A $10m paperweight and other curios: back-to-school money quiz for grown-ups
7 September 2026
Bling fruit, foul-tasting fowl, and the dowry to beat all dowries: please try our surprisingly informative themed quiz on money and wealth, with a few lessons for investors.
Rathbones Investment Management
Article last updated 7 September 2026.
Quick take
Our ten-question quiz looks at money and valuable things, in multifarious forms.
It considers money throughout history, from medieval Europe to the present day, and from American entrepreneurs to the pirates of the South China Sea.
Every answer includes a useful lesson on how to invest.
A $10m paperweight, foul-tasting fowl and the dowry to beat all dowries: please try our themed quiz on money and wealth.
We’ve found it more fun without calling on Google’s help, though of course that’s up to you.
Please find the answers at the bottom of this page.
Quiz questions: gold, pigs, and passionfruit
1 Who built his initial fortune not by prospecting for gold, but largely by selling the prospectors everyday essentials?
Levi Strauss
Sam Walton (founder of Walmart)
Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck
Henry John Heinz
2 Which monarch had to tax their subjects to pay for their ransom payment?
Leopold, Duke of Austria
Richard the Lionheart, King of England
Dey Hassan III Pasha, pirate king of Algiers
Zheng Yi Sao, pirate admiral of the South China Sea
3 Which of these has never been used as currency?
Peat
Cowry shells
Woollen cloth
Pigs
4 Which beautiful and ruinously expensive bird was served as a status symbol at medieval European dinner parties, even though the flesh is unappetisingly dry?
Bird-of-paradise
Peacock
Crane
Ortolan bunting
5 Moving on to a dinner party curio to be looked at but not eaten, which exotic and exorbitantly priced fruit was once regularly rented out for such occasions, to impress the guests?
Passionfruit
Persimmon
Pineapple
Pomegranate
6 Who used a diamond worth more than $10 million in today’s terms as a paperweight?
John D. Rockefeller
Queen Victoria
Cecil Rhodes
Mir Osman Ali Khan, Nizam of Hyderabad
7 Which country has suffered the worst inflation in history?
Hungary
Zimbabwe
Venezuela
Germany
8 Which country has the highest standard of living?
United States
United Arab Emirates
Monaco
Singapore
9 Who received Tangiers and parts of Bombay (as it was then known) as dowry?
Philip V, King of Spain
Alfonso the Victorious, King of Portugal
Charles II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland
Aurangzeb, the Mughal Emperor
10 Which composer was musically furious over a trifling amount of money?
Franz Schubert
Ludwig van Beethoven
Giuseppe Verdi
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Quiz answers below - please click on each question.
Levi Strauss, a German immigrant to the US who built his initial fortune by establishing a prospering dry goods business in San Francisco during the 1850s California Gold Rush. Rather than panning for gold, he sold miners, among others, everyday essentials like clothing, fabric, blankets, and tents imported from his brothers from New York at the other end of the country.
Strauss is an excellent example of the ‘picks and shovels’ argument that stock market investors often make: people, companies, and by extension investors in companies may often make the best return from the equipment and supplies that make a activity possible, rather than from the activity itself. This was certainly the case for the California Gold Rush: the gold prospecting itself made few people rich.
Not Leopold of Austria, Dey Hassan III Pasha, or Zheng Yi Sao, who struck a blow for gender equality by taking over the leadership of her deceased husband’s pirate fleet. To the contrary, they all conducted their own ransoming. The answer is Richard the Lionheart, King of England, captured by Leopold on the way back from the Third Crusade. The Duke blamed Richard for murdering his cousin. Leopold was also angry at Richard for throwing down Leopold’s standard from the walls of the Crusader stronghold of Acre (on the grounds that Leopold was a mere duke). Richard was then passed on to the Holy Roman Emperor, who ransomed him for the princely (or even kingly) sum of 100,000 pounds of silver – two to three times the English crown’s annual income.
Few of us, these days, are likely to be ransomed by hostile emperors, unless we’re unusually unlucky. But one important motive behind long-term investing is to have money spare for unseen but large eventualities.
Peat.
The cowry shell has been widely used for trading in Africa and Asia – even, in some places, up to the nineteenth century. The classical Chinese and current Japanese symbols for money are pictures of the shell.
A woollen cloth called wadmal was used in medieval Scandinavia and Iceland.
Pigs’ tusks are even now sometimes used as currency in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu.
We can’t find any trace of peat being used as a currency. But it’s useful in another way: it helps in the fight against climate change by soaking up carbon.
Investors need to be aware of currency risk: the potential for the currency of a country whose shares they’ve invested in to fall against the pound. This would reduce the value of their investments, measured in sterling. One solution is not to have too much invested in any one country with a highly volatile currency.
Peacock.
