Chinese society, being essentially a society organized on a
credit-co-operative system, so nicely adjusted that money, either
coined or fiduciary, was not wanted save for the petty daily
purchases of the people, any system which boldly clutched at the
financial establishments undertaking the movement of sycee
(silver) from province to province for the settlement of trade-
balances, was bound to be effective so long as those financial
establishments remained unshaken.

The best known establishments, united in the great group known as
the Shansi Bankers, being the government bankers, undertook not
only all the remittances of surpluses to Peking, but controlled by
an intricate pass-book system the perquisites of almost every
office-holder in the empire. No sooner did an official, under the
system which had grown up, receive a provincial appointment than
there hastened to him a confidential clerk of one of these
accommodating houses, who in the name of his employers advanced
all the sums necessary for the payment of the official's post, and
then proceeded with him to his province so that moiety by moiety,
as taxation flowed in, advances could be paid off and the
equilibrium re-established. A very intimate and far-reaching
connection thus existed between provincial money-interests and the
official classes. The practical work of governing China was the
balancing of tax-books and native bankers' accounts. Even the
"melting-houses," where sycee was "standardized" for provincial
use, were the joint enterprises of officials and merchants;
bargaining governing every transaction; and only when a violent
break occurred in the machinery, owing to famine or rebellion, did
any other force than money intervene.