Strolling along the narrow streets in Canton city in the olden days, the first thing that caught your attention must be the signboards hanging outside shops. On these rectangular boards, you would see characters telling you the sorts of goods the shop sold. As you can see from the postcard above, there were ivory carvings, peppermint oil, cloisonné, smoking pipes, foreign goods, etc. There were also services like dentist and photography. The characters on of one of the signboards read like this: 精法包教識新舊銀両 ‘Concise methods that guarantee success in detecting new and old coins.’ Well, what kind of business was that? That shop was probably a “shroffing school” where students were taught the skills to detect false coins and evaluate the purity of the coins. The profession was called shroffing and the person who practised it was a shroff.
The word shroff originated from Arabic ṣarrāf, meaning ‘a money-changer.’ It entered Hindi as śarāf and Urdu as sharāf. The Anglo-Indian English form was Sharaf and English spelt it as shroff (also schroff). In the book《英語集全》 (The Chinese and English Instructor) (1862), the Chinese translation of shroff was 看銀, literally ‘watch silver’.1 During the Ming and Qing dynasties, silver was an important currency in China. Today, besides being a type of mental, 銀 ‘silver’ also stands for money as in 銀紙 ‘money, banknote’. In the 19th century, foreign firms relied on the compradors to supervise and support other Chinese staff such as the shroffs. So, what did a shroff do in an office? Alfred Weatherhead, a clerk of the colonial Hong Kong Government between 1855–1859, recorded his observation as follows:
“the great houses and Government offices employ a class of men termed “shroffs” who calculate all matters of exchange, interests, etc. and examine all coin passing through the establishment, receiving a percentage on the amount scrutinized. The quickness and certainty with which they detect false coin is really astonishing, no matter how close the imitation be, it is almost impossible to deceive them – owing to their exquisitely delicate sense of touch, sharpened by constant practice.”2
Well-trained shroffs could tell quickly whether a coin was genuine or counterfeit, and how much it was worth. The《英語集全》 (The Chinese and English Instructor) showed us some examples of their professional standards. The dialogue, conducted in pidgin English of course, began with the shroff examining some coins.
Shroff: thisee dollar no good ‘This is a bad dollar.’
Q: what for no good? ‘Why is it bad?’
The shroff found out that it was a copper dollar and said:
Shroff: thisee dollar no can passee ‘This dollar is not current.’
Q: what for no can passee? ‘Why is it not current?’
Shroff: China man talkee Cow chin ‘Chinese call it Cow chin.’
The Chinese term for Cow chin was 鈎錢. After examining another dollar, the shroff concluded that its composition was not pure.
Shroff: thisee dollar hap got lead ‘This dollar is leaded’
Q: how muchee can catchee ‘What is it worth?’
Shroff: can catchee eighty cents ‘It is worth eighty cents.’
Another type of low-quality coin was found in the following example.
Q: thisee dollar allee copper ‘Is this a pure copper dollar?’
Shroff: outside silver ‘The outside is silver’
inside copper ‘The inside is copper’
By comparing the pidgin English version and standard English version, readers may already notice some differences between the two varieties. There were two question words – what for and how muchee – in the pidgin dialogue. When asking for reasons, we can use the question word why and the construction what … for (e.g., what did you buy that for?). In pidgin English, however, almost all the why-questions were expressed as what for, as in what for no can passee. The other question word in the pidgin was how muchee, which did the job of how much and how many in English, was used to inquire the quantity of something. More often than not muchee appeared in the expression too muchee. Too muchee could mean ‘a lot, much/many’ before nouns and ‘very, too’ before adjectives. To make the language concise, pidgin English often left out words that would not affect understanding. One example was the absence of the function word to be, as in thisee dollar no good, outside silver. Another common word in pidgin English was allee or alla, meaning ‘all, whole.’ It was used in a variety of constructions such as alla man ‘everyone’, alla color ‘all colours’, as well as one of the liveliest pidgin expressions – alla same, meaning ‘the same’, as in he face alla same you ‘He looks like you’.
As mentioned by Weatherhead, the position of shroff was established in different government offices such as the post offices, hospitals, the Treasury, etc. in early Hong Kong. At the bottom of the Crown Rent receipt of 1923 shown on the left, there were the signatures of the Treasurer and the Shroff. Unlike the Treasurer, the Chinese shroff used a chop, i.e., a Chinese seal, instead of a handwritten signature. Although improvement in and standardization of minting eventually made the arts of shroffing unnecessary, surprisingly, the word shroff took refuge in the car parks in Hong Kong. Today we can still find “shroff offices” or simply “shroffs”, i.e., cashiers in some car parks like the photo shown on the right. Next time, if you see this word in a car park, take a photo of it because this usage is so unique to Hong Kong.
1 Tong, Ting Kü (唐廷樞). 1862. The Chinese and English Instructor 《英語集全》. Canton.
2 Weatherhead, Alfred. Life in Hong Kong: 1856-1859. Unpublished manuscript.