How much is an ancient silver equivalent to today?
This question is difficult to answer, because the concept of "ancient" is too big. The Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period are ancient, Qin and Han Dynasties, Wei, Jin and Ming Dynasties are ancient, and before the Opium War, ancient times spanned thousands of years. How has the purchasing power of silver remained unchanged for thousands of years? What's more, silver is different from silver. There are "98-foot silver" with good color, "85-foot mixed silver" with color difference and "granular silver" with false color. There must be a difference in their purchasing power, right? In addition, we have to consider regional differences. At the same time, the same money may be worthless in Beijing, but it may be valuable in the countryside. Finally, the weight of one or two pieces of silver was different in different dynasties. The "Er" in the Eastern Han Dynasty was very light, less than 15g, while the "Er" in the Tang Dynasty was very heavy, with one or two exceeding 40g. So if you want to answer this question, you must add a lot of restrictions: what year, where and what color of silver do you mean?
/kloc-in the 0/9th century, there were three kinds of silver in Beijing: broken silver, silver ingot and silver dollar. Broken silver and silver ingots are "made in China" and have different colors. Taking silver grains as an example, the author calculated the standard weight of one or two pieces of silver: 37.3 1g, and the weight of pure silver contained in one or two pieces of silver: 34.9g g. One or two pieces of silver like this can buy more than 70 kilograms of ordinary rice in Beijing at 1884. In view of the fact that ordinary rice now sells for about three yuan per catty, it can be estimated that one or two pieces of silver at that time were equivalent to about two hundred yuan now. If you buy eggs with one or two silver, you can buy three or four hundred eggs, which is still equivalent to more than two hundred yuan. If used to rent a house, the purchasing power of one or two pieces of silver far exceeds that of 200 yuan. At that time, I rented a set of six quadrangles with an area of half an acre in the urban area of Beijing, for only one or two silver a month. It can be seen that there was no shortage of houses in Beijing at that time, and the rent was surprisingly cheaper than food.
/kloc-In the 9th century, the silver dollar was also the common currency in Beijing. The silver dollar was cast by the late Qing government. At that time, China mainly imported silver dollars, including Mexican Angelababy, British Exhibition Ocean and Japanese Yang Long.
Silver ingots and silver dollars are generally used for large-scale transactions. Copper coins are the most commonly used in the lives of ordinary citizens. There are many kinds of coins, such as making pennies, pawning pennies, pawning pennies and pennies, pawning a thousand coins. In the Qing Dynasty, there was a custom in Beijing. No matter what kind of copper coin it is, it must be valued at twice its face value. For example, a thousand coins were originally a thousand coins, but they are definitely two thousand coins in Beijing. One thousand coins "when ten coins" was originally ten thousand coins, but it was determined to be twenty thousand coins in Beijing. Some scholars believe that in the early Qing Dynasty, a very light copper coin was minted in Beijing, referred to as "Jing Coin" or "Jing Coin". The face value of a coin made in Beijing is a penny, but its weight is half of that of coins minted later. Later, coins made in Beijing were no longer in circulation, but they were still the most basic unit of valuation. In other words, after making money, when ten coins replace Beijing coins, people are still used to valuing according to Beijing coins, and because two coins are equivalent to making money, when people see making money and ten coins, they automatically double their face value.