Happy birthday paper money: celebrating 353 years of wanton destruction

If you ever find yourself vacationing in the western Pacific, I highly recommend swinging by Yap Island, home of one of the most bizarre forms of money in history.

Over a thousand years ago, natives would mine enormous chunks of limestone and carve them into gigantic circular discs.

I’m talking REALLY big… a typical disc would be 5 to 10 feet in diameter, over a foot thick, and weigh several tons.

They called them ‘Rai Stones’, and they were actually used as currency. Curiously, an indiviaul rai would be valued not based on its weight or size, but based on its story.

If many people had been killed transporting it, or if the stone had once belonged to a famous warrior, the rai would be worth more. So it was a bit of a collectible as well as a form of money.

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