Sycee

Sycee is a shiny, metal bar that people in China used long ago as a form of money. Imagine you're playing with shiny toy cars and someone else also wants to play with them. You could say that they should give you a shiny spoon or a shiny rock in exchange for one of your toy cars. In China long ago, instead of shiny stones or spoons, people would use sycee to trade for things they needed, like food or clothes.

Sycee is often made of silver or gold and was shaped like a long bar or a little ingot. They were sometimes decorated with pictures or writing to show how much they were worth. For example, a sycee that was worth a lot of money might have picture of a dragon on it because dragons were very important in Chinese culture.

Because sycee was made of valuable metal like silver or gold, people knew it had worth and could easily trade it for things they needed. And, like money today, the bigger the sycee bar or ingot, the more valuable it was.

Nowadays, people don't use sycee as money – we use paper money and digital money instead. But sycee is still special because it's a piece of history that shows how people traded things before money as we know it was invented.