Journal of World History, Vol. 22, No.

1
2011 by University of Hawaii Press
1
The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells:
The Asian Story
*
bin yang
National University of Singapore
A
half century ago, William C. White, reviewing The Beginnings of
Chinese Civilization: Three Lectures Illustrated with Finds at Anyang,
a pioneering study of Chinese archaeology by Li Chi, found himself
disappointed that Dr. Li did not mention the widespread use of cowrie
shellsfor currency, decoration, or reward, or for good-luck amulets.
1
This disappointment still lingers. While cowries (both true cow-
ries and their imitations in jade, stone, bone, earthenware, gold, tin,
and bronze) have been found in archaeological sites throughout China,
appropriate academic attention has still not been paid. While cow-
rie shells have been listed by numerous archaeological reports, few
interpretations have been attempted, and, far less, any comprehensive
examination of their significance for early Chinese civilizations, such
as the Shang (ca. seventeenth century b.c.e.eleventh century b.c.e.)
and the Zhou (ca. eleventh century b.c.e.222 b.c.e.). When cow-
ries are studied, what scholars address is whether or not they served
as money, and when.
2
The source of these shells and the routes that
* An early version was presented at the First Congress of the Asian Association of
World Historians, 2931 May 2009, Osaka, Japan. I would like to extend my thanks to the
organizers and to the reviewers of the Journal of World History for their comments and sug-
gestions.
1
William C. White, review of The Beginnings of Chinese Civilization: Three Lectures
Illustrated with Finds at Anyang, by Li Chi, Journal of Asian Studies 17, no. 3 (1958): 464465.
2
Peng Xinwei, Zhongguo Huobi Shi [A History of Chinese Currencies] (Shanghai:
Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe, 1965); Huang Xiquan, Xianqin Huobi Tonglun [A Compre-
2 journal of world history, march 2011
made possible their spread are usually not taken into consideration.
3

As a result, the implications of the cowrie network with respect to
the links between the Chinese world and other worlds have remained
unexamined.
Understandably, the magnificence of early Chinese civilization
does not necessarily need this small marine product for its glorifica-
tion, which has been well established by the jade culture, the oracle
culture, and the bronze culture in the Shang and Zhou periods. These
art objects, with the implications of cultural complexity and sophisti-
cation they carried, have been widely scrutinized, and have, as a result,
come to represent the essence of Chineseness, whereas the cowries
have been allowed to remain in obscurity.
Unlike China, India had been well known for its use of cowries.
Numerous cowries have been found in India from its prehistorical
period to the modern era. The monetary system in which cowrie shells
functioned as small money, while silver functioned as big money,
has been vividly illustrated in many accounts of early Indian society.
The cowrie trade is also connected to the slave trade, linking the
Indian Ocean with Africa and the Atlantic slave markets. Surprisingly,
however, the role of cowrie shells in the Silk Road seems not to have
been much explored, though cowries were widely used as money in
northern India, including modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, in addi-
tion to Orissa and Bengal. Little statistical work has been done on the
archaeological finds in these areas, let alone a comprehensive research
project. Nor has the pre-1500 period been well studied. As things stand,
the historical expansion of cowrie currency in India remains unclear.
In addition to northern India and Central Asia, cowries also
reached Southeast Asia, through both overland and maritime routes,
though they functioned as money only in some places and societies.
Cowrie shells were used as a medium of trade in Assam, Arakan, Lower
Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Yunnan. Yunnan is an area located in
hensive Examination of the Pre-Qin Currencies] (Beijing: Zijincheng Chubanshe, 2001);
Li Yung-Ti, On the Functions of Cowries in the Shang and Western Zhou China, Journal
of East Asian Archaeology 5 (2006): 126.
3
Ke Peng and Yanshi Zhu are the only scholars who have done serious research on
the origins of cowries used in ancient China. Ke Peng and Yanshi Zhu, New Research on the
Origins of Cowries Used in Ancient China, Sino-Platonic Papers 68 (Philadelphia: Depart-
ment of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, 1995). Many
thanks to Wang Luman for obtaining this paper that I had attempted to get for more than
three years. And I was extremely excited when I found that the two authors shared the same
conclusion that the origins of cowries in ancient China were the Indian Ocean, a rebuttal
to the conventional South China Sea hypothesis.
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 3
upper mainland Southeast Asia, sandwiched by Tibet and China, and
had cultivated a cowrie monetary system from the ninth century until
the seventeenth century.
Cowries surely went westward to Arabia and Africa. The latter is
another well-studied area. Pioneering works by Jan Hogendorn and
Marion Johnson have illustrated how this Indian Oceanbased item,
which had been shipped to West Africa at least since the fourteenth
century, contributed to the spread of the European colonial machine
and served to engulf various local economies, especially during the
period of the Atlantic slave trade.
4
While the early period seems vague, it is clear that by the fourteenth
century, cowrie currency had reached the upper and middle Niger, first
the Mali Empire, and then Songhay. The Europeans, pioneered by
the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, followed by
the Dutch and English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and finally joined by the French and German in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, brought cowries from the Indian Ocean to West
Africa in such quantities that they eventually ruined all local money
systems and economies, though of course contributing mightily to the
prosperity of both the Atlantic slave trade and the palm oil trade.
Originating in the seas, especially those surrounding the low-lying
Maldive islands, cowrie shells migrated to various parts of Asia as pre-
cious goods in the prehistoric era and were transformed into a com-
modity money and currency in various societies over a long period.
This article sketches the complex range of roles occupied by the cowrie
in eastern Eurasia from the archaeological period to the nineteenth
century. The focus on eastern Eurasia reflects the comparative lack of
scholarly attention this area has received, compared to the substantial
work done on the use of the cowrie in Africa, particularly in the mod-
ern epoch.
While the three cases of China, India, and Southeast Asia varied
over time, they raise similar general questions: Was the cowrie only
small money? Was the cowrie currency local or global in character?
Had there, in fact, ever been a universal cowrie monetary system?
What was the interrelation among cowrie money, silver, copper coins,
and gold? How do cowrie shells help us understand the rise of Europe
and the formulation of the modern world? Why did China not develop
such a system? By focusing on these global and local questions, this
4
Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986).
4 journal of world history, march 2011
article attempts to illustrate the significance of cowrie shells in a cross-
regional context over the longue dure and discuss some implications
for the world, past and present.
China: Cowries as Precious Ornaments,
Commodity Money, or Money?
There are more than 250 species of cowrie in the world, but when we
talk about cowrie currency, only two are referred to: Cypraea moneta
and Cypraea annulus. The first and most important is C. moneta, or the
money cowrie, as its scientific name indicates. C. annulus is commonly
called the ring cowrie. Cowries have been found in Neolithic sties in
China. These cowries surely were imported, and they were regarded
as precious items that symbolized power, prestige, and wealth. Such
a pattern continues, as revealed by the many oracle bone inscriptions
that contain messages concerning cowries and by the archaeological
discoveries of cowries in the Shang tombs.
