In Siberia, Mongolia and Tibet bricks of pressed tea served as money.
They paid for goods and even taxes, and in Mongolia this tea currency stayed in use into the early 20th century.
More amazing facts
- 1796 · 1980 It took 184 years to get from the first vaccination to a world without smallpox.
- 1798 The Orthodox emperor Paul I became Grand Master of the Catholic Knights of Malta: in 1798, after Napoleon seized their island, the knights in Saint Petersburg elected the Russian tsar head of the order.
- 1800 · 1844 As early as 1800 Humphry Davy wrote that laughing gas might be useful in surgery.
- 1801 · 2006 Ceres was counted as a planet for half a century.
- 1803 The land Napoleon sold the US in 1803 now lies in 15 American states and two Canadian provinces.
- 1803 Count Fyodor Tolstoy so exasperated Krusenstern on Russia's first voyage round the world that he was put ashore in Kamchatka — after teaching the ship's orangutan to pour ink over the captain's log. He came home tattooed and nicknamed 'the American'.