"The Ming Notes" were issued in 1375,and since then they kept on depreciating throughout the Ming era. Equally worse,the
circulation of the Ming Notes was very narrow and the designed popularity had never achieved.Accordingly, the Ming Notes were displaced out of the private sector at the beginning of the 15th century. By then, the only usage of the Ming Notes was confined to
government transactions but to a limited extent.Traditional historians took it for granted that the failure of the Ming Notes was simply due to its over-supply, overlooking the boarder problems caused by improper monetary system design and poor implementation. This article aims to offer a new perspective of looking at the problem and to put forward a systematic analysis of the failure of the Ming Notes. In a nutshell, this article concludes that the root cause for the collapse of the Ming Notes is, other than its over-supply, the failure of the entire monetary system. As an example, the Ming government was ignorant and never introduced or maintained a reserve
mechanism. Without reserve mechanism, the market value of a currency was at stake!