The discovery of the Yin Site at Anyang, Henan (the mid Yellow
River region), has been the fundamental discovery for early Chinese
history. One of the remarkable finds at these sites was the tomb of Lady
Hao, unearthed in 1975. Lady Hao was a favorite wife of Wuding, the
king of the Shang dynasty in the early twelfth century b.c.e. She was
very influential in the Shang court, as she conducted various ceremo-
nies and even led military campaigns. As such, it is no wonder that so
many precious items were buried around her body: 1,928 articles were
discovered, including 468 bronze pieces, 755 jade items, 47 precious
stones, and 63 stone artifacts. In addition to these invaluable findings,
on 7 June 1976, workers in the tomb of Lady Hao discovered piles
of cowrie shells, so many that they had to put the cowries into some
bronze containers to remove and lift them from underground. These
cowries amounted to more than 6,800 pieces.
The tomb of Lady Hao epitomized the conventional narrative of
Chinese civilizational origin: the Yellow River as the mother river and
North China as the cradle. Had major discoveries not been made in
many other macroregions, this narrative would be convincing. Finds of
the Shang period in the northwest, Upper Yangzi, Middle Yangzi, and
Gan River have complicated this early landscape, however. In terms
of cowrie shells of that period, the Sanxingdui relics near Chengdu,
Upper Yangzi, are surely comparable with those of the Yin site. In Pit
1, more than 460 items were unearthed (bronze: 178; gold: 4; jade: 129;
cowries: 124); in Pit 2, more than 1,300 items (bronze: 735; gold: 61;
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 5
jade: 486), and more than 4,600 cowrie shells.
5
Moreover, a bronze
triple-chained cowrie item was discovered in Pit 2.
6
In addition, cowrie
shells were found in Xingan, Jiangxi (Lower Yangzi), dating to the late
Shang period.
The frequency of findings and the large quantity of cowries in the
late Shang period in the Yellow River region naturally led people to
think about the nature of the cowries. The central question remains
as to when cowries began to function as money. This question is dif-
ficult, partially because of peoples diverse definition of money. Did
cowrie shells function as money, commodity money, or precious orna-
ments with ritual or religious connotations? Peng Xinwei avoids giving
an accurate date for cowrie money by vaguely referring to the Shang
Western Zhou period (ca. eleventh century b.c.e.771 b.c.e.).
7
Though
unable to demonstrate the use of cowrie shells as currency during the
Shang, he nonetheless suggests that cowries functioned in a role similar
to that of money.
8
According to the inscriptions in various Shang-Zhou
bronze articles, many materials were presented as gifts, such as bronze,
horses, bows, slaves, land, carriages, fur, jade, cloth, and cattle, among
which cowries were the most frequent.
9
In some cases, more than a
thousand cowries were given as a gift.
10
And while cowrie shells seem
not to have functioned as money, they clearly symbolized power, value,
and social prestige.
Having made a relatively comprehensive review of cowrie discov-
eries in pre-Qin North China,
11
Huang Xiquan argues for the Shang
period if not the legendary Xia period.
12
He believes that cowrie shells
functioned as money in the Shang and as the main form of money
5
Chen Xu, Xia Shang Kaogu [Archaeology of the Xia and Shang] (Beijing: Wenwu
Chubanshe, 2001); Tan Jihe, Sanxingdui Wenming yu Bashu Wenhua Santi [ Three Notes
on the Sanxingdui Civilization and the Ba-Shu Culture], in Yinshang Wenming ji Jinian San-
xing dui Yizhi Faxian Qishi Zhounian Guoji Xueshuyantaohui [Collections of International Con-
ference Essays in the Memorial of the 70th Anniversary of the Sanxingdui Discovery and
the Yin Culture], ed. Song Zhenhao and Xiao Xianjin (Beijing: Sheke Wenxian Chu banshe,
2003), pp. 4749.
6
Zhonguo Kaogu Wenwu zhi Mei-Shangdai Shuren Mibao [ The Beauty of Chinese
Archaeological Relics Treasure of the Shu People in the Shang Period ] (Beijing: Wenwu
Chubanshe, 1994), p. 143.
7
Peng, Zhongguo Huobi Shi, p. 14.
8
Ibid., p. 5. Peng believes that before the minting of metal coins, cowries in China
had achieved the status of currency or proto-currency. See Peng, Zhongguo Huobi Shi, p. 8.
9
Peng, Zhongguo Huobi Shi, p. 12.
10
Peng was the unit for the Shang and Zhou to measure cowries. Most scholars agree
that one peng contains ten cowries.
11
Huang, Xianqin Huobi Tonglun, pp. 10 20.
12
Ibid., pp. 1213.
6 journal of world history, march 2011
in the Western Zhou. Moreover, cowrie shells surely symbolized high
value with religious meaning. Sites and tombs dating from the West-
ern Zhou period where cowries were discovered are widely located in
North China, including Shaansi, Shanxi, Henan, Shandong, Hebei,
and Beijing. The places where cowries were put in tombs suggested
their high value and cultural implications. Some of them indeed were
put in the mouths of the dead, which imitated the ritual of jade and
indicated their cultural and religious significance. In addition, during
the Western Zhou, cowries were also found in the tombs of common
people, which may imply that the appreciation of cowries, economi-
cally and culturally, had spread from nobles to masses.
Huang Xiquans view is resisted, however, by Li Yung-ti, who sees
the main function of cowries in the Shang and Western Zhou period
is more likely to have been ornamental, funerary, or ritual.
13
Lis state-
ment is not far from that of Yang Lien-Sheng some years ago. Yang
cautiously noted that apparently the cowrie was merely one of several
valuables which were used occasionally as money in Shang and West-
ern Zhou times, since barter transactions remained predominant.
14
As
we can see, it is hard to determine whether or when cowrie shells func-
tioned as money in early China. Without doubt, they were highly val-
ued and played important roles in politics (lord-vassal relationships),
ceremonies, and rituals.
Another question concerns varieties and sources of cowries. The
majority of cowries found from the Shang and Zhou period were C.
moneta (mainly) and C. annulus. Some people believe that C. moneta
were imported from the South China Sea.
15
Egami Namio has been the
main articulator of the South China Sea hypothesis through collect-
ing and analyzing Chinese textual records.
16
This, however, is doubtful,
first and foremost because of the lack of archaeological data on cowries
in the South China Sea.
17
Furthermore, these ancient Chinese textual
records never specify C. moneta or C. annulus. Indeed, most textual
sources are vague and always refer to the species that were taken as pre-
cious and used as ornaments because of their size (the larger, the more
13
Li, On the Functions of Cowries, pp. 126.
14
Lien-sheng Yang, Money and Credit in China, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1971), p. 13.
15
Guo Moruo, Shi Pipan Shu [ The Ten Treatises] (Beijing: Sheke Chubanshe, 1956),
p. 10; Egami Namio, Migration of the Cowrie-Shell Culture in East Asia, Acta Asiatica
26 (1974): 4445.
16
Namio, Migration of the Cowrie-Shell Culture.
17
Peng and Zhu, New Research on the Origins of Cowries, p. 4.
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 7
valuable) and bright colors. Even if we accept Namios speculations,
the questions of who might have brought these cowries, via whom,
and through which routes, remain. And it is puzzling that we could not
locate any later practice of cowrie procurements in the South China
Sea. Accordingly, I find that Chinese textual sources cannot support
the hypothesis of a South China Sea origin. To sum up, neither archae-
ological nor textual evidence leads to the conclusion that the South
China Sea had provided cowrie shells on such a scale to north China.
Naturally, and geographically, the South China Sea could not have
been the origin of cowries used in ancient China.
