The Chinese Currency

I didn't learn to much today but I did read up on Chinese culture. I learned today that the Chinese currency is not the  元(yuan2) as I have always thought but the 人民币(ren2min2bi4). You can find the Wikipedia article here. So 人(ren2) and 民(min2) means people and 币(bi4) means currency or money. So 人民币means "people's currency". With my limited knowledge I would have translated "people's currency" as 人的币. So hopefully one day soon I will discover why my way is incorrect :) PS: Google Translate does translate my direct translation 人的币 to "people's money".