Asian Agricultural Charm With Trigram | Boxer Rebellion

OK, here's an interesting piece (and your pics are indeed the right way up). It's not what you think it is, but exactly what it was made for and when it was made is a matter of debate; they are believed by some to date from the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.

The four characters on the obverse read, clockwise from top, "Ping Shui An Lu" in archaic seal script, literally "peaceful water tranquil land", but more poetically as "may there be peace and safety at sea and on land".

Those aren't farming implements on the reverse; they're weapons - a sword on the left, a spear on the right, weapons which the Boxers believed themselves to be immune to. At the top is the Big Dipper star constellation, while at the bottom is kan, the water trigram. The rebels organised themselves into eight divisions, each named after one of the Eight Trigrams; Kan division was responsible for military activities around the northern concession city of Tientsin.

While some of these "coins" certainly do appear to date from the Boxer Rebellion (though the Boxers themselves used them more as charms than as money), others which copy them are either merchant tokens or charms. On zeno.ru, this one is considered genuine period; this one is a later imitation amulet with a different obverse legend.

Your coin is listed in the Jen catalogue of Chinese cash coins (2000 edition) as number 903, with a CV of $30 in VG. Also see this scanned article in zeno.ru's database. The article mentions at the very end "counterfeits" of these coins which don't have a horizontal stroke at the top of "Ping", the top character. On your coin, you can see where the stroke is supposed to be but it's not detached from the rim; I'm not sure where that puts it on the authenticity scale.