Page 22 - Chinese SIlver By Adrien Von Ferscht

THE ABSENCE OF AN ASSAY SYSTEM

HOW CHINA, A SILVER-OBSESSED NATION, MANAGED WITHOUT ONE
!

Adrien von Ferscht, Strategic Researcher

A nation with a 1400 year history of silver making and an economy that was obsessed with
being silver-based until well into the 20th century, it is strange to learn that it could exist
without any assay system.

In the 155-year Chinese Export Silver manufacturing period, the vast majority of silver
items that were made did carry a silver mark, 100 years of which many of the marks
indicated the purity content by the addition of a number, more often than not 90 or simply
the word ‘sterling’. With no regulation or even self-regulation of silver marks, one could be
left wondering how credible the marks we are presented with actually are.

Silver poured into China over several centuries. Generally it would have come from one of
four sources; mines in Spanish Central and South America, Japan or China itself as well
as from silver trade dollars used to trade with China at the insistence of the Imperial court
by various Western trading nations that were allowed to trade.

An early King Philip III of the Spains 8 reales cob coin; 27.7gm; 0.917 silver
Potosi Mint [Bolivia]

Philip III: The House of Hapsburg
Philip was styled "Philip the Third, by the grace of God, King of Castile, Leon, Aragon and
the Two Sicilies, Jerusalem, Portugal, Navarre, Granada, Toledo, Valencia, Galicia, the
Majorcas, Seville, Cordoba, Corsica, Murcia, Guinea, Algarve, Gibraltar, the Canary Islands,
also of the Eastern and Western Indies, and the Islands and Terra Firma of the Ocean Sea,
Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy and Milan, Count of Habsburg, Barcelona, and
Biscay, and Lord of Molina, etc