Vermeer’s hat Timothy Brook
Weighing Silver
100102507 李 屏
100102501 蔡詠歡
100102512 劉若榆
Woman Holding a Balance
The change of
Catharina, Vermeer’s
wife
 The darkened studio
 The painting of the last
judgement – the moral
discrimination

The painting of the Last Judgment

The only suggestion of movement is the
painting of the Last Judgment in the
Flemish style hanging on the wall behind
Catharina. Her head and upper torso are
framed by an apocalyptic vision of Christ
with his arms raised, summoning the dead
to arise and be judged by him.
(p. 152)
The moral discrimination

As the woman weighs her coins, so she
measures her own behavior in the light of
the divine judgment awaiting her at the
resurrection. It is worth knowing that
some artists used the image of a woman
weighing coins to condemn the
contemporary obsession with silver, not
just the sin of worldliness.
(p. 155)

But Vermeer bathed Catharina in light,
making her a figure of trust and
conscience. She handles money, but her
calculating of the family’s wealth is as
honorable and wholesome as the
fecundity of natural increase that her
pregnancy signifies. Vermeer’s depiction is
positive, in keeping with the new ethic of
accumulation in seventeenth-century
Holland.
(p. 155)
Let’s direct our attention instead to what the
real woman in this painting is actually doing.
She is holding a balance preparatory to
weighing something.
Is she weighing Pearls? Gold?
Actually, she is weighing silver.
And silver is the subject of this
chapter!

Weighing coins is not something we do today,
but it was an essential part of economic
transactions in the seventeenth century.
(p. 153)
The careful householder had to weigh her
coins.
 The large silver coin (the ducat) on
Catharina’s table is our next door into the
mid-seventeenth-century world.

To moralist from Europe to China, silver
created the illusion of wealth but was not
itself wealth. “merely the measure of
wealth.”
(p. 156)
 But once silver was present in the
economy, most people had no choice but
to use it, whether to buy their food or pay
their taxes. They also had no choice but to
acquire it by selling things or their own
labor. Silver became unavoidable.


Chinese: import silver to compensate for
their inadequate money supply.
Europeans: export silver to buy their way
into the Asian market.
The silver from Potosí


Let us suppose the silver in Woman
Holding a Balance came was from the
major world source of silver, Spanish
America, either New Spain (today’s Mexico)
or Peru (which in the seventeenth century
encompassed today’s Bolivia.)
Let us suppose it came from Potosí.

Potosí means “uninhabitable.” But after
the silver mines were discovered, Potosí
became the largest city in the Americas
almost overnight.

China was the great global destination for
European silver for two reasons.
(1)The power of silver to buy gold in Asian
economies was higher than it was in
Europe.
(2)European merchants had little else to
sell in the China market.


The Dutch shipped a vast amount of silver
to Asia during the seventeenth century.
The silver paid for commodities
unavailable in Europe that sold well in the
home market.
Spices (the early years)
→ textiles (the 17th century)
→ tea & coffee (the 18th century)
Manila
Silver flowed east
from Potosí → Europe → Asia
but that was not the only route it took to
China, nor even the most important.
 Twice the volume of silver that went east
also went west : crossed the Pacific to
Manila. So Manila became the place where
the two hemispheres of the seventeenthcentury globe joined.



When the first Spaniards in Manila found
some three hundred Chinese merchants
already there, their relations started well
since each side sensed that the other
might be a profitable trading partner.
In 1567, a new emperor lifted the ban on
maritime commerce. It was a sign that the
pressure of foreign demand was having its
effect. The bulk of the commodities went
out of the harbor and the silver came in,
tied China to the outside world.



Spain was an empire purely of trade,
not of conquest.
→The Spanish imagines their future in
East Asia rather differently.
At first, there were two proposal to the
King and claimed that they should
conquer China, but Philip wasn’t
persuaded.
Governor
of the Philippines gave his
contemptuous view of Chinese, and thought
that it was possible to conquer China.
→The another proposal was that they
could send Jesuit missionaries to infiltrate
the country.
Why Jesuit missionaries?
Petitioners also assured King Phillip, it was
not about “sordid lucre”, but “honorable
deeds.” Much was at stake and time was of
the essence.
They also warned that the Chinese are
each day becoming more wary, and more
on their guard.
The oddest point that the argument made
for invasion was …….
 China was in danger of falling into Muslim
hands. Once Muslims controlled China,
Spain would be cut out of the Chinese
market forever.
 Why this point?
 Because of the memory of the expulsion
of the Muslims from Spain in 1492 was still
so strong. The competition between Spain
and Ottoman empires was fierce.

They
wanted to override King Philip’s
calmer consideration through this appeal.
However, it didn’t.
He claimed that it was impossible for Spain
to conquer China. The wealth of China
would have to be tapped through trade.
Spain
used Manila to be the base of
trading.
Manila was rebuilt to be a heavily fortified
city.
The aria inside the massive stone walls was
exclusively for Spaniards.
Chinese with whom they conducted
business should remain outside.
Initially, Chinese came seasonally.
As the volume and complexity of the trade
grew, they could stay through the year, and
that was what they called ”cramming winter.”
Alcaiceria, Parian, Pali?
 →In 1581, Spain restricted Chinese to a
“ Chinese ghetto”. They made the Chinese
stay there at night.
 Sangley?
 →The Chinese who conducted trade in
Manila.
 In fact, without these Sangleys, the City
cannot get along or maintain itself
because they are masters of all trades.