18
By examining
temperature and slat concentration (both being too low in the South
China Sea), the two cowries do not live in the South China Sea in
the present day, and it is highly unlikely that they lived there in the
discussed periods of cowrie use in North China.
19
As such, the Indian
Ocean constituted the only answer for the origin of cowrie shells in
ancient China.
20
The scrutiny of the geographical expansion of cowrie use in ancient
China supports this seemingly shocking speculation.
21
Cowrie use
began in the far western inland region of China during the Neolithic
era, expanded eastward over time, and boomed in the mid Yellow
River region, where the Shang and Zhou dynasties prospered. The area
of cowrie use was almost exclusively north of the Yangzi River, with
only a few exceptions, such as the Sanxingdui. Such a geographical
distribution not only refutes the South China Sea hypothesis but also
suggests the IndiaCentral Asia connection. Given that cowrie shells
from the Indian Ocean had reached northern India and Central Asia
before the period we are discussing, why should we not suppose they
had also reached the Yellow River region? Considering the fact that
cowrie shells were found in northern India, Central Asia (Mongolia
and Siberia), and Sichuan (Sanxingdui), and that jade from Xinjiang
was found in the tomb of Lady Hao, it seems evident that cowrie shells
were brought from the Indian Ocean through Central Asia to the
Shang elites.
What particularly interests scholars is the combination of bronze and
cowries, namely, the bronze cowries (tongbei) in early Chinese history.
Bronze cowries were made as early as the Shang but were also widely
18
Ibid., pp. 23.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., p. 14.
21
Ibid., pp. 213.
8 journal of world history, march 2011
found in the Zhou.
22
Indeed, bronze cowries might have functioned
as the earliest metal money in Chinese history.
23
However, before the
Eastern Zhou period (770 222 b.c.e.), neither cowries themselves nor
bronze cowries had been circulated.
24
Certain bronze coins, oval in shape, are believed to be imitations of
money cowries.
25
They are known as the ant-nose coin (yibi qian) or
ghost-face coin (guilian qian) among numismatists and were very pop-
ular in the Chu state of the Eastern Zhou period. The Chu state, a giant
kingdom of the period, occupied the mid Yangzi region and extended its
influence into the south, the north, and the lower Yangzi area. Bronze
cowries were widely discovered in Hubei, Hunan, Anhui, Jiangsu, and
Shandong, where the Chu had its main influence. Though the statis-
tics are incomplete, they have been found more than a hundred times
and amounted to more than 150,000 pieces.
26
The number of bronze
cowries found varies case by case, from one piece to several dozen, from
several hundred to more than one thousand; the largest single discov-
ery consisted of 15,978 bronze cowries in Shandong, and another one
weighed a total of about 200 kilograms. The weight of bronze cowries
vary case by case, too; the lightest one found weighed 0.6 grams, while
a heavy one weighed 5.65 grams, with an average around 2 grams. In
most cases, they are less than 2 centimeters in length, 1 centimeter in
width, and 0.3 0.6 centimeters in height.
27
The bronze cowries surpris-
ingly imitate true cowries in terms of size (especially the Maldivian
ones, which are relatively small).
The Chu state probably began to produce bronze cowries with
inscriptions during the Warring States period (475222 b.c.e.), and
by the mid to late Warring States period, they had clearly become very
popular.
28
An extraordinarily interesting finding was a mold for cast-
22
Peng, Zhongguo Huobi Shi, p. 17.
23
Ibid., p. 27.
24
Ibid., p. 28.
25
Yang, Money and Credit in China, p. 13.
26
Huang Xiquan, Chu Tongbei Beiwen Shiyi Xintan [A New Exploration of the Chu
Bronze Cowrie Inscriptions], in Xianqin Huobi Yanjiu [A Study of the Pre-Qin Currencies],
Huang Xiquan (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2001), p. 224.
27
Huang has listed all the findings of bronze cowries in China up to the publication
date. My above statements concerning the physical features of bronze cowries are made on
his statistics. See Huang, Chu Tongbei Beiwen Shiyi Xintan, pp. 230235.
28
Ibid., p. 225. One should bear in mind that it was during this period that more than
200,000 cowries were discovered in Yunnan. These cowries were from the Maldives. Yunnan
is not far from Sanxingdui in the upper Yangzi, and Sanxingdui is close to the middle Yangzi,
where the Chu was based. The geographical proximity may imply some cross-regional
cultural connections.
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 9
ing bronze cowries, which provides us with a glimpse of the process of
bronze cowrie minting. The large quantities and the casting mold tend
to confirm that bronze cowries functioned in the Chu area as money
rather than decoration.
When the Qin state unified China in 221 b.c.e., it began to stan-
dardize metal money. As a result, the bronze cowries were stripped of
their monetary function, and the Qin coinage (qin banliang) continued
to be universally circulated to the very end of imperial China. Never-
theless, cowries did briefly reappear during the short-lived Xin dynasty
(925 c.e.), established by Wang Mang, a devoted Confucian who
worked to reestablish the glorious Zhou dynasty, including the restora-
tion of what he assumed to be the Zhou monetary system. Accordingly,
cowries and tortoise shells (also believed to have functioned as money
in the Zhou period) found their places in Wangs monetary reform.
In this reform, five materials (gold, silver, copper, tortoise shell, and
cowrie) were made official currencies, and each of them was classified
based on its size or weight. In terms of cowries (in five denominations)
and tortoise shells (in four), the larger the size, the higher the value.
Therefore, while the rehabilitation of cowrie shells by Wang Mang
serves to show their historical role, Wangs system was in nature differ-
ent from the cowrie currency in the Zhou (if it existed) or the bronze
cowrie system in the Chu, as the latter two were based on the number
of cowries rather than the size.
India: The Cowrie Monetary System
Cowries were found in the prehistoric Indus Valley in northwestern
India. C. moneta from the Maldives was shipped to many parts of India
and beyond. The major importer of cowries in the Indian Ocean was
Bengal, where it had been used as currency at least since Mauryan
times.
29
But the earliest notice of the use of cowries as money in north
India was made by Faxian, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim in the beginning
of the fifth century. In Bengal, the earliest definite reference to cowries
is found in the Harsacarita, which states that in the seventh century
Bhaskaravarman of Kamarupa (Assam) sent Harssa heaps of black and
29
Deena Bandhu Pandey, Cowries as a Monetary Token in Ancient India, pt. 2,
Journal of the Numismatic Society of India 28 (1966): 133; James Heimann, Small Changes
and Ballast: Cowries Money in India, South Asia 3, no. 1 (1980): 48.
10 journal of world history, march 2011
while cowries.
30
Xuanzang of the early seventh century clearly states
that in the country, gold, silver coins, cowries, and small pearls were
the media of exchange. A few decades later, Yijing remarked on the
use of cowries in India.
31
Huiyuan, another Tang monk (prior to the
ninth century), vaguely recorded that cowries were taken as property
in Magadha, but he did not mention whether cowries were used as a
medium of exchange.
