So… What Is Graycastle Yuan to Begin With? | Graycastle Yuan in Release That Witch Manhua Doesn’t Make Sense at All
To understand why paper money showed up historically, we have to go back. Early paper notes were basically contracts with a bank: the bank promised to redeem them for a fixed amount of gold (or silver). Later systems dropped the metal peg, but that’s a separate issue.
What matters here is that the Graycastle Yuan is, in pure value terms, just a piece of paper. Er Mu never shows us an exchange rate, never clarifies whether it’s tied to any gold standard, and never builds the foundation that would make the paper mean something.
Public trust is a different conversation. Right now I’m pointing out the more basic problem: there is no underlying gold (or silver) standard established first.
In my opinion it would have been better to start by standardizing the coin form of the currency. That’s what people would actually use day-to-day. By fixing weight, purity, and form of the precious metal, you define what one unit is actually worth. Only then can you issue credible paper contracts against it. Without that standard you can’t create a fixed-value paper note, and you also open the door to currency fraud.
Someone will say: “But Odesa, there already is a gold standard — the Royals!”
That’s exactly where the earlier point applies. Royals are a medieval system. They’re not standardized the way a modern currency is. If you try to use them as the peg for the Yuan, the value won’t be precise because the underlying standard itself isn’t precise — the technology and practices of the time simply don’t allow it.
If you first turn the Yuan into a properly standardized modern-style coin (fixed weight and purity), then you can reliably wire paper notes to a fixed value. That gives you a real, well-defined 100 Yuan instead of an arbitrary piece of paper.
Edit No. 1:
I’ve already laid out the historical reality of medieval coinage and why pegging Yuan to an unstandardised gold royal doesn’t create a stable standard. Not going to keep restating it.