Why are money boxes shaped like pigs?
You fatten your piggy bank just as a pig is fattened in anticipation of a feast – and smashing it open is a kind of ritual slaughter. Many early money boxes – pig-shaped or otherwise – were eminently smashable, being cheap clay items; intriguingly, one clay type used was known in England as “pygg”. Though the term “piggy bank” only came into widespread use in British newspapers in the 1940s, china or other pottery pig-shaped money boxes pre-dated that period. Some examples were among the “penny toys” bought by collector Ernest King in London in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were popular in Java, Indonesia from at least the 12th century, and archaeologists found a 13th-century example from Germany – two cultures that both saw pigs as symbols of good fortune. Piggy banks seem to have been popularised in Europe by 19th-century German manufacturers, possibly after the Dutch – whose children certainly had them – imported the idea from their colony in Indonesia.