In Mandarin Chinese, 贝 (Pinyin: bèi 🔊) means “shellfish” or “cowrie”. In ancient China, cowries were used as money, therefore this symbol also has an ancient meaning of “money” or “currency”. According to Wiktionary,
Guo (1945) proposes that cowries used by the ancient Chinese dynasties in Central China must have come from the southeastern shores of China and areas further south, as the species of sea snail used as decoration and currency — Monetaria moneta (money cowry) — is not native to the eastern seashores of China.
贝 is a simplified form of the traditional character 貝, which evolved from a pictogram of a cowrie shell. Lawrence J. Howell writes in his Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters:
A depiction of a bivalve (one split open to reveal its contents) → shellfish; (sea) shell → treasure.
Unsurprisingly, there are many compounds of 贝 related to shellfish, for example 螺贝 / 螺貝 (luóbèi) “conch”, 贻贝 / 貽貝 (yíbèi) “mussel”, or 扇贝 / 扇貝 (shànbèi) “scallop”. 贝 is also used phonetically in words of foreign origin, such as 贝鲁特 / 貝魯特 (Bèilǔtè) “Beirut”, 诺贝尔 / 諾貝爾 (Nuòbèi'ěr) “Nobel”, or 分贝 / 分貝 (fēnbèi) “decibel”.
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