Is it easy to forge ancient paper money? How do ordinary people tell the authenticity of paper money?
A: As the earliest country in the world to issue and use paper money in ancient history, ancient China people not only had the economic confidence to dare to use paper money, but also had the technical strength to prevent counterfeit and silver notes.
In fact, since the Northern Song Dynasty, the first kind of paper money "Jiaozi" appeared in Sichuan, and the crime of counterfeiting paper money also rose. Even in the Song and Yuan Dynasties when paper money was just born, counterfeiting activities once reached a very rampant level. During the Southern Song Dynasty, major cases of counterfeit money often involved hundreds of thousands of yuan. In the Yuan Dynasty, a thunder event happened: Wu Youwen's counterfeit money gang in Jiangxi not only monopolized the counterfeit money trade in the Central Plains, but even more than 50 of his younger brothers entered the government as informants for him. Many officials who want to investigate him are often killed by him first, and the plot is very rampant!
Therefore, in order to crack down on counterfeit money, one of the basic means of China dynasties was legal protection. That is, through legislation, those who dare to forge will pay a heavy price. There were many loopholes in the legislation in this area in the early Song Dynasty. According to the notes of the Northern Song Dynasty, many first-time offenders basically hit the board. It was not until the third year of Chongning in the Northern Song Dynasty (1 104) that legislation was formally enacted in the Northern Song Dynasty, and making counterfeit money without permission would be punished by exile for four years. However, after the founding of the Southern Song Dynasty, this was a cruel thing. In the thirty-second year of Shaoxing in the Southern Song Dynasty (1 162), it was clear that counterfeit money should be beheaded.
Since then, this severe sentencing has been used in the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, and the wrist has been strengthened from generation to generation. On the banknotes of the Yuan Dynasty, the words "the forger is put to death" are printed. In the Ming dynasty, it was even more cruel. Not only will the counterfeiters be beheaded, but reporting the counterfeiters will be rewarded, and even the property of the counterfeiters will be rewarded to the whistleblower. In the Qing Dynasty, not only forgers were executed, but also their families and relatives were buried with them, and they often became a large family when they were exiled.
But Rao is so cruel, but the benefits of forging paper money are too great, and there are many skilled fugitives who are not afraid of death. Therefore, the technical means to prevent counterfeit banknotes have been followed up in the past dynasties, and various strange tricks have emerged one after another.
First of all, a basic trick is to control printed materials. Paper money in the Song Dynasty was made of "fine paper" specially made in Sichuan. This white and smooth paper became the exclusive style of paper money in Song Dynasty. Therefore, throughout the Song Dynasty, this kind of "good paper" was also named "Sichuan paper", which was only allowed to be used for coinage. According to the criminal law of Song Dynasty, it is fatal to arrest "private businessmen breaking the ban", which is tantamount to giving a radical solution to counterfeit banknotes from the source.
Another routine is to make a fuss about the content of paper money face. Since the Song Dynasty, the characters on paper money were generally written by the emperor or copied by famous artists at that time. The content is dense and the handwriting is unique. They are not experts in calligraphy, and it is basically difficult to copy. The patterns on paper money should be carefully studied. In the Song Dynasty, various complicated pictures such as house figures appeared on paper money. When it developed to the Qing dynasty, it simply printed the whole dragon on it. Fakers want to imitate? Without hard skills, I can only do it.
However, if you encounter a master counterfeiter, this series of painstaking efforts can sometimes be easily cracked. For example, at the end of the Yuan Dynasty and the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, some experts opened their minds and could make counterfeit money no different from real money, which led to the proliferation of counterfeit money in the market. As a result, an anti-counterfeiting technology that emerged in the Song Dynasty gradually improved and became another killer weapon against counterfeit banknotes in the Ming and Qing Dynasties: seal.
This powerful technology appeared as early as the Northern Song Dynasty, when it was mainly used for the circulation of silver tickets. In the southwest of the Northern Song Dynasty, there was a "silver ticket shop" that kept huge sums of money for businessmen. Depositors deposit huge sums of money in the "silver ticket shop" and then use the silver ticket with "seal signature" as a voucher to withdraw money. This kind of "seal" is either a special pattern or a special signature hidden on a silver ticket, which is generally extremely difficult to imitate, so it has a long reputation.
After developing to the middle of Qing dynasty, the technology of "printing and signing" was widely used in the issuance of paper money. The paper money issued by the Qing government must first be stamped by the chief secretaries of the provinces, then stamped by the governments and counties, and finally stamped by the banks, and then distributed among the people. Although the procedures are cumbersome, it can also prevent fraud to the greatest extent.
Of course, these anti-counterfeiting efforts can still be called high-tech in ancient scientific and technological conditions, but after entering modern times, they have gradually fallen behind. In modern China, the epoch-making event of banknote anti-counterfeiting was the establishment of the Qing Dynasty Banknote Printing Bureau in 1907. After the introduction of western steel intaglio engraving technology at that time and the training of the first batch of modern banknote makers in China by American technology Haiqu, China's banknote printing technology achieved a qualitative leap. Since then, China people have really used modern paper money. If the late Qing Dynasty, which was beaten behind, left any great contribution, then this pile is a very heavyweight one.