School of Government, Beijing Normal University

The proposition that the Western Han Dynasty lost much gold and disappeared in the Eastern Han Dynasty has always been a concern for scholars in ancient and modern times. The author conducted a textual research in 1989. The total amount of gold in the Western Han Dynasty was about 1000 tons, mainly from the accumulation before the Western Han Dynasty, the search and collection of the rulers, the production of improved smelting technology and the import of overseas trade. After the entry of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the argument of “Buddhist temple consumption” “the loss of foreign trade” “gold system brass” and other arguments were not established. Most of the gold in the Western Han Dynasty was buried and hidden in the imperial tombs, the princes' tombs and the place where the rich businessmen live, because of the thick burial and wealth consciousness of the Western Han Dynasty, the fierce war as well as the decline of the gold payment function after the Eastern Han Dynasty and the rising of the storage function. In 1999，219 Western Han gold cakes were found in the ten Li Pu village in the North ten northeastern suburb of the northeastern suburb of Xi’an, and 378 pieces of gold cake unearthed at the tomb of the Western Han Dynasty waste emperor in 2015 were unearthed at once, which was the most important evidence for the examination.

Tang Renwu. The Source of the Huge Amount of Gold and the Reason Time and Place of Disappearance in the Western Han Dynasty [J], Researches in Chinese Economic History, 2019, (04), 121-130.