The Civilization of China by Herbert A. Giles

In the earliest ages of which history professes to take cognizance, / persons who wished to dispose of their goods were obliged to have / recourse to barter. By and by shells were adopted as a medium of / exchange, and then pieces of stamped silk, linen, and deerskin. These / were followed by circular discs of copper, pierced with a round hole, / the forerunners of the ordinary copper coins of a century or two later, / which had square holes, and bore inscriptions, as they still do in / the present day. Money was also cast in the shape of "knives" and of / "trouser," by which names specimens of this early coinage (mostly fakes) / are known to connoisseurs. Some of these were beautifully finished, and / even inlaid with gold. Early in the ninth century, bills of exchange / came into use; and from the middle of the twelve century paper money / became quite common, and is still in general use all over China, notes / being issued in some places for amounts less even than a shilling.

Measures of length and capacity were fixed by the Chinese after an / exceedingly simple process. The grain of millet, which is fairly uniform / in size, was taken as the unit of both. Ten of these grains, laid / end-ways, formed the inch, ten of which made a foot, and ten feet a / _chang_. The decimal system has always prevailed in China, with one / curious exception: sixteen ounces make a pound. How this came to be so / does not appear to be known; but in this case it is the pound which is / the unit of weight, and not the lower denomination. The word which / for more than twenty centuries signified "pound" to the Chinese, was / originally the rude picture of an axe-head; and there is no doubt / that axe-heads, being all of the same size, were used in weighing / commodities, and were subsequently split, for convenience's sake, into / sixteen equal parts, each about one-third heavier than the English / ounce. For measures of capacity, we must revert to the millet-grain, a / fixed number of which set the standard for Chinese pints and quarts. / The result of this rule-of-thumb calculation has been that weights and / measures vary all over the empire, although there actually exist an / official foot, pound and pint, as recognized by the Chinese government. / In one and the same city a tailor's foot will differ from a carpenter's / foot, an oilman's pint from a spirit-merchant's pint, and so on. The / final appeal is to local custom.