Except where foreign coins such as American silver dollars are employed, all payments in silver and gold are made by weight, the only money being the copper cash. The Chinese metric system, like our own, is based on natural seeds or grains of plants. Thus ten of a kind of seed called fên (the Candarin) probably placed sideways make 1 ts’un (the Chinese inch3), just as our forefathers based the English inch on 3 barleycorns placed lengthwise. So with their monetary