Annam Phan? | Japanese Mon

those look pretty neat

The four characters on "modern" cash coins are always read in the order top-bottom-right-left. So to identify cash coins, look at the top and bottom characters first.

The left and right characters are rarely much help in identifying a coin, because exactly the same ones were used on most varieties of "modern" cash-style coins: Chinese, Annamese, Japanese, Korean, all use those same two characters, which mean "current coin" in all the languages, though how you pronounce them in each language is slightly different.

In Chinese, it's "tong bao" or "t'ung pao" (depending on whether you're using the modern pinyin or old-fashioned Wade-Giles westernization system). In Vietnamese, it's "thong bao". In Japanese, it's "tsuu hou". In Korean, it's "T'ong Bo". Same characters, but with different pronunciations in the different languages.

Note that there are some exceptions to this rule. Some older cash coins (notably Chinese and Annamese) have "yuan bao" (unit coin) instead of "tong bao". By a tradition that goes back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), these coins are read clockwise, top-right-bottom-left. So if the bottom character is "yuan" (it normally looks sort of like a Greek "pi" with an extra bar on top), then you've got an older coin, and the top and right characters are the key identifiers.

Larger, multiple-cash coins also often have a different character instead of "tong" or "yuan".