Cash is a name for several historical currencies used in Asia. It is applied to units used in China, Vietnam, and of Madras and Princely state of Travancore in British India. It is also occasionally used to refer to the Korean mun and the Japanese mon.
Tamil kācu/kāsu, Skr. karsha 'a weight of silver or gold equal to 1⁄400 of a tulā' (Williams). The early Portuguese writers represented the native word by cas, casse, caxa, the Fr. by cas, the Eng. by cass: the existing Pg. caixa and Eng. cash are due to a natural confusion with CASH n.1. From an early date the Portuguese applied caixa (probably on the same analogy) to the small money of other foreign nations, such as that of Maritime Southeast Asia, and especially the Chinese, which was also naturally made into cash in English. (Yule)" [1] The English word "cash," meaning "tangible currency," is an older word from Middle French caisse. [2]
In China, cash - not to be confused with the type of copper coin - refers to a unit used for centuries for copper coinage and banknote equivalents known as wén (文). Being the first country to implement paper based currency, in 1023 the 交子 paper money currency occur to adapt the economical climate change of globalization brought by fair trade via Silk Road, although metal coins were still in circulation. After the introduction of a unified currency system in 1889, cash continued to be used as a subunit of the yuan with 1000 cash being equal to one yuan. Coins continued to be denominated in cash until the 1920s nationally and for a time thereafter regionally.
Cash (văn) was a currency unit for copper coinage in Vietnam until the introduction of the French Indochina piastre in 1885 when it became a sub unit of the piastre usually known as a sapèque.
Cash was a currency unit of Madras Province during the period of British rule in India. Specifically, it was a subunit of the fanam, rupee, and pagoda.
Copper coins of 20 cash were called pice, 10 cash were called dodees, and 5 cash were called half dodees. [3]
Travancore cash was similar to the Madras cash yet differed in the value compared to the rupee.
thus, 1 rupee = 448 cash. [4]
Rupee is the common name for the currencies of India, Mauritius, Nepal, Pakistan, Seychelles, and Sri Lanka, and of former currencies of Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, British East Africa, Burma, German East Africa, and Tibet. In Indonesia and the Maldives, the unit of currency is known as rupiah and rufiyaa respectively, cognates of the word rupee.
The Indian rupee is the official currency in India. The rupee is subdivided into 100 paise. The issuance of the currency is controlled by the Reserve Bank of India. The Reserve Bank manages currency in India and derives its role in currency management based on the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934.
The piastre or piaster is any of a number of units of currency. The term originates from the Italian for "thin metal plate". The name was applied to Spanish and Hispanic American pieces of eight, or pesos, by Venetian traders in the Levant in the 16th century.
The Coinage of India began anywhere between early 1st millennium BCE to the 6th century BCE, and consisted mainly of copper and silver coins in its initial stage. The coins of this period were Karshapanas or Pana. A variety of earliest Indian coins, however, unlike those circulated in West Asia, were stamped bars of metal, suggesting that the innovation of stamped currency was added to a pre-existing form of token currency which had already been present in the Janapadas and Mahajanapada kingdoms of the Early historic India. The kingdoms that minted their own coins included Gandhara, Kuntala, Kuru, Magadha, Panchala, Shakya, Surasena, Surashtra and Vidarbha etc.
The yuan is the base unit of a number of former and present-day currencies in Chinese.
The piastre de commerce was the currency of French Indochina between 1885 and 1954. It was subdivided into 100 cents, each of 2~6 sapèques.
The cash was a currency denomination used in China in imperial times. It was the chief denomination until the introduction of the yuan in the late 19th century.
The Travancore rupee was a type of currency issued by the erstwhile Indian princely state of Travancore, which was primarily located in the modern Indian state of Kerala. The rupee was largely a newer currency in comparison to the older currencies of Kerala such as the Fanams, Achus, Chuckrams as well as the Kasu. Its creation was probably intended for the increased trading with British India and the high-value transactions therein.
The fanam was a currency issued by the Madras Presidency until 1815. It circulated alongside the Indian rupee, also issued by the Presidency. The fanam was a small silver coin, subdivided into 80 copper cash, with the gold pagoda worth 42 fanams. The rupee was worth 12 fanams. After 1815, only coins of the rupee currency system were issued.
Fanam was the currency used historically in major parts of South India, especially during the British Raj. Fanam is the an Anglo-Germanic sound shift from the traditional Dravidan word paṇaṁ, meaning "coin" or "wealth". It may specifically refer to:
The pagoda, also called the hoon, was a unit of currency, a coin made of gold or half-gold minted by Indian dynasties as well as the British, the French and the Dutch. It was subdivided into 42 fanams. The pagoda was issued by various dynasties in medieval southern India, including the Kadambas of Hangal, the Kadambas of Goa, and the Vijayanagara Empire.
