The German economy after World War One was in tatters so the local communities took to printing 'notgeld' (emergency money) on a range of materials including wood, tin, aluminium, silk and playing cards as a means of payment until the central bank recovered. The canny Germans realised that collectors would pay real money to have such items in their folios thus generating real cash for 'notgeld'. Perhaps the rarest item is a coin stamped on anthracite, a form of coal.
Before the universal US dollar was printed and promised 'In God We Trust' on each bill, the founding colonies printed their own bills. With counterfeiting rampant, they resorted to scare tactics by printing each note with the warning 'To Counterfeit Is Death'. This practice ensured a level of scarcity and hence value in the notes!
Whilst we think today of currency being universally accepted a means of payment for all goods or services, some cultures have developed specialised notes interchangeable against certain types of goods. The best example is a Vietnamese bill with coupons around its edges that allowed for the specific purchase of items of clothing. Each coupon was removed as the shoes or shirts were acquired.
Roman soldiers were once paid in salt and this historic linkage gives rise to the common term salary from the Latin 'salarium'. But food as a means of payment is common in many cultures and the Solomon Islands uses "reng" (a yarn ball of turmeric wrapped in coconut), Latin America has used cocoa beans and Italy Reggiano cheese. Burmese people have used a poisonous seeds as a form of currency.
One of the oddest is the 2007 Mongolian 500 Tugrik coin. Whilst looking like a normal coin on the face, the reverse contained a picture of John F Kennedy complete with a tiny button which, if pressed, gave a short excerpt from his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.
Most novel schemes for saving money on money go to Zaire and some of the Caribbean Islands. After a coup in Zaire in 1997, the new government simply cut out the face of the old president until new notes could be printed. These 'notes with a hole' follow earlier examples of hi jacked coinage in the Caribbean where faced with no currency of their own, the islanders simply took coins from other countries and punched holes to make them no longer legal in their original market but legal tender on the islands.
The island of Palau took religion to the currency when in 2007 they produced a silver dollar containing a small amount of holy water from the Grotto of Lourdes, France. The issue was so sought after that they issued a second set the following year.
But strangest and least portable currency of all goes to the islanders of Yap in the Solomon's. Rai stones made of limestone and looking like mill stones signified wealth measured by the pure effort involved in getting them anywhere. So the biggest and heaviest stones (12 feet wide and eight tons in weight) signified great wealth.
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