Ebook: A Monetary History of China, Volumes One and Two (Zhongguo Huobi Shi)

A Monetary History of China, Volumes One and Two by Peng Xinwei, translated by Edward H. Kaplan. Translating this long, complex work, touching as it does on so many aspects of Chinese life, ranging from ancient philosophers to late Qing picaresque novels, has proven a daunting but rewarding task. I have learned a great deal about much more than Chinese money in the course of doing the translation. Nevertheless, I can hardly claim to have done justice to what is one of the great monuments of modem Chinese scholarship, and to its martyred author. Still, as Chesterton wisely observed, "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

Not the least of the virtues of making a translation of Zhongguo huobi shi available to the English- reading world is to celebrate a scholarly career which managed to transcend the limits of a regime which could have had no sympathy for the objects —the money-commodities and manufactured moneys— which were the focus of that career, and which, as this book went through its second and third versions, came perilously close to abolishing altogether the market, the only place within which those objects can find their meaning.