Arguably of greater importance to world history than Chinese history, the Ming Dynasty Single Whip Reform of 1581 ordered that all land taxes in China be paid in silver. One in a series of reforms (referred to in their entirety as the “Single Whip Reforms”; 1581 is perhaps the most important of them) that increasingly monetized the Chinese tax system, the changes impacted even the lowliest Chinese peasant—who could no longer pay his taxes in kind, but instead had to purchase silver in order to do so.

The reform could not have been implemented without the large amount of silver pouring into China from Spanish Empire (South American) mines, and the resulting domestic need for silver pushed up its global price. It has even been argued by Dennis Flynn that without Chinese demand pushing up silver prices, the Spanish crown would not have earned enough from its New World possessions to keep governing them, much less finance decades of warfare in Europe itself. And it's also worth remembering that under the Song and Yuan Dynasties, China actually had a functioning paper currency system—the world's first. Had the Ming restored that rather than following the private sector's turn to silver (after the late Yuan and especially the early Ming destroyed confidence in paper currency by over-printing it) both Chinese and global history might have been quite different.

Related Topic

The Single Whip Method