32
Even so, it is reasonable to speculate that cow-
ries functioned as money, considering the historical context. Indeed,
some Buddhist pilgrims pointed out that cowries were used as a medium
of exchange in the West Region,
33
which was a vast area stretching
from northwest China into modern central Asia (for instance, Kash-
mir saw the disappearance of cowrie money as late as the early nine-
teenth century). As a matter of fact, many Chinese Buddhist sutras
translated from Sanskrit or central Asian languages contain some pas-
sages mentioning cowries being donated to Buddhist monasteries. By
the ninth century, cowries from the Maldives had circulated as money
in Bengal and Orissa. From Bengal, cowries and the cowrie monetary
system extended to some coastal areas of mainland Southeast Asia and
penetrated to upper mainland Southeast Asia, including modern Chi-
angmai and Yunnan.
In India, cowries were used in combination with gold and especially
silver. Gold was employed only for large transactions, while silver was
used for medium-scale transactions on a popular basis. Cowrie currency
was used for small transactions on a daily basis. Deyell has described the
monetary systems in early medieval northern India, where the lowest
niche was occupied by the cowrie shell; next in value was the copper
coin; above this a silver mass ranging from a fraction of a gram to a
few grams; and for this highest level of transactions, a gold mass of a
fraction of a gram to a few grams.
34
In medieval Kashmir, the cur-
rency system consisted of a copper coinage with cowrie shells serving
for small transactions.
35
Such a monetary system was vividly revealed
30
Harsacarita, c.f. Robert S. Wicks, Money, Markets, and Trade in Early Southeast Asia
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1992), p. 75.
31
Yijing, Nanhai Jigui Neifa zhuan Jiaozhu [Annotated Account of Buddhism Sent from
the South Seas], annotated by Wang Bangwei (Beijing: Zhong hua Shuju, 1995), pp. 46, 167
n. 22, 219.
32
Huilin, Yiqie jing yin yi [Pronunciation and Meanings of All Sutras], in Cishu Jicheng
[Collections of Dictionaries], vol. 2, ed. Gu Feng, pp. 451650 (Beijing: Tuanjie Chuban-
she, 1993), p. 660.
33
Ibid.
34
John Deyell, Living without Silver, the Monetary History of Early Medieval North India
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 237.
35
Ibid., p. 62.
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 11
in the second half of the thirteenth century when the Delhi sultanate
established an empire that stretched from Sind to Bengal.
36
In Pala
Bengal, trade is carried on by means of Kauris, which are the current
money of the country. The same was true of the upper Ganga basin,
where hoards such as that found at Khajausa (3.75 kg cowries and 638
billion vigrahapla and divarha drammas), or at Bhondri (9,384 cow-
ries and 54 billion vinakapla drammas) demonstrate the use of shells
as a fractional currency alongside the higher value metallic coinage.
37
Heimann points out that India was subdivided into local market
economies based on cowries and transmarket economies based on
metal currencies.
38
He has demonstrated an ordered system of ratios
between specific numbers of cowries and between cowries and other
forms of metallic currency from the post-Gupta period (280550)
until the nineteenth century.
39
Such stability resulted from not only
marketplaces but also the state taxation system, in which cowries were
accepted as payment for revenue and taxes, especially in Bengal.
40

Cowries were also used to pay penalties for the infringement of state
regulations.
41
In addition, cowries were employed for other economic,
ritual, or religious functions, such as donations, hoarding, and religious
ceremonies. For instance, in some tribes in Bengal, a boy purchased
might be named after the number of cowries paid.
42
International trade since the sixteenth century had pushed the
cowrie trade and the cowrie monetary system into a new stage. As such,
cowrie shells no longer served simply as small money. By contrast, they
played very active and dynamic roles in the Indian Ocean trade sys-
tem that combined South Asia, West Asia, Europe, Africa, and the
New World. Frank Perlin points out that in the 17th and 18th centu-
ries there is plentiful evidence that these [cowrie and copper coinage]
became media of payments for large numbers of urban and country peo-
ple caught up in relationships transcending the merely local sphere.
43

36
Ibid., p. 221.
37
Ibid., pp. 3334. Deyell cites the first sentence from Sulaiman. Sulaiman, Salsilat-ut-
Tawrkh, in H. M. Elliot, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, J. Dowsoned,
incorporating revisions by S. H. Hodivala and preface by Md. Habib (Aligarh, 1951), 1:5.
38
Heimann, Small Changes and Ballast, p. 56.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., p. 57.
41
Pandey, Cowries as a Monetary Token, p. 132.
42
Ibid., p. 128.
43
Frank Perlin, Money-use in Late Pre-colonial India and the International Trade
in Currency Media, in The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India, ed. John F. Richards
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 237.
12 journal of world history, march 2011
Meanwhile, with the growth of local economies (the booming textile
industry and cash crop production, for example) in the seventeenth
century, cowries were widely used in the Indian subcontinent, partially
because of the poor performance of copper coinage mints.
44
However, by the mid eighteenth century, copper had either dis-
placed the shells from most of its old regions of use or subordinated
shells to an even more humble but nevertheless still monetary role,
with the exception of eastern India, where Bengal, part of its Bihar
hinterland, and Orissa absorbed ever greater quantities, right into the
early nineteenth century.
45
Southeast Asia: The Indian Ocean Connections
In early Southeast Asia before the early fifteenth century, where barter
trade was prevalent, precious metals, such as silver or gold, frequently
became measures of value. In some instances, rice, lengths of cloths, or
imported cowrie shells performed the same function.
46
In southeastern Bengal and Assam, smaller transactions were car-
ried out throughout the imported cowries, and in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries the Turks began to mint Islamic-style silver coin-
age while cowries remained the preferred subsidiary currency.
47
Assam
possessed a cowrie-based rudimentary monetary system before the fif-
teenth century. Indeed, the Bengal-centered cowrie monetary system
had extended to its neighboring Southeast Asian areas and had been
observed by both Western and Chinese travelers.
Tom Pires, the first Portuguese ambassador to China, arrived in
India in 1511 and saw cowries in Bengal and some ports in Southeast
Asia. In Arakan and Pegu (lower Burma), white cowries were used as
coinage.
48
In Martaban fifteen thousand are usually worth one vica,
which is ten calains; when they are cheap sixteen thousand; when they
are very dear fourteen thousand, and generally fifteen thousand. A
44
Ibid., p. 241.
45
Ibid.
46
Wicks, Money, Markets, and Trade, p. 7.
47
Ibid., p. 66.
48
Tom Pires, The Suma oriental of Tom Pires, an account of the East, from the Red Sea to
Japan, written in Malacca and India in 15121515, and The book of Francisco Rodrigues Rutter
of a voyage in the Red Sea, nautical rules, almanack and maps, written and drawn in the East
before 1515, trans. from the Portuguese. Ms. in the Bibliotheque de la Chambre des dputs,
Paris, and ed. Armando Cortesao, pp. 97100.
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 13
calaim is worth one thousand five hundred. For four hundred or five
hundred they will give a chicken, and things of that sort for the same
price.
49
He specified that the cowries come from the Maldives (Diva)
Islands, where they make large quantities of towels, and they also come
from the islands of Bagang and of Borneo (Burney) and they bring
them to Malacca and from there they go to Pegu.
50
In Siam, cowries, like those current in Pegu, are current through-
out the country for small money, and gold and silver for the larger
coins. This money is worth the same as we have said for Pegu.
51
While
the Maldives were the main source for cowries in Siam, white cowries
also came from Malacca.
52
What he recorded was confirmed by manu-
scripts produced more than two centuries ago in northern Thailand.
Law codes promulgated by King Mengrai (r. 1259 1317) stipulated
that cowries were to be paid for fines or compensations, just like sil-
ver coins.
