Unidentified Chinese Coin - Identified (1898 Korean1/4 Yang)

Unusual arrangement of the characters on the reverse (upper picture). Wonder if it some sort of token.

Wow, thanks! So I guess old Korean and Chinese are close enough where even Chinese people might not recognize the difference? After searching for 1898 1/4 yang, lots of images come up...I noticed that some of these were counterfeited by Japan but authorized by Korea? I understand there are several varieties, what gives this away as a counterfeited one?

See the "2" (two parallel line) at one o'clock on the bottom picture?
This indicates the year within the reign of Kuang Mu.

Most East Asian languages - Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc - were originally written using the same Chinese character set. The characters usually meant the same thing, but were pronounced differently. These coins contain both "Chinese" and Korean scripts; the Korean can be seen in the lower pic, at around 4 to 6 o'clock.


As gxseries said, these coins were made of cupronickel - the same alloy that American nickels are made of. Your coin looks more bronze or brassy. Secondly, the bubbly surface indicates to me some kind of crude casting has taken place.

Thanks for the replies and information everyone...all of this will definitely help me the next time I run across something that looks Chinese and I can't figure out where to go! Sounds like at least I should slap this in a 2x2 and put it in my Korean collection.

There is a story for this. Early Korean nickel copper coins were pretty much unwanted as many people distrusted them for good reasons.

Prior to machine struck coinage where cast coins were used in commerce, coins were cast in good quality copper alloy. As time pass, the government decided to make huge profit by melting coins and issue bronze alloy coins with much lower copper content. This has caused a huge uproar and this was understandable as the new coinage was worth much less. New coinage was issued in 1888 and the first nickel copper coin was issued in 1894. (I know, you would say there were coins dated 1892 but they were first issued in 1894).

This mistrust in government issued coinage persisted and as the price of nickel fell during the early 1900s, many were quick enough to trade them to the bank as soon as possible. The problem was made worse as a huge supply of contemporary counterfeit was issued dated 1898. Obviously it was cheap for the government to issue such coins but the public had reasons to not like them. This coinage was to be demonetize in 1906.

If you are interested, this particular year is home to at least 6+ varieties from what I hear not including counterfeit examples.

Here's some examples:

Genuine example



Small font variety



And then two contemporary counterfeit. Note that the dragons look more cartoonish and the characters look more deformed. The above coin is consistent with known contemporary counterfeit.





An attempt to reissue nickel copper coin restarted in 1905 and then issued in 1907. Another attempt was made in 1909 but tragedy struck - as soon as these coins were struck, there were orders to demonetize just this particular coin. Others were to be demonetize at later time. This caused a mad rush for these coins to be exchanged at the bank. This explains why 1909 5 chon coins are extremely rare - they literally didn't get to circulate as they were only valid for a couple of months. The official number of such nickel copper coins collected from the public was at a staggering 266.5 million. Whether there were that many coins issued to start off with, these coins were just not loved by the public only to be appreciated a century later.

Attempting to assemble a complete set of these coins is a BIG challenge. Coins dated 1894, 1895 (2 character variety), 1897 - 1901 with the exception of 1898 and 1909 are worth big money in ANY condition. In fact, try and look for other years (not including 1898) - you will find them to be difficult. At one stage I was tempted to sell off my duplicates but judging how scarce they were, I decided to keep them.