Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The Chinese Tang Dynasty persuades people to accept paper money. . . . When Marco Polo traveled to China in the late thirteenth century he was astonished to see the locals use paper money instead of coins. Prompted by a copper shortage, the Tang Dynasty (618-907) introduced this new monetary system in 806, more than 800 years before the first European banknotes." [1001 Inventions, p. 139]