From: Thomas Chan (tc31@cornell.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 01 2002 - 11:28:05 EDT
On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Thomas Chan wrote:
> (Was U+56ED what you saw, James?--I don't have my Krause catalog by me at
> the moment, but I think it was present on older PRC coinage.)
A correction to myself here--I thought I had seen U+56ED as a currency
unit, but now I cannot find a reference in my notes, so I'm retracting
this one.
James Kass said:
>I don't blame you. According to Krause...
>One Dollar (Yuan) = 100 Cents (Fen/Hsien) = 1000 Cash (Wen/Ch'ien) =
> (=) 0.72 Tael (Liang) = 7 Mace and 2 Candareens
>...and, that's just for starters.
Well, the last part is a different system--mace and candareens are weight
measures for silver coins as part of the "tael" system: liang/qian/fei/li
(tael/mace/candareen/?). Hence, there are three systems: dollar, cash,
and tael.
The 1/100th units fen and xian (hsien in Krause) are part of different
systems: yuan-jiao-fen in the north, and yuan-hao-xian in the south.
(xian U+4ED9 < English 'cent', even in Macau, where 1/100th of a pataca is
an avo.) The northern and southern systems may be seen residually in
contemporary Hong Kong and Macau, and historically during the early 20th
century during a period of provincial minting in mainland China, where
people used their local terminology on their coins, with the exception
of the 1.0 unit. The situation is similar for the 1/10th unit; jiao in
the north and hao in the south.
Marco Cimarosti said:
>U+5143 4~6~D^4~D6~^A
>U+5186 4~6~D^4~DC^4~DC
>U+5706 4~6~D^4~D^4~DC
>U+570E 4~6~D^4~D^I
>U+5713 4~6~D^4~D^O
Thank you for finding these--I didn't realize that U+570E was encoded
independently of U+5713, and not as a font variant of the latter. (And I
had forgotten the obvious U+5713 ~ U+5706 connection.)
I checked Krause--U+5713 may be seen on pre-war Japanese coinage for
"yen".
Alan Wood said:
>I have added all of the symbols from this discussion to the second table
on
>my page at:
>http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/currency_symbols.html
Please remove U+56ED--that was my mistake.
U+6587 is not entirely appropriate there--while it was a currency unit
(approx. 1/1000th yuan), it was gone in all regions by the early 1930s,
and now it is just (a least) a colloquial Cantonese synonym for yuan, sort
of like northern kuai4 U+584A/U+5757 'piece'. I can provide you with a
bunch of other terms for 1/10th and 1/100th units, but once one steps into
the realm of Han characters, one is no longer dealing with symbols but
words, and the list can inflate very quickly unless restrictions are set,
such as primary currency units (not 1/10th or 1/100th units) in
contemporary use (not historical) that appear appear on currency (not
other terms like "bucks", "benjamins", etc).
U+5713 I wouldn't list as "yen/yuan variant"--it should be on the same
level as U+5143 and U+5186, as U+5713 (Yuan) is the unit used in Taiwan
and Hong Kong on the currency (despite being "dollars" in English).
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
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