What Are These? Chinese...

looks like red ink in the design of I Chinese coin I can tell you it is Chinese for sure but I cant tell you the dynasty !

I would assume they were the pieces of paper a Chinese coin dealer wrapped their coins in prior to shipping them

Thanks your replies.

I had considered that they could be some sort of coin wrapper, given the impressions, but I am not entirely convinced. They dont appear to be modern (certainly not modern paper) so I wondered if they were some form of unofficial IOU or early receipt?

Anyone read Chinese?

My basic, very basic chinese tells me (on the second image) that the bottom character is Tian which means like sky, day, things like that. The one on the right is Shou, which means hand. Possibly the one on the left is Tai, which I'm not really sure what it means, other than I've seen it in a name, and come across it in reading but not remembered it. The top one is too complicated for me.

The four characters on the second item, arranged cash-coin-style, are the exact same four characters you can see in the top left of the stamp on the first item. Reading them in the top-to-bottom order they appear on the first one, the characters are (in modern Pinyin romanization) "shou he tian", literally "hand union heaven". Unfortunately, I can't read the third character, either. But I would assume these four characters are the name of the coin dealership shipping the coins. The large character at the top centre is "bao", which is the symbol for "coin" or "money" found on cash coins; unfortunately, I can't read the other large character.

For I'm fairly certain they are home-made shipping/storage envelopes. The bottom one has clearly been very tightly wrapped around a large cash-style coin, either a Song Dynasty piece or one of the larger Qing Dynasty pieces. Such objects have not been used as actual money since the mid-1800s, and these pieces of paper, while certainly old (at least 50 years, I would guess) are almost certainly not 150 years old. The only kind of person needing to wrap up an obsolete coin in a piece of paper like this is somebody selling obsolete coins - a coin dealer.

And yes, they would have been used as a form of receipt, or at least a reminder of a coin's provenance - which is why they would have been kept.