Posted 03/13/2012 11:03 pm
It's a 10 dollars from Taiwan, dated Year 72 of the Republic (or AD 1983).
There are eight characters on the obverse. The four on the right hand side are, from right to left (the traditional Chinese direction of reading) zhong hua min guo. This is the name of the country: Republic of China (literally, "Middle Kingdom people land").
The remaining obverse characters are the date. The leftmost character is nian, meaning "year"; learn to recognise this character, because on Chinese and Japanese coins it's always at the end of the date, an important consideration given that on some Chinese and Japanese coins, the inscription is read left to right, rather than right to left.
The three remaining characters are the numerals for the year, which in this case are, from right to left, 7 10 2. This is why it's important to get your head around the "which way around is the year" question, because it's all too easy for it to be accidentally read as "2 10 7", or 27 rather than 72, and off you'd go looking in the 1940's for a coin that was actually struck in the 1980s.
On the reverse, the character on the left is "yuan" which for Taiwanese coins is usually translated "dollar". The other character is the "financial" version of the numeral 10. See Wikipedia for more info on "financial" and "regular" Chinese numerals.
There are eight characters on the obverse. The four on the right hand side are, from right to left (the traditional Chinese direction of reading) zhong hua min guo. This is the name of the country: Republic of China (literally, "Middle Kingdom people land").
The remaining obverse characters are the date. The leftmost character is nian, meaning "year"; learn to recognise this character, because on Chinese and Japanese coins it's always at the end of the date, an important consideration given that on some Chinese and Japanese coins, the inscription is read left to right, rather than right to left.
The three remaining characters are the numerals for the year, which in this case are, from right to left, 7 10 2. This is why it's important to get your head around the "which way around is the year" question, because it's all too easy for it to be accidentally read as "2 10 7", or 27 rather than 72, and off you'd go looking in the 1940's for a coin that was actually struck in the 1980s.
On the reverse, the character on the left is "yuan" which for Taiwanese coins is usually translated "dollar". The other character is the "financial" version of the numeral 10. See Wikipedia for more info on "financial" and "regular" Chinese numerals.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
