On the money | 8 September 2016

Kublai Khan, said Marco Polo, had ‘a more extensive command of treasure than any other sovereign in the universe’. There were no jangling pockets of coins in Kanbalu. Bark had been stripped from the mulberry trees and beaten into paper notes. The notes carried delicate little pictures of earlier currency — long, frayed ropes weighed down with coins. It was as though they were mocking the old ways.

Paper money had been produced in China from as early as the 7th century, but that did not stop Marco Polo from gushing that the Great Khan had discovered ‘the secret of the alchemists’. Back home, there was much curiosity but apparently little urgency. Only in 1661 did the first banknotes circulate in Europe. Sweden led the way, printing white, countersigned ‘Palmstrucher’ notes at the Bank of Stockholm. The goldsmiths of London issued their own ‘running cash notes’, while the Bank of England began to print notes ‘payable to bearer’ soon after it opened its doors in 1694.

It feels strange to be waving goodbye to all this, to the crunchy, wrinkled, eminently palpable paper banknote and its history. The new fiver, which enters circulation next week, is made from polymer, an altogether less romantic material than cotton paper. The polymer fiver will be followed by a polymer ten-pound note next summer and a polymer twenty by 2020. And so the Age of Paper dies.

The new notes are said to be cleaner, safer and stronger than the old ones. The fiver is certainly brighter. It also has the remarkable quality of being both slippery and clingy at once. The Australians have been using polymer for their notes since 1992, since the heat caused their paper ones to deteriorate rapidly, and so far it has aged well.