One of my favorite little facts about history is that the Mexican peso was functionally the everyday unit of currency in China in the 19th and early 20th century. Silver was one of the few western commodities that Chinese merchants were willing to trade in at rates that made shipping it to China (an expensive, arduous process) profitable; this trade became so voluminous by the 19th century that large everyday transactions even far away from port cities were conducted in pesos, in large part because Mexico’s large domestic silver supply and existing transpacific trade links meant that the currency was stable (a known quantity to merchants in a time and place where relatively pure silver coins were otherwise uncommon) and readily available for use in trade
Zhang Zongchang, the bandit general of the warlord era, could call himself (or at least be called) “Old Eighty-Six” because of the peso - everyone knew or had a vague sense at least how tall a stack of 86 pesos would be, and that this was an impressive length for a guy’s dick
