burial coins are sometimes referred to as "charms" they are not included in Chinese charm catalogues either.[12] It seems that because of many cultural reasons that almost nobody wants to have these types of coins in their collections.[12] Chinese burial coins that resemble cash coins have at times been described as "really scary" and "horrifying" by Chinese coin collectors.[12] 

Many Chinese coin collectors state that they would not buy or even own a burial coin because of their association with death and the deceased.[12] This may be because these burial coins were at times "put into the mouth of the deceased" during the Chinese burial ritual or burial. Superstitious coin collectors may also claim that they should be "thrown away because they are unlucky" because of their macabre origins and uses.[12]

After the imperial period ended Chinese and Vietnamese burial and ritual customs have changed, it became uncommon for both actual and imitations of currency to be buried together with deceased individuals.[5] Today it's more common for hell money to be ritualistically burned as offerings for the dead to use in the afterlife.[5] These modern imitations of banknotes are supposedly issued by the Bank of Hell, the central bank of the afterlife.[11]

The critical role of spirit money is to repay the debts of the ancestors of those burning the spirit banknotes.[10] The belief is that the spirit of the deceased must pay its mystical debt that it has accumulated over their life.[10] According to John McCreery in the 1990 article "Why Don’t We See Some Real Money Here?: Offerings in Chinese Religion" published in the Journal of Chinese Religions 18 the burning of a large quantity of spirit money is believed to can make the difference how severely someone gets punished in the afterlife.[10]

Despite the changed customs the basic concern remains the financial well-being of those that have died in the afterlife.[5] Hell banknotes that are burned at modern Chinese and Vietnamese funerals have hyperinflated denominations, which can be as high as $10,000 to $5,000,000,000, or even higher.[5] High denominations like the were also at times used with the ancient custom of clay burial money, such as a clay Jinbing having a nominal value of a million cash coins in the afterlife.[5] When modern Hell Money when introduced during the late 1800s their denominations were roughly equal to that of the contemporary circulating banknotes, but over time their denominations have exponentially increased.[11]

One hypothesis about the current situation where Hell Money have such high denomination states that it expanded to keep pace with the hyperinflation that occurred in China during the 1940s in the wake of World War II and that unlike the actual Chinese yuan, the denominations of Hell Money never declined, even after the Chinese economy was brought back under control following the surrender of Japan and a series of monetary reforms.[11] The denominations of Hell Money and modern Renminbi differ greatly indicating that the value of money in the afterlife may not be equivalent to that used by the living.[11] A writer at the HK Magazine noted that either the inflation in the afterlife is rampant, "or the cost of unliving {is} ridiculously high".[11]

• Cash coins in art
• Coins for the dead
• List of coin hoards in China
• List of coin hoards in Vietnam
• List of ways people honor the dead
• Visitation stones
• Zhizha