Factory of Wealth - Archaeology Magazine

Factory of Wealth

A mint from the Han Dynasty produced billions of coins that enabled vast economic growth and trade along the Silk Road

A brick excavated near the modern city of Xi'an in China's Shaanxi Province was used as a coin mold at an imperial mint on the outskirts of the Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 9) capital of Chang'an.
(Courtesy Liu Zhendong, Imaginechina)

In a back room at the Shanglinyuan archaeological headquarters, just outside the modern city of Xi'an, a concrete floor is nearly entirely covered by a single layer of loosely arranged and dusty bricks. They have been placed in rows and come in red, gray, and brown. Some are crumbling at the edges, and others have been rounded over time. But these are no simple construction materials. Archaeologist Liu Rui picks up one of the bricks, which date to the Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 9), and dusts it off with a brush. Each brick has one or more circular impressions on its face, and further dusting reveals a square protrusion at the center of each circle. It is an iconic shape in Chinese archaeology—the outline of the country's longest-lived currency, the "Wu Zhu" coin. These are molds for casting the coins that helped unify China and build the Silk Road, which connected the region to the rest of the world. The room is filled with the phantoms of the enormous wealth of the Han Dynasty.

Liu is the head of an ongoing excavation at a Han Dynasty mint, a gigantic ancient factory located in Shanglinyuan, a few miles from the ruins of the Han capital of Chang'an. "We have discovered Wu Zhu coins in tombs all over China, but we have never excavated a site like this," says Liu. "We don't yet know the full story of how the Wu Zhu coin was minted." To him, the bricks provide a new way to look at the empire's vast wealth and an opportunity to study the lives of the workers and artisans that once kept the sprawling factory—and the empire it supplied—running. It is estimated that during the Western Han, around 28 billion coins were minted. They remained in use for 700 years, as other dynasties adopted the currency and continued minting the coins, which have been uncovered in sites as far afield as Southeast Asia, Japan, and Russia.

The city of Chang'an served as the Han capital from 220 B.C. to A.D. 11, and rivaled Rome in both size and grandeur. The remains of this site, including the mint, miles of mud-and-brick city walls studded with gates, several imperial palaces, and a variety of other official buildings and residences, lie at the edges of Xi'an's modern sprawl. Though study of the site has been going on for some 60 years, there is still much to be learned—as long as modern China's rapid development can be held at bay. The bricks that served as molds for coins provide a humble entry point to big questions about commerce and the ways of empire-building. "This mint," Liu says, "can help us tell the story of the booming Han economy."

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Lauren Hilgers is a freelance writer based in Shanghai.

Enviado desde el iPhone de Carlos Lozano