The Mongol regime established a common unit of account denominated in silver for long-distance exchanges across the Eurasian landmass. The transfer of a significant quantity of silver ingots from appanages in China to the western Khanates catalyzed a widespread convergence. The unprecedented monetary transformations originated especially in the lower Yangzi, in which Yuan paper money displaced silver westward and copper coins to Japan and Java. The emergence of new marketplaces in Holland and Japan seems to have been almost perfectly synchronous. Yet the common unit of account in silver was not accompanied by a popular circulation of silver items and did not seriously affect the methods of exchange at ground level. The substantial contraction in distant trade after the collapse of the Mongol regime, however, paved the way for the global silver march starting from South America and reaching China and India in the late sixteenth century.

Money serves as a means of exchange in any society and in any period. However, depending on place and time, money exhibits distinct characteristics. Chinese imperial monetary history spotlights a blind side about money that mainstream thinking overlooked. Chinese historical experience is replete with examples of money use transcending the theoretical frameworks of those who attribute the acceptability of money to its intrinsic value as well as those who emphasize enforcement by public authorities. Chinese monetary history may appear highly irregular from the viewpoints of contemporary foreign observers and modern social science, but a coherent system surely existed in an endogenous way behind the apparent disorder.