Oriental Coins

gxseries,
I've used your calculator and have found it very helpful. I have problems with the first step which is trying to read the numbers off of the coins. I can handle it once I get past that point.

You read the numbers on the Taiwanese coins correctly, but you got them backwards. At that time the characters are read from right to left. Right now, Taiwan changed its banknotes and all other materials (books, newspaper)are now read in the Western format of left to right standard. Although, the coins are still read in the traditional format.

No problem, I am not sure about the other coins. Some of them are Japanese, but I am not familiar with the year of their emperor. The first one on the 1st row is modern and rest looks to me around ww2 period.

Numbering left to right, top to bottom:

#1: Japan 1 yen, Heisei First Year (= 1989 AD). Gxseries doesn't mention it on his calendar conversion site, but for Year 1 of an emperor's reign, they use the character "gan", meaning "first", rather than the usual "ichi", meaning "one".

#2: Japan 10 sen, Showa Year 15 (=1940 AD). Another example of the need to get the year around "the right way". the characters for 10 and 5 would be around the other way for "50".

#3 to #7: answered by hc8604.

#8: Curious. One side says "1 wen" (or 1 cash), not sure what the four characters on the other side are, except for the top one which appears to be "dai", meaning "great, large" in both Chinese and Japanese. I can't spot an actual coin like this in the China, Japan or Vietnam listings; maybe it's a token?

#9: Japan 1 sen, Showa year 12 (= 1937).

#10: you seem to have this one identified.

#11: Japan 5 sen, Showa Year 17 (= 1942).

I too get confused by reading East Asian date-numerals sometimes. I find the easiest thing to do is to try to read it as one date, then look up Krause to see if I can find a coin that looks anything like that for that date. If I can't, then I've probably read the date wrong so I go back and rearrange the date until I get it right.

arthrene, I answered that earlier on, 4294 just refers to 1961.

#8 has now been identified, in this thread: China (Empire) 1 cash c.1909, KM/Y# 25.

It's tricky. You use the "url tags" as usual, but you have to put the URL within the first pair of brackets, also inside quotes, thusly:

Typing The link to this thread is {url="http://www.coincommunity.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=30570"}right here{/url}. (except using square brackets rather than squiggly ones) produces:

The link to this thread is right here.

It can make it hard to read what you've actually typed, so hitting preview before hitting submit helps to check that it actually looks like you want it to look.

Hey thanks Sap! I've been wondering about that for a really long time.