Oct. 20.
Tue image of an old Chinese, and iron kettle, turning out unimpeachable sycee in a back street of Hongkew, is the favourite symbol of the mainstay of China's currency. Copper is, of course, a byword. Subsidiary silver has afforded plentiful opportunity for illicit profit—as, for instance, Anhui, flooded with inferior twenty and ten cent pieces from Canton, recently found to its sorrow.
But so long as sycee retained its purity, the dollar was regarded as safe, because it does not pay to mint dollars below Tls. 72 or Tls. 72.10 to the hundred.
Whatever else they tampered with, it seemed, therefore, that the mints would have to maintain a certain fineness for the dollar.
Recently, however, it would appear that the temptation to make money has overcome the prudence enjoined by the unvarying—excellency of—sycee.
From time to time tests are obtained of the fineness of the dollar, those specially interested in China's currency, and these have
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.