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If children believe in fairies, it's the famous moment when Peter Pan asks the

audience to save Tinkerbell by joining him in believing in fairies. Just say it in your heart.

I believe, I believe and clap your hands.

And it's an unfailing winner.

That ability to convince others to believe in something they can't see but wish to be true is a terrific trick.

Take the first paper money. Someone in China printed a value on a piece of paper and asked

everyone else to agree with them that that paper was actually worth what it said it

was. The paper notes, you could say, like the Darling Children and Peter Pan, were supposed to be as good as gold,

or in this case as good as copper, literally worth the number of copper coins printed on the note.

The whole modern banking system of paper and credit is built on this one simple act of faith.

Paper money is truly one of the revolutionary inventions of

human history. Today's object is one of those early paper money notes. The Chinese call them Faye Chien, flying cash, and the object comes

from China at the time of the Ming around 1400. I think the right aphorism is that evil was the root of all money. Money was

invented in order to get round the problems of trusting other individuals, but then

the question is could you trust the person who issued the money?

Here's a note that has managed it in some sense to stay in circulation for over six centuries.

It's extraordinary.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. Ming Bank Note, note in China, between 1375 and 1425. This week we're circling the world in empires around 5 600 years ago before anybody had in fact physically circled the world.

They did know though what made it go round.

Money and trade were the great drivers of wealth then as now and they were essential to the building of

empires. Most of the world until this point was exchanging money in coins of

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