What Did I Buy?

If you don't mind me asking, how much did you pay for it?

Update:

The reason I asked about the price you paid is that I've seen a great many of these over the years while searching for world coins on auction sites like ebay. Anyone interested in buying items of this nature, be very wary. One seldom receives precisely what's advertised.

Can a coin (or round) legally say XX.XX dollar of a foreign currency if it wasn't authorized to be minted by that country? The first thing I see is the simplified Chinese characters and that suggests to me it's a product from China. Hong Kong usually uses traditional Chinese characters. I did not find any information looking up Hong Kong Gold Coin Company, but I did find a China Gold Coin Incorporation. I suspect the name was put on for show to suggest it is a Hong Kong product or it may just be an outdated name.

The character inside the circle in the center says dog. The inscription above says it is a commemorative coin featuring the chinese zodiac painting by the painter (the first two characters are his name). I googled the inscription and it appears it was offered for sale at one point by a bank in China. Each piece is 550g of 999Ag, and there are 12 pieces per set for the full zodiac. There were 2006 sets sold in China or minted (I'm not too sure from the online article). Then again, it appears a few of these sets have been created in the past, so I'm not sure if the mintage refers to this particular set. These coins were apparently very popular and sold out when they were released. I personally have never seen this set before.

EDIT: the set of 12 coins total more than 550g (read the article again)

I really did buy it as a gamble. I only payed $10 for it, so even if it's fake I'm not really out much money. If it does turn out to be real I will have made a good buy. I figured with the vast knowledge contained within this site someone would have known exactly what it was and been able to give me an answer quickly. I don't want to destroy it to see if it's real silver though. I guess i'll just toss it into the unknown "unique" pile and forget about it.

The price really wasn't a red flag to me. It's called an antique mall, but it's more of an indoor co-op year round garage sale. People pay rent for a glass showcase and have to work a set amount of hours. Finding deals isn't unheard of. I took the gamble that this may be real because of the price and the fact I got a Mercury dime from the same case for a dollar. In the end it's 10 bucks and it looks cool.

Technically probably not, but no ones going to go anything about it. North Korea pumps out high quality fake 100 dollar bills and all they try and do is pick off shipments of those. Something like this wouldnt get any attention except maybe customs at the airport if they were being finicky that day.

The only real take away is just knowing that if it says it it means nothing. The one time it could become an issue would be resale on ebay if someone reports it as fake currency but then again the Norfed dollars seem to go unchecked for resale so I find it unlikely something like that would get much if any attention from anyone other than ebay if they decided to act

The dollar amount appears to be on the case, but that is a guess from the picture. Perhaps that is the suggested price.

It does not appear to be a coin, since a Chinese coin would have a denomination, including the yuan symbol which looks like the pi symbol. China has a lax policy regarding counterfeiting other countries coins, but not so if that symbol is on the coin. They do not allow counterfeiting their own.

The way such things get past ebay is they claim to be selling weights to hold cards down for poker, etc., and do not say coin.