53
Various things, including tools, domestic and forest ani-
mals, wild products, ritual objects, and peoples property (such as water,
money, clothes, and slaves), were given with their value measured by
cowries, and 1,100 cowries were equal to one piece of silver. Obviously,
cowries functioned as currency in the kingdom of Chiangmai, northern
Thailand. In Sukhothai (in northern Thailand) where a large quantity
of cowries from the Maldives was unearthed, many inscriptions com-
posed between 1292 and 1400 have demonstrated cowries as a measure
of value in Thai society.
54
Cowries were used for religious dedications
and for the purchase of cheap goods such as cloth and lamps, but also
expensive deals such as land. To be true, the use of cowrie money in
Thailand did not end until the latter part of the nineteenth century.
55
The situation east of Siam seemed very different, as the cowrie cur-
rency was not found either in Cambodia or in Cochin China. Chinese
copper coins dominated local markets in these regions. In Cambodia,
cashes from China are used for the small money, and in trade, gold and
silver [are used ].
56
In Cochin China, the money they use for buying
49
Ibid., p. 100.
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid., p. 104.
52
Ibid., p. 108.
53
Aroonrut Wichienkeeo and Gehan Wijeyewardene, trans. and ed., The Laws of
King Mangrai (Mangrayathammasart) (Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Australian
National University, 1986).
54
Wicks, Money, Markets, and Trade, pp. 170182.
55
Ibid., p. 166.
56
Pires, Suma oriental of Tom Pires, p. 114.
14 journal of world history, march 2011
food is the cash from China, and for merchandise gold and silver.
57

And so it was in Java, where for small money, local people used cash
from China.
58
Tom Piress observation provides us with a map of the cowrie cur-
rency in the Bay of Bengal world.
59
Cowries originating in the Maldives
were shipped to Bengal, where they began functioning as small mon-
etary denominations. Because of the intimate commercial relation,
some coastal mainland Southeast Asian societies, including Arakan,
Martaban, Pegu, and Siam, joined this cowrie monetary system. East of
Siam there seemed to be no cowrie currency where copper coins from
China were preferred. As for maritime Southeast Asia, while he men-
tioned that the white cowries in Siam were from Malacca, it seems that
cowries did not function there as small money.
While upper mainland Southeast Asia was generally not men-
tioned, the Pyu kingdom might have imported cowries, as cowries were
found at Beikthano.
60
And Laos as an inland country was found to
use cowries as money during the seventeenth century.
61
This is under-
standable, since cowries had been used in the Chiangmai kingdom that
neighbored Laos.
Not surprisingly at all, the above Western records were in line with
what Marco Polo records. The legendary traveler spoke of the cowrie
currency in Bengal (as he heard), Lochac (Siam), and Caugigu (Tong-
king, modern Hanoi area).
62
Polo might have been mistaken in the case
of Tongking, as no other sources support the use of cowrie currency,
but cowries might have been used more or less on its northwestern
borders.
63
And his words were the earliest mention of the use of cow-
ries in Siam, according to Pelliot,
64
which would have been confirmed
by many Chinese observers during the Yuan-Ming period (12791644).
The above non-Chinese sources have provided the profile of the
cowrie currency system centered in the Bengal world from the ninth to
the seventeenth centuries. What these non-Chinese travelers observed
was indeed shared by their Chinese counterparts. Paul Pelliot in Notes
57
Ibid., p. 115.
58
Ibid., pp. 170, 181.
59
Ibid., pp. 9495.
60
C.f. Wicks, Money, Markets, and Trade, p. 116.
61
Hans Ulrich Vogel, Cowrie Trade and Its Role in the Economy of Yunnan: From the
Ninth to the Mid-Seventeenth Century (Part I), Journal of the Economic and Social History
of the Orient 36, no. 3 (1993): 230.
62
Paul Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo (Paris, 1959), 1:552.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid.
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 15
on Marco Polo analyzed cowries with many insights based on his incom-
parable knowledge of diverse (including Chinese) sources.
65
Egami
Namio in his study of migration of cowrie shells in East Asia and Hans
Ulrich Vogel in his masterpiece on the cowrie monetary system in Yun-
nan (almost at the same period, from the ninth to the seventeenth
centuries) have also explored Chinese sources that trace the circula-
tion of cowries in South and Southeast Asian countries and ports.
66

The author would supplement them with some other Chinese sources
to provide a relatively comprehensive picture of the cowrie currency
world as witnessed by Chinese people.
With the maritime Silk Road having been regularly employed since
the Tang period, Chinese travelers began to notice cowries in South-
east Asia and South Asia, in addition to the western region. Histories
of the Tang dynasty clearly stated that the Middle Tianzhu (Central
India) used cowrie shells as a medium of exchange.
67
Zhao Rukuo of the
early thirteenth century followed this by stating that Tianzhu (India)
traded with Daqin (West Asia) and Funan (mainland Southeast Asia)
annually and used cowrie shells for their transactions.
68
Wang Dayuan,
a fourteenth-century traveler, recorded various countries, port cities,
and people in Southeast and South Asia who used cowries. In Luohu,
Wang Dayuan states that cowries were used as money, and he also men-
tions the exchange rate with zhongtong chao (a paper money of the Yuan
dynasty; 10,000 cowries = 24 taels of zhongtong chao).
69
Scholars agree
that Luohu (Lvo, Lavo, and Lohot) was located in modern Lophuri of
the lower Menam River.
70
Indeed, Marco Polo observed from Lochac
all the cowries moved and were spent in all the other provinces of
the world.
71
Moving westward, Wang recorded that in Siam people
still use cowries as money (Reng yi bazi quan qian shiyong).
72
The
65
Ibid., pp. 531563.
66
Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo; Namio, Migration of the Cowrie-Shell Culture;
Vogel, Cowrie Trade and Its Role in the Economy of Yunnan (Part I), pp. 211252; Hans
Ulrich Vogel, Cowrie Trade and Its Role in the Economy of Yunnan: From the Ninth to
the Mid-Seventh Century (Part II), Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
36, no. 4 (1993): 309 353.
67
Jiu Tangshu, juan 198, 5307; Xin Tangshu, juan 221, 6237.
68
Zhao Rukuo, Zhufan Zhi [A Record of Various Barbarians], annotated by Yang Bowen
(Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2000), p. 86.
69
Wang Dayuan, Daoyi Zhilue [ Records of Islands and Barbarians], annotated by Su
Jiqing (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2000), p. 114.
70
Ibid., p. 115.
71
Marco Polo, The Description of the World, trans. and ann. by A. C. Moule and Paul
Pelliot (London: G. Routledge, 1938), 1:369 370.
72
Wang, Daoyi Zhilue, p. 155.
16 journal of world history, march 2011
inclusion of the word still leads to the conclusion that Wang Dayuan
knew that cowries had been used as money in Siam prior to his arrival,
which accords with Marco Polo. In Zhilu (Mergui, northern region of
the Malay Peninsula), cowries were traded with Siam as money.
73
In
Beiliu (Male), whenever overseas merchants moved one shipload of
cowries to Wudie (Pegu) and Bengal, more than one shipload of rice
was exchanged; Wang commented that since those places (Bengal and
Pegu) employed cowries as money, cowries had been a long-lasting way
for local people (in Beiliu) to make a living.
