Paper was first used for money because paper could burn. When the earliest paper money was printed in China sometime around the eight century, it was developed as an imitation of metallic currency in order to be burnt at funerals and thereby transfer the wealth of one life to another.
Not too long after paper money began to be used at funerals, the Chinese began to accept printed-paper as a valid medium and exchange and legal tender in the Middle Kingdom. The issuance of standard forms of paper money became a state monopoly in the late eleventh century, and the fall of the Sung dynasty to northern barbarians soon afterwards as exacerbated by a new type of crisis of confidence in the government: runaway inflation.
Kublai Khan and the Mongols perfected the system the Sung Chinese had started. Marco Polo was so struck by the widespread use of paper money in Mongol-ruled China that he began his descriptions of Chinese cities with the following formula: "The people are idolaters and subjects of the Great Khan, and have paper money." Meanwhile, techniques of printing that made massive issues of paper money possible were slowly spreading westward along the Silk Road through central Asia, Persia, and the Middle East.
Paper money has had a long and glorious history as a popular medium of exchange. But new technology may lead to a change in the way we buy, sell, borrow, and steal. In Singapore, a dynamic Asian city-state, the use of paper money is slowly but steadily losing ground. Singapore has one of the world's mot advanced systems of electronic funds transfer, and the Singapore one-dollar note is being phased out this year because it is "inefficient." Despite these trends, paper currency survives here in its earliest form: as money for burning.
Eclectic Religious Practices In Singapore
Singapore is an ethnically diverse society. The majority Chinese community is made up of the descendants of immigrant laborers sponsored by the colonial British and a smaller community of Peranakan (locally born) Chinese, who are descended form Chinese communities that have thrived in Southeast Asia since at least the beginning of the Ming dynasty (late 1300). And Chinese vernacular religion is strong here. There are hundreds of Chinese temples scattered around the 20-mile-wide island: some are 150 years old; some new ones, covering city blocks, are grand and impressive; some have been improvised in apartments in public housing developments; others have been cobbled together in vacant lots from bits of planking and zinc roofing. In front of each temple, no matter how small, is a bin for burning paper money--anything form a brightly painted twelve-foot-tall furnace built in the shape of a pagoda to a rusty oil drum on a metal stand.
In such temples, or at shrines, graves, and family altars, the act of worship or propitiation is to bai: to take sticks of burning incense between one's hands, incline one's head toward the alter, shrine, or cardinal direction, and move the hands up and down three times. In each of the three main strains in Chinese religion, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship (the roots of the rather cerebral state cult of Confucianism), the objects of veneration are different: various deities and sprits (shen) for the Taoists, different incarnations of the Buddha for the Buddhists, and ancestor for the ancestor
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