Soft Fork: China's tea money

Anyone who has spent time learning about monetary history can tell you that humans are pretty creative when it comes to money. From seashells to Rai stones to bits and bytes, it seems like everything in existence has, at one point or another, been used as money.

One of these monies was tea bricks — which was surprisingly used as money up until the 20th century. The use of tea bricks as money can be traced back to 9th century China. Tea bricks were mainly comprised of compressed dried and ground tea leaves pressed into brick shapes mixed with bind agents like flour, blood, or manure.