74
In Wudie (Pegu), each
silver coin weighed two mace and eight candreens, equivalent to ten
taels of zhongtong paper money, and each could be exchanged for about
11,520 cowries. Because 250 cowries could buy one pointed basket of
rice (equivalent to 1.6 dou [Chinese official peck]), each silver coin
could buy 46 baskets of rice, namely, 73.2 pecks, more than enough to
feed two men for a year.
75
Wang Dayuans account of cowrie money in
Orissa bears an extraordinary similarity to descriptions of Bengal and
Pegu, which reveals the regulation and consistency of such a monetary
system in all these regions.
The Zheng He expeditions passed through Southeast Asia, the Bay
of Bengal and beyond, and leave us with some valuable records. Ma
Huan said that in Siam, in trade they employ cowries as money for
current use; optionally, gold, silver and copper coins may all be used.
76

So it was in Bengal. The cowrie goes by the foreign name of K ao-li;
[and] in trading they calculate in units [of this article].
77
Both cow-
ries in Siam and in Bengal were from Liushan (the Maldives) as Ma
observed. In the Maldives, As to their cowries: the people there col-
lect them and pile them into heaps like mountains; they catch them in
nets and let the flesh rot; [then] they transport them for sale in Hsien
Lo, Pang-ko-la and other such countries, where they are used as cur-
rency.
78
Gong Zhen, another observer on the treasure fleet left a simi-
lar account. Gong recorded that trade transactions involved cowries
73
Ibid., p. 126.
74
Ibid., p. 264.
75
Ibid., p. 276.
76
Ma Huan, Yingya Shenglan, The Overall Survey of the Oceans Shores (1433), trans.
from the Chinese texts, ed. Feng Chengjun, with introduction, notes, and appendices by
J.V. G. Mills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1970), p.
107.
77
Ma, Yingya Shenglan, p. 161.
78
Ibid., p. 150.
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 17
as money.
79
He recorded that kaoli was the foreign name of haiba (sea-
shells), and that it was counted one by one in the trade.
80
Huang Xingceng, in his 1520s Xiyang Chaogong Dianlu, recorded
that in Siam, trade was made through gold and silver, through copper
cash, and through cowries.
81
Unlike some who mistakenly thought that
cowries were used as money in the Maldives, Huang clearly confirms
that silver rather than cowries served as local money, while cowries
were exported to bring wealth to the country. Huang even detailed the
procurement of cowries: people caught cowries, piled them into moun-
tains, let them decay, and finally stored them, and he said that it was
the Siamese and Bengali merchants who came to purchase cowries.
82
Many scholars have examined and reflected on the cowrie mon-
etary system in Yunnan from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries.
But where were the sources for these shells in Yunnan, an inland area,
far from the sea? Linguistic analyses may help. The term cury, or kauri,
as they were known in Bengal (observed by Tom Pires), suggests that
Bengal was the source of cowries in Yunnan. The cowrie, or cowrie
shell, was originally called in Chinese bei, haibei (seashell), or beichi
(shell teeth),
83
but never kaoli, a new term that was not invented until
the Yuan-Ming period to refer to cowries. Both Ma Huan and Gong
Zhen of the early fifteenth century recorded the word kaoli for the first
time. Kaoli from its pronunciation is clearly a transliteration of cury or
kauri, suggesting the origin of cowries in Yunnan to be Bengal. It seems
that both the Chinese term kaoli and the English term cowrie should
be regarded as Indian dialectal terms akin to kaudi in Hindi, kavari in
Martha, and kabtaj in Maldive languages.
84
Another Chinese term, ba, was invented during the Yuan-Ming
period and deserves our attention. Wang Dayuan used the term bazi
79
Gong Zhen, Xiyang Fanguo Zhi [A Record of Foreign Countries in the Western
Ocean], annotated by Xiang Da (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2000), p. 14.
80
Ibid., p. 38.
81
Huang Xingceng, Xiyang Chaogong Dianlu Jiaozhu [A Record of the Tributes from the
Western Ocean], annotated by Xie Fang (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2000), p. 69.
82
Ibid.
83
Beichi, as it is so named, because of the marks inside the edge of the shell that resem-
ble the teeth. See Faxian, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms: Being an Account by the Chinese
Monk Fa-Hien of His Travels in India and Ceylon (A.D. 399 414) in Search of the Buddhist
Books of Discipline, translated and annotated with a Corean recension of the Chinese text by
James Legge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), p. 43 and p. 43 n. 2.
84
Namio, Migration of the Cowrie-Shell Culture, p. 36.
18 journal of world history, march 2011
(shells).
85
Ma Huan and Gong Zhen also used the term haiba (sea-
shells). The character ba is the combination of two Chinese radicals
shell and ba. The radical shell refers to its origin and feature, while
the radical ba is used for its pronunciation. The radical ba most likely
is the transliteral abbreviation of the Sanskrit term kaparda, or the
Hindustani derivation kapari.
86
The pronunciation of ba resembles the
Cham bior, the Khmer bier, the Siamese bia, and the Laotian bia hoi in
Thai.
87
Pelliot has also brought the Malay biya to our attention, and he
suggests that the Thai probably borrowed the word from the Malays.
88

Whatever the case, the linguistic connections lead to speculation not
only on the trading routes of cowries, but also on the intimacy of the
relationship among Bengal, coastal mainland Southeast Asia, and Yun-
nan (upper mainland Southeast Asia).
Reflections: Cowries in Global and Local Contexts
After this brief account of the cowrie experiences in India, China, and
Southeast Asia, I would like to share some reflections on cowrie shells
in both a global and Chinese context.
The history of cowrie currency has raised many questions for our
understanding of monetary and economic history, ethnic and cultural
dynamics, and translocal and transregional interactions. The first ques-
tion naturally concerns the issue of cowrie shells as small money.
89
The
cowrie was probably the first universal money and one that lasted lon-
ger than any other kind of money in human history. It existed in an
extensive geographical span of our globe by a great range of peoples at
different periods of their histories. Unlike the conventional wisdom,
which sees cowries as small or primitive money, a view that is simply
biased by cultural paradigms, European or Chinese, scholars such as
Hogendorn, Johnson, Heimann, and Perlin have challenged such an
account by their empirical researches and theoretical analyses. African
85
Wang, Daoyi Zhilue, p. 264.
86
Namio states that it is apparently. See Namio, Migration of the Cowrie-Shell
Culture, p. 34.
87
Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, p. 554; Namio, Migration of the Cowrie-Shell Cul-
ture, p. 32.
88
Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, p. 554.
89
Paul Einzig, for example, in his studies of so-called primitive money has introduced
cowrie shell money in many places of the world, including India, China, the Solomon
Islands, the Trobriand Islands, and New Guinea. See Paul Einzig, Primitive Money: In Its
Ethnological, Historical, and Economic Aspects, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1966).
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 19
experience may have drawn a conclusion that the cowrie currency was
the most important, the most interesting, and the most modern.
90

Heimann points out that the cowrie currency in India predated or was
concurrent with its first coins and functioned as money in all modern
senses of the wordsensitive to changes; liquidity demands, supply,
transaction and production costs, and gross national product.
91
Perlin
criticizes the dichotomy between the economy of gold and silver and
that of copper and cowries: the former is seen as urban, coastal, translo-
cal, and luxurious, while the latter is seen as rural, local, substantivist,
and changeless.
