Circulation and Flow: Acupuncture, Hydraulics, and Finance in Eleventh-Century China

During the eleventh century, the central government of the Song Empire (960-1279 CE) minted an unprecedented number of coins and issued the world’s first paper money in order to enable and to regulate a growing trade in goods and services. The uneven supply of currency and goods, however, caused unpredictable fluctuations in prices and in the value of money. In their effort to determine the principles of this complex economy, Song officials made analogies with water and the human body. They assumed that the flow of water and the circulation of vital essences did not merely provide convenient similes for the workings of money, but that money shared crucial physical characteristics with water and with qi, as the health of imperial subjects depended on the robust circulation of all three of these substances. Irreconcilable debates about finance during the 1070s and 1080s forced the realization that the natural principles of finance were not easy to discover or to demonstrate.