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Another Coin I Think, Asian, 24.07 MM And 3g

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Canada
81 Posts
 Posted Today  5H 42M ago Show Profile   Bookmark this topic Add lahave56 to your friends list Get a Link to this Message Number of Subscribers
I found this one didn't have a label. In addition to some help with an id I'd like to learn what to look for with these coins to determine the country of origin as I may run across others. Is there anything short of knowing something about the language? Thanks.


Another-Coin-I-Think,-Asian,-24.07-MM-And-3g
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jbuck's Avatar
United States
188952 Posts
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Canada
81 Posts
 Posted Today  4H 19M ago  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add lahave56 to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
Thanks jbuck! That sure looks like the right one. How did you id it so quickly?
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jbuck's Avatar
United States
188952 Posts
 Posted Today  4H 7M ago  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add jbuck to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
My pleasure.

Image search on Google found the CCF topic, then I searched Numista for the details.
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Canada
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 Posted Today  3H 44M ago  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add lahave56 to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
Ah yes - image search. Pretty impressive how quickly it finds a match.
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Sap's Avatar
Australia
16841 Posts
 Posted Today  2H 43M ago  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add Sap to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
In my case, identifying it was easy because I have seen a rather large number of this specific coin type. They are quite unique and distinctive, and often turn up in caches of mixed cash coins.

For over 2000 years, Chinese "cash" coins (round coins with square holes in them) were traditionally produced by casting - pouring molten brass into a sand mould. When "western" style coinage presses were first introduced to China in the late 1800s, the Kwangtung mint (and a couple of other provincial mints) tried their hand at using those presses to make cash-shaped coins. Thus were created coins like the one in the OP - a fusion of ancient Chinese design with modern Western production methods. Being restricted to just a couple of mints and a narrow time window, there were only a handful of different designs of machine-struck cash used across the Empire.

While over a billion of these coins were indeed made there this way, in the end it proved unsuitable to continue to produce them. The extra time and labour needed to punch out the central square hole was not justifiable for a coin that was literally only worth 1/10th of a cent. The next generation of machine-struck cash coins were smaller, and had a round hole: https://en.numista.com/22475
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Canada
81 Posts
 Posted Today  2H 2M ago  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add lahave56 to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
@Sap thanks for that background. I wonder if the holes (round or square) in these coins served a similar purpose as holes in some early trade tokens where I've read they made it possible to string together a bunch of them to make them easier to carry around.

[Edit: According to google this indeed was one purpose of the holes]
Edited by lahave56
Today 2H 0M ago
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