92
He points out that in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries Indian cowries became the medium for urban people.
93
Per-
lins case is not surprising as cowrie money had served for deals of high
value in medieval Yunnan and Chiangmai. As such, the case of cowries
has updated our understanding of the history of globalization. Peter
Boomgaard argues that the use of cowries as currency and the trade in
cowries from the ninth century onward constitute early examples of
globalization.
94
In other words, the large temporal and spatial span,
the rich dimensions, and the functional dynamics lead to the conclu-
sion that cowrie money had been the first global common money.
What interests most scholars is the role of cowries in the Indian
Ocean and the modern world, particularly the cowries and the rise of
the West. Scholars of the Atlantic trade, and surely of world history,
have examined the significance of silver and gold of the New World
for the rise of European powers. Andre Gunder Frank, for example,
pointed out that these precious metals provided a ticket for Europe to
take the Asian Express.
95
Although his conceptualization of the world
system, to many scholars, seems to be too radical, no one would deny
the role of silver and gold for the dramatic rise and expansion of the
modern European world system. Such a perception has been shared
among experts on late imperial China (the Ming and Qing dynasties,
1368 1911), who have analyzed the positive and negative legacy of the
90
Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money of the Slave Trade, p. 1.
91
Heimann, Small Changes and Ballast, pp. 55, 57.
92
Frank Perlin, Money-use in Late Pre-colonial India, p. 233.
93
Ibid., p. 237.
94
Peter Boomgaard, Early Globalization Cowries as Currency: 600 bce1900, in
Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns, and Kin in Asian History, ed. Peter Boomgaard, Dick Kooi-
man, and Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008), p. 15. The term globaliza-
tion, according to Boomgaard, refers to phenomena of economic integration and connect-
edness that can be observed in earlier periods.
95
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1998).
20 journal of world history, march 2011
silver inflow into China by diverse European merchants. Silver, on one
hand, pushed commercialization and monetarization in China from
the late Ming and drew China into a world economy to an unprece-
dented degree; on the other hand, being a vital element of the imperial
economy, silver would have been an enormous destroyer had its huge
inflow been unable to be sustained, which would be testified by the
opium trade. In other words, silver from the New World had contrib-
uted to the globalization of Europe, the New World, China, Southeast
Asia, and India. But what about the cowrie shells in this globalization
process?
Cowries played the same role as silver for the European world sys-
tem. For a long time, cowrie shells from the Maldives had been shipped
to West Africa, and when Europeans reached both West Africa and
the Indian Ocean, they immediately began to participate in this net-
work, resulting in the combination of the cowrie trade and the Atlan-
tic slave trade. The Dutch dominated the cowrie trade until 1750, and
the British controlled the trade until 1807.
96
Statistics by Hogendorn
and Johnson reveal that during the period between 1700 and 1790,
some 11,436 metric tonnes of shells were shipped to West Africa by the
Dutch and English, the equivalent of the staggering figure of 10 billion
individual shells.
97
While the abolition of the slave trade caused a tem-
porary slump in the nineteenth century, the growing palm oil export
from West Africa immediately revived the cowrie trade.
98
The role of cowries both in the slave trade and in the palm oil trade
reveals that cowrie shells helped the Europeans enter and penetrate
local markets in the New World, Africa, and other regions. The small
articles functioned as a lubricant for the European colonial machine. A
similarity between cowries and silver and a similarity between cowries
and opium quickly capture us because all served to enhance European
accumulation and dominance. Silver from the New World, followed
by opium produced from Bengal, was used by Europeans to open the
Chinese market in exchange for Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain, while
cowries from the Indian Ocean were shipped to open African markets
in exchange for slaves, who in turn were exploited in plantations in the
New World. While to what degree the Indian Ocean had shaped the
96
C. A. Gregory, Cowries and Conquest: Towards a Subalternate Quality Theory of
Money, Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, no. 2 (1996): 198.
97
Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money of the Slave Trade, p. 58; Gregory, Cowries and
Conquest, p. 198.
98
Gregory, Cowries and Conquest, p. 198.
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 21
modern world system remains a question, our consideration of cowries
undoubtedly has or would have complicated the rise of Europe and
global dynamics.
A relevant question is the relationship between the cowrie money
and metal cashes such as gold and silver. Perlin has emphasized the
historical developments that conditioned and facilitated the European
maritime invasion of China.
99
Responding to the role of American sil-
ver as the precondition for international commercial development, he
comments that it was the broad-based, varied, and massive demand for
the instruments of monetarization, together with the simultaneous long-
run developments in production and supply of monetary media, that
was the pre-condition for flows of American silver and for Euro-Asian
trade.
100
Cowrie currency seems to have played a key role in these
precondition infrastructures. While Europe (and European people)
seemed not different as late as the 1750s,
101
its close location to the
New World and its navigation capacity made Europeans able to use
all the Asian preconditions (sources, networks, and infrastructures) for
their own sake.
The cowrie monetary system also leads one to rethink the world sys-
tem debates, especially when considering the world before European
hegemony and the restructuring world system following the arrival of
Europeans. First, was there a world system before European hegemony?
Second, if one existed, was it the same one as Abu-Lughods 1250
1350 world system?
102
Or shall we name a cowrie world system that
might have originated as early as the ninth century? Third, the case of
Yunnan can be revealing for the interplay between modern world sys-
tem and a so-called premodern world system. Yunnan, which belonged
to the cowrie monetary system centered in the Indian Ocean, ceased
being part of it by 1700 and began to be transformed, as frontier, into
firmly Chinese territory, which facilitated the demarcation of several
macroregions in modern historiography: Chinese, Southeast Asian,
and South Asian ones. The creation of this modern world system now
disrupted other world systems and restructured them into a global one.
99
Frank Perlin, Monetary Revolution and Societal Change in the Late Medieval and
Early Modern TimesA Review Article, Journal of Asian Studies 45, no. 5 (1986): 1046.
100
Ibid.
101
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2000). Also see AHR Forum: Asia and Europe in the World Economy, American
Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002): 419480.
102
Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250 1350
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
22 journal of world history, march 2011
As such, the cowrie monetary system joins the approach that goes
beyond comparison of discrete regional economies and beyond explain-
ing the world economy in terms of dominance by a single pole.
103

Connections and interactions among various regions were the key for
our understandings of historical developments of our global world.
Last, the cowrie monetary system has served a balanced case, avoid-
ing risks caused either by an ocean-based perspective or the domi-
nant land-based perspective. Cowrie shells were ocean products but
played crucial roles in inland societies and kingdoms such as the Shang
dynasty, Orissa, Chiangmai, Nanzhao, and Dali,
104
no matter as ritual
values, precious items, commodity money, or general money. As such,
cowries demonstrated the far-reaching and long-lasting influence of
the ocean on the landmass, symbolizing the land-ocean connections
and interactions. For this we have to re-review the significance of the
Indian Ocean, particularly the Bay of Bengal, which might have been
a Mediterranean for the Eurasian continent. A few pioneering scholars
such as G. Coeds once highlighted the role of the sea in Asias his-
tory.
105
James Heimann has examined the cowrie trade to illustrate the
integration of the Indian Ocean world-economy.
106
Rila Mukherjee
has produced an inspiring work that elaborates on this watery region of
the eastern Indian Ocean, describing it as an arena of littoral societ-
ies, hybrid polities, religious/commercial practices or connected soci-
eties.
