Brendan Greeley

So so now to Tracy's question, what you start to see in China is, you know, not just cobs showing up in hordes.

These are, you know, every once in a while during construction, someone will find a box of coins that tells us a little bit about what people used at the time.

So when you date the coins to the 18th century, you actually start to see these really nice, high quality round milled coins.

And this is when so

The word yuan refers to this coin.

Yen refers to this coin.

The Malaysian ringgit actually means jagged, which refers to the milling on the edge of this coin.

This coin becomes a global standard.

The Hong Kong dollar is not derived from the American dollar.

It's derived from this very specifically shaped and trustworthy piece of silver in the 18th century that began to circulate not just intercontinentally, but domestically within China.

It starts to move north from the trading ports in the south.

So it's the quality of the mint to answer your question.

It's sort of Spain.

Empires are hard to manage.

It's pretty difficult to figure out how to get silver out of a hole on the ground on the other side of an ocean and then turn it into a high quality coin.

Over time, they figure this out.

And as they figure this out, you've got one empire, one silver, one coin.

It's going everywhere.

Yeah, absolutely.

But the mechanics and the detail matter.