The Vietnamese cash, also called the sapek or sapèque, is a cast round coin with a square hole that was an official currency of Vietnam from the Đinh dynasty in 970 until the Nguyễn dynasty in 1945, and remained in circulation in North Vietnam until 1948. The same type of currency circulated in China, Japan, Korea, and Ryūkyū for centuries. Though the majority of Vietnamese cash coins throughout history were copper coins, lead, iron and zinc coins also circulated alongside them often at fluctuating rates. Coins made from metals of lower intrinsic value were introduced because of various superstitions involving Vietnamese people burying cash coins, as the problem of people burying cash coins became too much for the government. Almost all coins issued by government mints tended to be buried mere months after they had entered circulation. The Vietnamese government began issuing coins made from an alloy of zinc, lead, and tin. As these cash coins tended to be very fragile, they would decompose faster if buried, which caused the Vietnamese people to stop burying their coins.
The term tiền is used to refer to various currency-related concepts used in Vietnamese history. The name is a cognate with the Chinese qián (錢), a unit of weight called "mace" in English. It can refer to a unit of weight used in precious metal coinages as well as the number of cash coins in a string. The name was also used for different awards, both Chinese-style and Western-style awards given in Vietnam throughout different times of its history.
British involvement in the Middle East began with the General Maritime Treaty of 1820. This established the Trucial States and the nearby island of Bahrain as a base for suppressing sea piracy in the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, in 1839 the British East India Company established an anti-piracy station in Aden to protect British shipping that was sailing to and from India. Involvement in the region expanded to Egypt in 1875 because of British interests in the Suez Canal, with a full scale British invasion of Egypt taking place in 1882. Muscat and Oman became a British Protectorate in 1891, and meanwhile Kuwait was added to the British Empire in 1899 because of fears surrounding the proposed Berlin-Baghdad Railway. There was a growing concern in the United Kingdom that Germany was a rising power, and about the implications that the proposed railway would have as regards access to the Persian Gulf. Qatar became a British Protectorate in 1916, and after the First World War, the British influence in the Middle East reached its fullest extent with the inclusion of Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq.
The Travancore Fanam was a type of money that was issued by the State of Travancore, now mainly a part of Kerala in South India. The Fanams and Chuckrams were known to be some of the smallest coins in the world. The word Fanam appears to be an Anglo-Germanic sound shift from the word Panam, which means money in Dravidian languages. Historically, the Fanam and Chuckram coins were the regular unit of currency in medieval Travancore and appear to have been extensively used for trading in the region of South India. The words Fanam and Panam literally mean money and are still used as a synonym for wealth in Kerala in the native language of Malayalam.
The Yuan dynasty was a Mongol-ruled Chinese dynasty which existed from 1271 to 1368. After the conquest of the Western Xia, Western Liao, and Jin dynasties they allowed for the continuation of locally minted copper currency, as well as allowing for the continued use of previously created and older forms of currency, while they immediately abolished the Jin dynasty's paper money as it suffered heavily from inflation due to the wars with the Mongols. After the conquest of the Song dynasty was completed, the Yuan dynasty started issuing their own copper coins largely based on older Jin dynasty models, though eventually the preferred Yuan currency became the Jiaochao and silver sycees, as coins would eventually fall largely into disuse. Although the Mongols at first preferred to have every banknote backed up by gold and silver, high government expenditures forced the Yuan to create fiat money in order to sustain government spending.
The Indian 1-rupee coin (₹1) is an Indian coin worth one Indian rupee and is made up of a hundred paisas. Currently, one rupee coin is the smallest Indian coin in circulation. Since 1992, one Indian rupee coins are minted from stainless steel. Round in shape, the one rupee coins weighs 3.76 grams, has a diameter of 21.93-millimetre (0.863 in) and thickness of 1.45-millimetre (0.057 in). In independent India, one rupee coins was first minted in 1950 and is currently in circulation.
The Vietnamese văn as a denomination for Vietnamese cash coins was used from 1868 until 1945 during the reign of the Nguyễn dynasty. The inspiration to introduce the văn may have been to emulate the Chinese wén used on contemporary Qing dynasty cash coins which had just become a fiat currency, however unlike the Chinese system where all Chinese cash coins were cast from the same metals and the wén was the primary unit of account for coins made of the same metals, the Vietnamese system used the văn as a basic number currency symbol indicating how much zinc cash coins a brass or bronze cash coin was worth, the Vietnamese cash coins-based currency system used the mạch (陌) and quán (貫) as units of account that could be based on either zinc cash coins or copper-alloy cash coins depending on the region or context. It was continued to be used as a measurement for zinc cash coins when the French Indochinese piastre was introduced, after which the term still appeared on Vietnamese cash coins and represented a subdivision of copper-alloy cash coins rather than the piastre, this was known in French as the sapèque en zinc, as the production of zinc coinage was ceased by the Imperial government of the Nguyễn dynasty around the year 1871.
A string of cash coins refers to a historical Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Ryukyuan, and Vietnamese currency unit that was used as a superunit of the Chinese cash, Japanese mon, Korean mun, Ryukyuan mon, and Vietnamese văn currencies. The square hole in the middle of cash coins served to allow for them to be strung together in strings. The term would later also be used on banknotes and served there as a superunit of wén (文).