Does anyone know where the silver for the fat man series of coins of China was from? Were there specific mines in Asia or is the silver a mixture from several places and continents? Thank You
I think the silver was mined somewhere on the planet Earth Does it really matter where? Why? Here some of history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yua... were regularly,run exceeding a billion coins.
I don't know, but I don't believe China had much domestic silver production. China was on a silver standard (unlike most of the world, which had adopted a gold standard in the late 19th-early 20th century). So China imported much of the silver it would have used for domestic coinage. It appears that much of China's silver was produced in Spanish America. Not sure if that had shifted by the early 20th Century. China relied on an export-driven economy with goods like silk and porcelain providing for silver imports. This was a cause of much friction with the West, and was one of the causes of the Opium War. China also had an easier time than most countries during the Great Depression. The price of silver fell compared to gold in the early 1930s and provided a loose monetary policy which propped up the Chinese economy while the rest of the world economy was contracting. Unfortunately, later US efforts to raise the price of silver to please silver producers in the Western states caused a sharp deflation in China. This produced a fiscal crisis which made Chang Kia-shek ill prepared to rest Imperial Japan's invasions. The Story of Silver (2019) by William Silber has a lot of useful details on this period and is quite accessible to a reader (like me) without an economics background.
China has been buying and hoarding precious metals for a long, long time. They buy it from any and everywhere they can.