Cranes were eaten at such dinner parties – and are still sometimes consumed in other parts of the world. But the meat is actually rather tasty. It’s described variously as like duck, steak or pork chops. Ortolan buntings are delicious – the fat is reminiscent of hazelnut – and are still sometimes, illegally, eaten in France. The first bird-of-paradise probably didn’t arrive in Europe until it was brought into Spain by the survivors of the first circumnavigation of the Earth, in 1522 – and it was just the skin, anyway.
Peacocks were served at dinner parties hosted by the wealthy in both medieval Europe and Ancient Rome. This was partly for their appearance – they were roasted with their feathers still in the bird. It was also partly to flaunt wealth – they were extremely expensive. Using an authentic old recipe, intrepid journalists at America’s National Public Radio cooked it in pastry with cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon – equally bling ingredients, in medieval Europe – and didn’t find it to their liking.
As investment managers, we’re wary of companies that are the fashion of the year, unless we can strong reasons for their fashionability, grounded in strong prospects for future earnings.
Pineapple.
This fruit was unknown to Europeans until the sixteenth century. And since it had to be imported all the way from the Pacific, it was very pricey – in the seventeenth century, it was worth as much as £11,000 in today’s money. Hence the cheaper option of pineapple rental, with the fruit used as a centrepiece at a dinner. This might seem pointless, if it can’t actually be eaten, but the middle classes were attracted by the fruit’s beauty. .
Merchants who imported the fruit could make a great deal of money – just as for spices that couldn’t be grown in Europe.
Climate change and war are already making some food and ingredients more expensive. We have to be aware, as investors, of the likelihood that this will generate spikes in inflation, forcing up interest rates.
Mir Osman Ali Khan, the final Nizam (ruler) of Hyderabad, until it was annexed by the newly independent India in 1948. He is considered to have been one of the wealthiest people in history, because of his diamond mines. At the time, he was a monopoly supplier to the world.
Everyone needs some liquid assets, but we advocate keeping the bulk of wealth invested in assets that can generate a return – and invested for the long term, if the cash won’t be needed soon.
This is a hotly debated issue, but the strongest candidate is probably Hungary, which in 1946 issued the largest-denomination banknote ever created: 100 million trillion pengo. At one point, prices were doubling every 15 hours. The cause was the usual cause of hyperinflation: the government was issuing ever more money to fund the gap between its income and its spending.
We think we’re in a ‘new normal’ of higher and more volatile inflation. We’ve already mentioned the effect of climate change. Another reason is governments’ reluctance to rein in their fiscal deficits. But we’re not predicting an era of hyperinflation, as so many countries suffered during the twentieth century – largely because of the two World Wars.
Monaco, judged by probably the best measure, gross domestic product (economic output) per head, in purchasing power parity terms: $270,000, according to the CIA World Factbook. That measures the amount this could buy inside the country, after allowing for local prices. This reflects its status as a tax haven. We’ve written in the past about how a UK wealth tax could push people out of the country.
Even tax havens have to keep on good terms with their neighbours, however. In 1962 Charles DeGaulle, France’s patrician President, forced Monaco’s Prince Rainier into a compromise over Monaco’s tax treatment of French people that would have put him and his wife, ex-film star Grace Kelly, into an uncomfortable political and personal situation, through a simple expedient: he threatened to turn the water off. France controlled the supply of essential utilities to the country.
Within the G7 – the a group of countries with large developed economies – the US scores highest. It’s benefited, over a long period, from much higher productivity growth – the amount produced per worker. Please see the chart in our piece on the new Burnham government, which considers how the UK can make itself more productive. This productivity helps explain the much higher return of the US stock market over the past generation, compared with other large markets.
Charles II, king of England, Scotland and Ireland. His officials weren’t unaware where it was, beyond a vague – and incorrect – sense that it might be somewhere near Brazil, Portugal’s biggest colony. His dowry did help him temporarily, financially. But he continued to spend extravagantly, leaving the Crown enormously in debt.
Like Charles II, we see selective opportunities in emerging markets. In a telling sign of the times, Taiwan’s stock market became more valuable than the UK’s in April, thanks to the rise of TSMC, which makes 90% of the world's high-end chips, used for AI. Please see our article about emerging market opportunities.
Ludwig van Beethoven, who wrote the frenetic piano piece ‘Rage Over a Lost Penny’ (although the name was probably invented by someone else – the original title was ‘Rondo in the Hungarian style’). Beethoven was notoriously ill-tempered, but comfortably off thanks to the kindness of patrons. Of the four composers, Schubert was probably the poorest – several of his most famous works, such as his famous String Quintet, made him no money at all, because they were published posthumously. Verdi was stupendously rich because of the success of his operas.
Mozart was the worst at money management: he made a fair amount of money but died broke. He could have done with a good wealth manager.
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