Rushing Into the Future: China’s Financial Markets

Abstract

In the late thirteenth century the Venetian businessman and traveller Marco Polo, one of the first of the multitudes of Westerners who would go to China seeking wealth, observed that the Chinese empire was issuing paper money. When he returned home to Venice in 1295 and related this, we are told, his compatriots laughed at him. This seems a little strange, for Venice was a major financial centre and had itself been using a form of paper money for well over a century. But — and this could almost be a motto when studying China from a Western perspective — things that look the same often turn out to be profoundly different in nature, and so it was here.