Introduction

We all know what makes the world go round -money.Indeed, money lies at the core of the research and teaching of the Swiss-German sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel, to whom this special issue is dedicated on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.For many people celebrating their seventieth birthday, talk of money probably calls to mind the idea of small change carried in the pocket.In today's China, that habit belongs to history.China leads the world in cashless payment methods, just as it led the world in the use of paper money during the early modern period -the period when the groundwork was laid for the still unfolding process we call globalization.This very period has proved to be Hans Ulrich Vogel's primary interest, but to say so obscures somewhat the broad sweep of his research across the centuries, from archaeological sites of ancient China and down to the modern world, and from texts such as the Lunyu 論語, Mengzi 孟子, and Zhuangzi 莊子 to the Yantie lun 鹽鐵論,1 from the Wenxin diaolong 1 "Das 'Yantie lun': Ereignisse und Interpretation," in Huan Kuan, Yantie Lun; Vademecum zu dem