Arcane Topic Warning: Part the Third

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Worse yet was Valois/Bourbon France, where the coinage had no fixed denomination relative to the money of account, the livre; official values were periodically promulgated by royal decree.

[Alfirin]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Worse yet was Valois/Bourbon France, where the coinage had no fixed denomination relative to the money of account, the livre; official values were periodically promulgated by royal decree.

Actually that probably ties it with Feudal era Japan. While the ryo did techically have a fixed value of 3 ko of rice, the coins were debased so often and so severelyin both size and purity (a kechio koban (one ryo piece of the Tokugawa period is something like 4 times the size and has something like 5 times the gold per unit weight of the ones issued in the 1830's-1850's )that merchants tended to give preference to counterfeit coins for change, provided that they were older counterfeits (since while they had less gold than the coins they were counterfeiting, they still had more than the contemporary officials). or the fact that larger transactions were usually done with officially sealed packets of coins with the value written on it, which were never supposed to be opened (when they were, they invariably contained far less coins that the value written on them, so accidentally tear the paper and you lost about a quarter of the value ( a bit like how the larger oban had a face value of 10 but a gold content of about 7.5 since they really werent supposed to ever be spent (they were pretty much only used for official rewards and payments so they tended to be saved as honorary mementoes, a bit like Maundy Money.) Then of course there was the fact that gold and silver traded at almost 1:1 (given their isolation policies, nearly all precious metals in Japan were locally mined, and the two are found in roughy equal amounts there) This didn't really cause any local problems. But became a nightmare once Perry opened the country and sailors suddenly realized that every moneylender in Yokohama would happliy exchange a koban (which even in it's debased form still had about $1.25's worth of gold in it) for silver coins of around quarter size. At one point the amount of gold leaving Japan got so severe exporting it was actually made a capital offense.
Imperial China was rather odd too since the only "official" government coin was the 1 cash piece those bronze ones with the square holes (multiple cash coins do exist but were usually only issued at times when copper shortages or sieges made issuing the normal kind infeasible). All of the silver and gold "coins" (more often boat shaped sychee and small gold bars) were private issues and had no regulation.
I'm going to shut up now, as this has gotten WAAY off topic.