Unfortunately, market price levels of consumer goods in the Ming dynasty (and especially more so for the early-mid dynasty) are extremely patchy and often times simply nonexistent within the historical record. Historians are able to use context clues to a certain extent to provide estimates but if you were looking for answers and comprehensive tables listing out X good for Y strings of copper cash or taels of silver, then I can't really give you much of a solid answer here. I’ll try to give you a very brief rundown here of the fiscal history of the dynasty and then offer some answers. Just an aside: I’m going to use temple names to refer to emperors against the typical convention in English because I just can’t be bothered to type out ‘the Hongwu/Wanli/Yongle whatever Emperor’ over and over again.
Monetary policy in the early Ming dynasty was quite the mess. The Song dynasty which had been felled by Mongols only a few generations earlier had been the first country on earth to adopt the widespread use of paper currency and the Ming dynasty’s founding emperor, Ming Taizu, decreed the same for his new dynasty. In 1394, Taizu actually ordered that coinage within the Ming empire cease circulation. As a matter of fact, he not only ordered that coinage be pulled from circulation but that precious metals should also be barred from being used as currency and that coins should no longer be minted at all within China.^(1) Taizu’s de facto successor, Ming Chengzu, tried to emulate his father’s policies somewhat but pretty much immediately ran into issues after he usurped the throne in 1402, with the Ming treasury restarting the minting of bronze/copper cash coins during the early years of his reign. This effort was in part driven by the fact that the Ming – utilizing a fiat currency but lacking access to modern monetary and fiscal tools and policies – quickly devalued their own currency. By the 1430s, paper money had essentially been abandoned as a form of currency and coins once again begin to see widespread circulation as the main form of money. The Ming government was never able to meet the demand for coinage in its early decades though – a fact really not helped by a long pause from the central government on coin minting – so private entities stepped in, minting so-called ‘private coins’ (新钱 – lit. New Money) or counterfeit currency (伪钱). This inter-mixing of legitimate currency, counterfeit currency based off of legitimate Ming coinage (still minted in copper/bronze, just not officially sanctioned), and even old coins (古钱) of Song Dynasty vintage resulted in a whole mix of conversion issues when these coins were brought to market. Merchants were extremely wary of the privately minted coinage and the end result was that any coins bearing Ming dynasty mint marks were often heavily discounted. The result of this was that consumer goods spiked in price as the coinage in circulation was polluted by unwanted ‘fake’ coins and as merchants discounted the value of most copper coinage. We can see in accounts of the time talking about the changes in price levels at local markets but frustratingly, very few accounts survive detailing how much staple items actually cost. A newspaper gazette from the early 16th century details the conversion rate of these disparate coin varieties:
“At the beginning of the dynasty, when the Hongwu Tongbao coin was first issued, the state established a mint at the prefectural capital… Some… ever since, have been casting counterfeit coin. This coin circulates together with standard coin, but a thousand counterfeit coins are worth only three hundred genuine coin… When local people trade at Xinhui, they bring this coin.”^(2)
By the late dynasty, the use of silver as a standard of currency and as an acceptable form of taxation payment allows us to look a little bit into the price levels within the dynasty. We have surviving records of the salt monopoly (salt production was usually a state-sponsored monopoly in the Ming) from the late 16th century. In 1578, roughly 510,000 metric tons of salt were produced. This revenue was valued at two million taels of silver, or about 255 kilos per tael of silver. By the time the salt reached markets for sale, the cost had risen over four-fold to about 60 kilos per tael of silver. When the state monopoly was dysfunctional such as during the disastrous final years of the dynasty or during periods of extremely poor governance as seen at the end of the Wanli and into the Tianqi eras, the retail price could soar to some FIVE times the normal retail price, or just 12 kilos of salt for every one tael of silver. State revenue records also contain the costs of various other ‘miscellaneous’ goods, ranging from licenses for Taoist monks to trade custom taxes to horses and tea. In 1580, the Ming government collected excise taxes worth some 100,000 taels (not all of this was collected in pure silver; these numbers merely represent the value of the goods collected to pay the taxes) which was used to essentially buy 10,000 horses from Turkic and Tibetan peoples living on the periphery of the Ming empire. From this then we can see that a West Asian horse is worth the equivalent of about 10 taels of silver to the Ming government, or about 600 kilos of salt on a good market day.^(3) Unfortunately, these values do not show what the true market value of such horses were as the purchase was made by the government for government use so it can only be assumed that had those horses been brought to market, they would have probably gone for a considerably greater sum of money. The salary schedules of imperial officials also give modern historians an idea of what the costs of living were in late Ming China. By the end of the dynasty, the highest-ranking officials who held grade 1-Primary were granted a salary of 215.5 taels of silver per annum. At the same time, the Ming dynasty used to pay such officials the equivalent of 1045 piculs (1 picul = 60kg) of grain in various forms of currency and commodities. When officials began to receive salaries in silver in the 16th century, the government did a simple conversion for what they thought was a ‘fair’ exchange rate, although in reality the conversion was significantly lower than fair market price. Using the government’s imagined exchange rate, it can be seen that a tael of silver was able to buy you about 291 kilos of silver. Of course, as we just covered, the market price was probably much lower than the numbers the Ming government used during the salary conversions so it would probably be better to say that the 291kg/tael price is a soft price ceiling. To put things in perspective, a large and comfortable siheyuan house in Beijing would run you about 10,000 taels of silver.
u/JstorRobinhood has very clearly outlined the problems with the data and sources.
The readily accessible price lists I have seen come from later (the earliest I recall seeing in from about 1600), but there are an increasing number of price and wage series which include data from the fifteenth century. Probably the best single work covering these and discussing the various difficulties is:
Liu offers a land price series which shows a range in Huizhou of less than 1 tael per mu (1 mu = 0.164 acres) until the 1440s, rising to about 10 taels in 1490-1500. [Liu generally used a normative value of 1 tael = 37.68 g of silver per, though in actual practice tael values varied over time and geographically.]
As a general rule early Ming contracts usually set land purchase prices at double the annual rent value. But there are going to be considerable variations depending on the location and intended use of the land. This series builds on the land-value data in:
Liu’s book also assembles a variety of price series for rice, silk textiles, cotton textiles, and several other goods. Though the prices series are sometimes given in proportion to contemporary rice prices, so translating them into taels of grams of silver can be labor-intensive.
Liu’s Rice prices for the fifteenth century fluctuate between 13 and 22 g of silver per hectoliter of rice (100 liter). [Again, using a normative value of 1 tael = 37.8 g of silver]. Or 0.13-0.22 grams of silver per liter of rice.
The silk price sequence lists price fluctuations of 0.44-0.63 grams of silver per bolt of silk textile during the same century.
The price sequence for a bolt of cotton textile is unhelpfully measured in Shi of rice, (roughly 80-88.5 kg of rice), but ranged from 0.75-1.2 shi for this period.
You could use the price and wage information assembled in this volume to assemble a longer list, but the work itself is focused on answering other questions so the author did not assemble a price list themselves.
(edited to fix typo)