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Preface

My recent trip to Japan allowed me to see many Chinese characters i.e., Kanji
(漢字) and one thing that caught my attention was an extensive use of the
radical "貝"(かい) on words/characters related to bartering and economy.

For example:

買う - buy

売る - sell (now the traditional Chinese character for this is "賣")

貨 - money/value so 貨幣 (かへい) and 通貨 (つうか) become currency

資 - also related to value so 資金 (しきん) is fund, 資本 (しほん) is capital and so on.

There are a LOT more to these characters with the radical "貝" and many of them
have meanings related to money and value.

And "貝" means a shellfish, so I thought maybe ancient China used shellfish as
currency. (at this point I've realized maybe this is a wrong stackexchange to
ask this question, feel free to migrate.)

Question:

So what role exactly does a shellfish play in concepts that are related to
value?
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2016-07-25T15:31:43.973
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2016-07-26T09:15:48.297
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question
etymology culture
The radical "貝" and its relation to economic characters such as "貨" "資" etc
As I was researching alongside asking the question, I've found a [Wikipedia
article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money#East.2C_South_and_Southeast_Asia)
which states:

> In China, cowries were so important that many characters relating to money
> or trade contain the character for cowry: 貝. Starting over three thousand
> years ago, cowry shells, or copies of the shells, were used as Chinese
> currency. The Classical Chinese character for "money/currency", 貝,
> originated as a pictograph of a cowrie shell.
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answer