In China’s modern history, foreign powers signed unfair treaties with the Qing government and obtained a series of aggressive rights, including war reparations. Among the major unequal treaties, the Sino-British Treaty of Nanjing stipulated that Britain should be compensated 21 million silver dollars, the Treaty of Shimonoseki stipulated that Japan should be compensated 200 million taels of silver for military expenditures, and the Xinchou Treaty stipulated that the Qing government should compensate various countries for 450 million taels of silver. . We can’t help but wonder: Why did only the “silver dollar” be used as the compensation unit in the Treaty of Nanjing? In order to facilitate understanding, we deal with the problem in layers. First, we analyze why the reparation unit in the Sino-British Treaty of Nanjing uses "silver dollars" instead of "taels" of Chinese silver? Reason 1: The long-term supremacy before the Opium War allowed the Qing government to have a large amount of Spanish silver dollars in its foreign exchange reserves. In the Sino-foreign trade (mainly Sino-British trade) before the Opium War, the Qing government's closed-door policy and China's self-sufficient natural economy shape, stubbornly resisting the dumping of British industrial products; while traditional Chinese national products sell well in the British market.

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