As we all know, modern society issues paper money with national credit as an endorsement; In the gold standard period, paper money should keep a fixed proportion with gold, silver and common equivalents. Simply put, there is so much wealth in your society that you can issue so much money. Because the inflow of silver is unbalanced, there is more silver in the southeast coastal areas and less silver in the northwest, but the fluctuation of the national price index is transitive. For example, there is more silver in the southeast coast, and the price of rice has dropped, but the proportion of copper coins to silver will increase.
However, judging from the monetary policy implemented in the Ming Dynasty, the road of silver monetization in the Ming Dynasty was tortuous. In the early years of the Ming Dynasty, the government issued a "ban on silver" many times. Since the imperial court has issued many bans, why can silver still successfully replace paper money and copper coins as the dominant currency?
In foreign trade, besides spices, merchants in the Ming Dynasty mainly worked as cashiers. Due to China's unparalleled manufacturing and export of silk and porcelain, its trade with any country is in surplus. This forced those foreign businessmen to trade with China businessmen with silver.
During the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty, the Spanish opened the trade channel into China through the Cape of Good Hope, so the silver they mined in America flooded into China to buy three major products of China: silk, tea and porcelain. This massive influx of silver was the largest silver discovery in Japan and even the whole world from the middle of the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Ming Dynasty, because of the long 400 years from the Great Navigation Age, the American Silver Mine, the Mexican Silver Mine and the Peruvian Silver Mine, and from 1562 to the Edo Age.
It is always said that inflation harms people and always leads to economic crisis, mainly because paper money is widely used. Paper money is endorsed by national credit. So the original value of paper money is not important, what matters is the symbolic meaning and credit value of paper money.