Some interesting additions from Thanksgiving

So, for thanksgiving I got to go to my sister's wedding in Hong Kong. I notices several things that we had mentioned in previous blog posts or comments that I took pictures of and thought would be good to pass on to you all.

Bring out the Money

Cabbage, dough, mulla, green, buck. The number of terms of endearment for currency is staggering. I can recognize money immediately, as can most of you.  In currency there needs to be extreme consistency, inconsistencies are what allow us to identify forgeries. The first money was coinage. It could be cast or imprinted with exactness. The level of consistency needed for paper money to function was made possible by the advent of printing. And for that we can thank the Chinese.

The Chinese gift

Qufu

For the Rosetta stone project  I had the opportunity to work with the group representing Asia. Two of us represented China, one Japan, and one Cambodia. Because the majority of our group represented China, and China represents the majority of the world, we thought it best to portray China in our project.
Our first thought was to have a quote from Confucius on rice paper. This would have been culturally significant because paper was invented in China (see Shuan's post on this). However, attempts at making rice paper were disastrous. Contrary to popular belief, at least my own and that of my group members, rice paper is not actually made out of rice. It is made out of rice straw or more modernly wood fiber,, mulberry, or bamboo. Also the arguably most famous Confucius artifact is actually the Confucius temple of Qufu. Confucius sayings are inscribed in stone.

Choosing a Medium

I really enjoyed Mike's post about the metal plates and it started me wondering, is there a correlation between the medium used and the kind of document preserved? There are records from the Chinese preserved on wood, bamboo, silk, stone, paper, metal, and ceramic. I hypothesized that more domestic things would be preserved on ceramic, silk, and bamboo while the official institutional documents would be kept on paper, metal, and stone.