Hell Money

A recent visit to a Chinese supermarket led to a number of somewhat less than pragmatic purchases, including a pack of Hell Money. Alternatively known as joss money, it’s intended to be burned or otherwise offered to people and deities in the afterworld. Hence also the term joss sticks, AKA the incense burned before a shrine or altar. I guess the underlying idea is that the smoke carries the prayers up to the afterlife, and so by extension the burned money also travels the same way. You can get Hell (or joss) clothes, cars, and household appliances although they’re frowned upon by the authorities in mainland China as “vulgar” and “feudal”. You see loads of this kind of thing in places like Hong Kong, though. Fifty million HK$ is worth about four million British Pounds, nearly five million Euros or about $6.5 million US… and one typically offers them in bundles, so either the dead have serious spending power or Hell inflation is totally out of control.

The Hell part is a bit of a misnomer that was imposed because of Christians berating traditional Chinese ancestor worshippers that they’d go to Hell when they died. The Chinese response was something like: “Yes, we already know we go to the afterlife when we die but thanks for giving us an English name for it.” “Joss” is another misnomer, a corruption of “deus”, i.e. god.

The fellow in the middle is the Jade Emperor of Heaven 玉皇 Yu Huang, romanised as “yu wong” on the bottom right of the note, beside the dragon’s arm. The signature next to the phoenix on the left “yen looh” refers to 阎罗王 Yanluowang (wang=”king”), the King of Death who judges people in the afterlife.

The reverse side is less interesting, except that it explicitly spells out in English that it’s a Hell bank note, it looks a bit more like an archaic US bill, and there’s a little drawing of what I assume is the Bank of Hell.

More oddities of capitalism:

Ruining the value of money: a guide, in which the 14th century Emperor of Mali spends so much gold he single-handedly breaks the economy.

The English Usurer (is not tolerable).

To be sold: Books, Ribbons, Hannibal, William and Nancy. There was also a raffle in which first prize was a horse and second prize was “a mulatto girl” [sic].

The English Usurer

The Devil of Usury. From John Blaxton’s pamphlet against loan sharks, ‘The English Usurer’, printed by John Norton for Francis Bowman of Oxford, 1634.

“An Usurer (i.e. a person who lends money at an unreasonably high rate of interest and/or with unfair terms) is not tolerable in a well established Commonweale, but utterly to be rejected out of the company of men.”

Too bloody right. Four hundred years on, little has changed: payday loan companies, Lehman Brothers, toxic mortgage lending, fixing the LIBOR rates, bank executives getting huge bonuses at failed but state-bailed banks, etc. Note also the piggy bankers on the right, the top one saying “Mine is the Usurers defect. To root in earth, wallow in Mire” and the bottom one issuing the refrain we’ve also recently heard many contemporary versions of from bank CEOs, that they can’t and won’t be held accountable for the devastation they’ve caused with their greed: “Living spare me, and Dead spare me.”

PS: Beware, for after a long separation I have been reunited with my beloved library and this blog will most likely live up to its tagline like never before in the coming weeks as I explore it anew. Forthcoming… Japanese monsters, Cold War kitchen performances, telekinesis, Giorgio Moroder robot, a load of intensely nerdy vintage computer stuff, etc.

Ruining the value of money: a guide

Reading an art history book recently, I was so intrigued and inspired by single, uncontextualised sentence in a timeline graphic that I had to do some more research. The sentence was:

“AD 1324: Mansa Musa, the emperor of Mali, spends so much gold in Cairo on the way to pilgrimage in Mecca that he ruins the value of money.”

He ruined the value of money? How? In some ways this seems like a brilliant idea, especially nowadays when most of the money in the world is essentially  conjured out of nothing and totally imaginary anyway. Money’s a problem, why not trash the whole idea of it and try something else? He didn’t do it deliberately, though.

The most reliable and most quoted from primary source seems to be a 1957 article by A.J.H. Goodwin, ‘The Medieval Empire of Ghana‘ (JSTOR 3886971)

Mansa Musa, Emperor of Mali in the 14th century, from a Catalan atlas by Abraham Cresques of Mallorca, 1375. Musa’s brandishing a gold nugget. Text on the right says: “This Negro lord is called Musa Mali, Lord of the Negroes of Guinea. So abundant is the gold which is found in his country that he is the richest and most noble king in all the land.”

Musa (Mansa is a title, roughly equivalent to Emperor) was a Muslim who embarked on probably the most extravagant and blatantly blinging pilgrimage to Mecca of all time. The contemporary historian Chihab al-Umari recorded that Musa’s hajj involved travelling with 60,000 men and 12,000 slaves carrying 4lb gold bars, plus eighty camels bearing between 50lbs and 300lbs of gold dust each. Needless to say, even with adjustments for inflation and differing trade conditions, Musa was one of the richest people in Earth’s history. He’s also the only recorded individual to directly and single-handedly dictate the price of gold throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East. But first he inadvertently left a trail of economic devastation in his wake. He spent or gave away so much gold that everywhere he went– from Mali, through Cairo, Medina and all the way to Mecca– he depressed the value of gold for a decade. This in turn caused massive inflation as local economies attempted to cope with the unprecedented wealth that had landed on them.

To his credit, Musa did attempt to fix things by borrowing some of the gold back at high interest rates from moneylenders in Cairo. Rather than just flinging it off the back of his camel at random strangers he also spent a lot of his money in places like Timbuktu, building mosques, madrasas and universities.

So there it is. You need to be super rich and not very sensible to ruin the value of money and fuck up the economy. I think we all knew that already.