107
Their approaches have been recently elaborated by Barbara
Watson Andaya; she warns about the risk of a purely land-based per-
spective and calls attention to oceans unbounded.
108
While promot-
103
Patrick Manning, Asia and Europe in the World Economy: Introduction, AHR
Forum: Asia and Europe in the World Economy, American Historical Review 107, no. 2
(2002): 419.
104
Nanzhao and Dali were two sequent kingdoms in medieval Yunnan from the sev-
enth century to the mid thirteenth century.
105
Coeds, citing Sylvain Levi, emphasized the role of the Indian Ocean: the pattern
of currents and the pattern of periodic winds that govern navigation have long fostered a
system of trade in which the African coast, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, Indochina,
and China continually contributed and received their share. He also pointed out the
significance of the China Sea in Southeast Asia, as the sea has always been a unifying
factor rather than an obstacle for the peoples along the rivers. G. Coeds, The Indianized
States of Southeast Asia, ed. Walter F. Vella and trans. Susan Brown Cowing (Kuala Lumpur:
University of Malaya Press, 1968), pp. 34.
106
Heimann, Small Changes and Ballast, pp. 4869.
107
Rila Mukherjee, The Neglected Sea The Eastern Indian Ocean in History, Jour-
nal of the Asiatic Society, 49, nos. 3 and 4 (2007).
108
Barbara Watson Andaya, Oceans Unbounded: Transversing Asia across Area
Studies, Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 4 (2006): 669690.
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 23
ing a maritime view of history, Jerry Bentley has not only conceptual-
ized sea and ocean basins as frameworks of historical analysis and
discussed their advantages (for commercial, biological, and cultural
exchanges), but also pointed out their limits and problems (the spa-
tial and temporal boundaries and relations between maritime regions
and the larger world).
109
Following their theoretical constructions and
empirical analyses, I would like to propose the term the cowrie world
to serve as an alternative to purely land-based regional studies and
balance an ocean-based analysis. The cowrie world consisted of the
large land mass and vast water in which cowrie shells had lived and
combined them into a commercially and culturally intertwined world.
This world, to some extent, crossed various boundaries of topography,
people, culture, religion, and society.
In the case of China, the two questions remain to be researched.
One is the origins of cowries, namely, where they came from; the other
is the date of the cowrie money (either commodity money or com-
mon money). The first is basically solved, although further cooperation
among archaeologists, historians, and marine scientists is needed. Here
I would like to briefly discuss the spread of cowries from the Indian
Ocean to China through two roads: one from northern India through
Central Asia to North China, namely, the Silk Road; the other from
Bengal through mainland Southeast Asia (Burma and Thailand) to
Yunnan and Sichuan, namely, the so-called southwestern Silk Road.
110

While cowries in ancient north China had been brought through Cen-
tral Asia, those founded in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Jiangxi were highly
likely transported through the southwest Silk Road. More importantly,
one may bear in mind the cowries as money used in medieval Yunnan
were in a different context and of different nature from the cowrie use
in early China.
The second question calls on comprehensive studies of all available
sources. Indeed, whether or not cowrie shells actually functioned as
money in ancient China remains a question, one that contrasts sharply
with the situation in India. Let me add a few ideas on the Chinese situ-
ation that might help account for the difference.
Cowries taken as high-value items (precious or commodity money)
in early Chinese civilization partially resulted from their being exotic
109
Jerry Bentley, Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis, Geo-
graphical Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 215225.
110
For the introduction of this road, see Bin Yang, Horses, Silver, and Cowries: Yun-
nan in Global Perspective, Journal of World History 15, no. 3 (2004): 281322.
24 journal of world history, march 2011
and scarce. They traveled a long distance to reach North China. As
a result, their presence was limited, and they were unable to reach
abundance sufficient for them to function as a common currency. The
long-distance travel and their consequent scarcity made cowries able
to function only for a short time as commodity money as well as sym-
bols of power, social status, and wealth. Cowries were one of the many
candidates (salt, cloth, etc.) for common currencies, but gradually
metal mediums came to be preferred by the early Chinese states. By the
second half of the first millennium b.c.e., powerful Chinese states all
had created and promoted their own metal currencies, mainly iron in
the north and copper in the south. The metal distribution was simply
geographical: iron ores were available in the north, while copper ores
were only abundant in the south. These metal currencies still bore the
historic mark of early cowrie commodity currency as revealed by the
so-called ant-nose coinage.
Consequently, we may conclude that cowries had served as com-
modity money (but hardly common money) in some areas in early
China and had left a remarkable role in the Chinese monetary sys-
tem. Since cowrie shells early arrival, man-made counterparts such as
bone cowries, jade cowries, stone cowries, and metal cowries had been
found along with these true marine shells. This implies that in an early
period, at least, cowrie shells were favored by Chinese elite. The Chu
kingdom in the mid Yangzi region was the most astonishing, as hun-
dreds of thousands of bronze cowries had been produced, which reveals
the long-lasting role of cowries in Chinese creation of their monetary
tradition.
One might ask, why did cowries not develop into a universal
currency in China? Or, as in early India, come to function as small
money? Geographical distance was the key. China as a giant economy
demanded a tremendous amount of small money, be it metal coins or
cowrie shells. The Maldives were too far away for economic transport.
Overland caravan trade was unable to meet the demand, since the cost
of transportation would increase beyond any value as small money. The
only exception was Yunnan, because of its geographical and cultural
intimacy with the Indian Ocean.
But geographic distance alone is not entirely convincing. Why, one
might ask, did the Mali Empire, three thousand miles way from the
Maldives, import cowrie shells and create a cowrie monetary system?
Here we have to take into consideration the temporal factor. The mon-
etary economy in West Africa emerged much later than that of China,
which desired a common currency as early as the mid first millennium
Yang: The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells 25
b.c.e., when cowries and many other items functioned as candidates
for a common currency. Cowries failed the competition because of
their scarcity, and metal coinages began to dominate.
111
Therefore, the long distance from imperial China to the Maldives
precluded cowries from developing into a common currency in China,
even when this species might have once been commodity money in the
Western Zhou period and had been a dynamic medium of exchange
in India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Nevertheless, we should never
underestimate the role of cowries in early Chinese civilization, particu-
larly its contribution to the Shang-Zhou societies. Archaeologists have
noticed the symbiosis of cowries and bronze objects in early China
(Neolithic and the Shang period); where cowries were discovered,
there were bronze findings.
112
The abundant bronze cowries, though
being late inventions, serve as a wonderful symbol of this symbiosis.
The companionship between cowrie and bronze yields many implica-
tions for the origin of bronze technology and thus Chinese civilization,
and the formation of the Silk Road.
113
Scholars have widely discussed
the oracle culture, the jade culture, and the bronze culture, and their
significance in Chinese civilization, but nobody proposes the term the
cowrie culture and its relevance to Chinese civilization. Archaeologi-
cal finds, metal inscriptions, and oracle texts now are so abundant that
a serious and comprehensive scrutiny of cowries shall be made.
111
Considering the distance from the Maldives and the timing issue, a comparison of
the cowrie currency between Mali in West Africa and medieval Yunnan would arouse some
interest.
112
Peng and Zhu, New Research on the Origins of Cowries, pp. 1819.
113
Ibid.
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