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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
And even though copper remained the currency of ordinary market transactions, silver had become the currency of ordinary market transactions, silver had become the currency Chinese in sixteenth and seventeenth century fiction saved, hoarded, dreamed about, and killed for, as well as used for any purchase over 500 copper coins.

The success of silver, at a time when silver mines were closed by imperial decree, was not achieved easily. China's supply of this precious metal was simply never accessible enough, its production never sizable enough to meet all the demands of its growing population-about 150 million by the late sixteenth century. Consequently, not only was there never a smooth transition from copper coins to silver money on a nationwide scale, but also the primacy of silver remained a contentious issue among officials throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And so, even though the government at times rescinded its earlier mine closure orders and sought to increase silver production as from 1596 to 1605, Quan Hansheng concludes that China's domestic mines produced an average of no more than four to 6,000 kgs a year in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Compared to this figure, one places the imports from Japan and the Spanish New World, and one is forced to recognize the impact of China's relatively low gold/silver ratio until the 1640s. Previously, Japan had sent gold to China for copper coins and silver, as it needed silver even more than China. But the discovery of rich silver mines in western Japan in the 1530s, combined with the import of foreign methods for silver refinement and subsequent Japanese improvements, saw to a reversal of the direction of this trade. For the next century, silver flowed out of Japan into China, at an annual average at the higher end of the estimated range of between 33,000 to 48,000 kgs. In addition, the shipping of Mexican silver across the Pacific to Luzon in the Philippines provided Chinese merchants and ultimately the Chinese market with as much as a third of the overall production of this even more important new source of silver. Between 1570 and 1635 , every year 57,000 to 86,000 kgs entered China from Luzon, drawing the comment from the Portuguese merchant Gomes Solis in his Discourse on Silver of 1621 that "silver wanders throughout the entire world in its travels before flocking to China, where it remains as if at its natural center."

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