Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

NOTES 435
48. Marco Polo observed the practice
in the southern province of Yunnan in the
thirteenth century: "But when they have
any business with one another, they take
a round or square piece of stick, and split
it in two; and one takes one half and
the other takes the other half. But before
they split it, they make two or three
notches in it, or as many as they wish. So,
when one of them comes to pay another,
he gives him the money or whatever it
is, and gets back the piece of stick the
other had" (Benedetto 1931:193). See also
Yang 1971:92, Kan 1978, Peng 1994:320,
3JO, so8, Trombert 1995:12-15. Tallies of
this sort seem, according to Kan, to have
preceded writing; and one legend claims
that the same man, a minister to the Y ellow
Emperor, invented both writing and
tally contracts simultaneously (Trombert
199PJ).
49· Graham I96o:q9.
so. Actually the similarity was noticed
in antiquity as well: Laozi (Daodejing 27)
speaks of those who can "count without a
tally, secure a door without a lock." Most
famously, he also insisted "when wise
men hold the left tally pledge, they do not
press their debtors for their debts. Men of
virtue hold on to the tally; men lacking
virtue pursue their claims" (stanza 79).
51. Or one might better say, turning
them at one snap from monetary debts
to moral ones, since the very fact that we
know the story implies he was eventually
rewarded (Peng 1994:100). It is probably
significant that the word fu, meaning
"tally," also could mean "an auspicious
omen granted to a prince as a token of
his appointment by Heaven" (Mathews
1931:283). Similarly, Peng notes a passage
from Strategems of the Warring States,
about a lord attempting to win popular
support: "Feng hurried to Bi, where he
had the clerks assemble all those people
who owed debts, so that his tallies might
be matched against theirs. When the tallies
had been matched, Feng brought forth
a false order to forgive these debts, and he
burned the tallies. The people all cheered"
(ibid:1oon9). For Tibetan parallels, see
Uebach 2oo8.
52. Similar things happened in England,
where early contracts were also broken
in half in imitation of tally sticks: the
phrase "indentured servant" derives from
this practice, since these were contract
laborers; the word actually derives from
the "indentations" or notches on the tally
stick used as a contract (Blackstone 1827
1:218).
53· L. Yang 1971:52; Peng 1994:329-31.
Peng perceptively notes "this method of
matching tallies to withdraw cash was actually
an outgrowth of the process used in
borrowing money, except that the movement
over time of loans was transformed
into a movement over space" (1994:330).
54· They were called "deposit shops"­
and L. Yang (1971:78-8o) calls them
"proto-banks." Peng (1994:323-27) notes
something along these lines was already
operating, at least for merchants and travelers,
under the Tang, but the government
had strict controls preventing bankers
from reinvesting the money.
55· The practice began in Sichuan,
which had its own peculiar form of cash,
in iron, not bronze, and therefore much
more unwieldy.
56. Peng 1994:508, also 515, 833. All
this is very much like the token money
that circulated in much of Europe in the
Middle Ages.
57· The most important scholarly exponent
of this view is von Glahn (1994,
though Peng [1994] holds to something
close), and it seems the prevailing one
among economists, popular and otherwise.
58. Diagram from MacDonald 2oo3:6s.
59· One of the favorite images employed
when remembering the rule of
the Legalists, under the much-hated First
Dynasty, was that they constructed great
brass cauldrons, in which each law was
openly and explicitly spelled out-then
used them to boil criminals alive.
6o. See Bulliet 1979 (also Lapidus
200J:141-46) on the process of conversion.
Bulliet also emphasizes (ibid:129)