A five-essay arc on how a major commercial economy ran a working silver monetary system for two and a half centuries with no state-issued silver currency. Chinese merchants verified, weighed, melted, and re-circulated foreign silver — Spanish 8 reales, US Trade Dollars, Mexican pesos — through a polycentric system that did real economic work without a sovereign authority running it. Companion arc: Stateless Pricing — six case studies of how credit and contracts worked, across civilizations, when the state didn't supply them.