The massacre in 1603
Incidents that some Chinese visited
Manila to prove the truth of Gold Mountain
made Spaniards worried. Spain and China
went bad and caused lots of catastrophe
and hatred, and it finally went to the
massacre of Chinese.
Results?
The massacre cautioned the Chinese
government against opening the door to
trade with the outside world too wide.
BUT?
Manila mattered to everyone who traded
there.
 WHY?
 It was the point of commercial contact
between the economics of 17th Europe
and China, and once silver was flowing,
not even a massacre could break the
contact.
 The trade in Manila made many Chinese
into the business, as Zhou Qiyuan
notes……



The treasured goods the Manila galleons
carried back to Mexico, the Spanish
exchanged their own mountain of silver.
According to the official records, in the
first half of the seventeenth century, the
Spanish galleons carried just short of
three quarters of a million kilograms of
silver to Manila.
NOT ALL this silver went to Fujian. Some
got diverted to Macao and passed through
Portuguese hands. But the most of it went
to Fujian and disappeared into Chinese
economy.
 A potion of the silver from America that
came east from Europe via the Indian
Ocean, but the bulk of it was shipped
directly west across the Pacific.

HOWEVER,
the importation of silver on
this scale highlighted the awkward distance
in China between public policy and private
commerce.
The
government worked to discourage the
private accumulation of wealth among the
society marginal for fear that this wealth
might feed the forces of rebellion, while
private mercantile families amassed vast
fortunes by trading abroad.
Silver flowed easily into the Chinese
economy because it was needed to
supplement the small bronze coins that
were used for small transactions.
 The amount of silver coming to China was
so great that the Chinese believed its
supply was endless.
 However, the silver run out, or at least
down, it would, as we shall see.

Silver gilded the Chinese world...
Silver was the standard for of money in China
and was also the form in which the Ming
regime collected taxes.
 Chinese were so much deceived by the
amount of silver coming into China that they
think its supply was endless!
 The Franciscan missionary said, “This is not
following teaching; it is following silver.”

The influences of silver flow in
China:
It created a potential for accumulation and
liquidity that encouraged ostentatious (虛
榮性) spending and social competition.
 People who could afford them embraced
its arrival, creating a new wave of luxury
spending which excited a powerful
backlash in early 17th century…

Magistrate
濤)




Zhang Tao (張
was one of those appalled by the silver economy.
He found that the ethical foundations that once held society
together were crumbling, and the reciprocal duties that had once
sustained village life were no longer observed. He blamed it all
on the lust for silver…
“One man in a hundred is rich, while nine out of ten are
impoverished.” 「富者百人而一，貧者十人而九」
The result, in Zhang’s summary was, that “the Lord of Silver
rules heaven and the God of Cash reigns over the earth.” 金令司
天，錢神卓地

The spring rains had washed away the local
crop which in turn forced the price of rice to
rise…

In normal times, per Chinese “peck”(dou) costs
less than half a “mace”(qian).
1 斗 = 不到半錢 (1.875克的銀)


After spring rains, the price almost triple to 1.3
qian (4.6 grams)
• At this point,
Zhang stepped in and
released the stocks of rice in the county
granary at below-market rates, forcing
down the market price and eased the
crisis long enough for it to resume to
regular prices again.
Was the increase in the stock of silver
circulating in China driving up prices?

According to Brook, What devastated China
in the 1640s was not its monetary system (貨
幣制度) so much as the impact of…
cold weather
 virulent epidemics
 falling grain production
 huge military spending to hold back the Manchus
to the north

(P.175, second paragraph)


Still, people blamed silver for harmful,
negative economic behavior…
 Hoarding
(貪汙)
 Undermined stability for the poor
 Encouraged wasteful extravagance among the
rich

In Shanghai, the price of rice moved as
below:
 1620s—price ceiling started to move.
 1639—a peck of rice=1.9 mace (6.6
grams per decaliter)
 1642 spring—a peck of rice=5 mace
(17.5 grams per decaliter)
 Stabled for a few years ranging from 7
to 10 grams per decaliter
 1647—a peck of rice=14 grams
The connection of trade between
the Spanish and the Chinese

There were three sinkings that crippled
trade in Manila:
 Nuestra
Senora de la Concepcion
 San Ambrosio
 An outbound galleon back to Mexico

Result: The entire system of trade in
Manila collapsed.
Spanish ship Nuestra Señora de la
Concepción (1570)

Sebastian Hurtao de Corcuera
What’s worse…
Spanish America was originally the supply of
silver that funded the transpacific exchange,
but it had begun to contract.
 In the mid-1610s, silver production in Potosi
was already slipping, and by the 1630s, it
was not possible to produce enough silver to
cover all the purchases that Spanish
merchants were making in Manila.

Japan in the 1620s…
they came under a centralized authority in
the control of the new Tokugawa regime. It
banned Japanese from going abroad and
pressured the Portuguese to stop bringing
Europeans to Japan, especially missionaries.
 The only Europeans permitted to continue
trading in Japan were the Dutch, and then
only from a tiny island in the harbor of
Nagasaki under tight restrictions.

Stories that seems unrelated…

The Massacre of thousands of Chinese in
the Philippines



On 19 November 1639
At the village of Calamba southeast of Manila
The story of Fulgencia Oraozco
Conclusion
While all these stories were happening,
Catharina probably didn’t know about the
stories that happened with silver.
 The violence that wealth is capable of
provoking is invisible in Woman Holding a

Balance.
~Thank you for your
listening~