Nickel silver, Maillechort, German silver, Argentan, new silver, nickel brass, albata, alpacca, is a copper alloy with nickel and often zinc. The usual formulation is 60% copper, 20% nickel and 20% zinc. Nickel silver does not contain the element silver. It is named for its silvery appearance, which can make it attractive as a cheaper and more durable substitute. It is also well suited for being plated with silver. A naturally occurring ore composition in China was smelted into the alloy known as or () ("white copper" or cupronickel). The name "German Silver" refers to the artificial recreation of the natural ore composition by German metallurgists. All modern, commercially important, nickel silvers (such as those standardized under ASTM B122) contain significant amounts of zinc and are sometimes considered a subset of brass. History Nickel silver was first used in China, where it was smelted from readily available unprocessed ore. During the Qing dynasty, it was "smuggled into various parts of the East Indies", despite a government ban on the export of nickel silver. It became known in the West from imported wares called (Mandarin) or (Cantonese) (白 銅, literally "white copper"), for which the silvery metal colour was used to imitate sterling silver. According to Berthold Laufer, it was identical to khar sini, one of the seven metals recognized by Jābir ibn Hayyān. In Europe, consequently, it was at first called , which is about the way is pronounced in the Cantonese dialect. The earliest European mention of occurs in the year 1597. From then until the end of the eighteenth century there are references to it as having been exported from Canton to Europe. German artificial recreation of the natural ore composition, however, began to appear from about 1750 onward. In 1770, the Suhl metalworks were able to produce a similar alloy. In 1823, a German competition was held to perfect the production process: the goal was to develop an alloy that possessed the closest visual similarity to silver. The brothers Henniger in Berlin and Ernst August Geitner in Schneeberg independently achieved this goal. The manufacturer Berndorf named the trademark brand Alpacca, which became widely known in northern Europe for nickel silver. In 1830, the German process of manufacture was introduced into England, while exports of from China gradually stopped. In 1832, a form of German silver was also developed in Birmingham, England. After the modern process for the