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I just thought that the coin being all in Chinese with no date,no mint mark, no TEN CASH written on it nor the Province it was from made it kind of special.
Don't most common coins in that era have some or all of what this coin did not have ?
Many do, but the most commonly encountered types do not. You will find them listed under "general issues" in the catalogues, although the purpose for omitting any indication of date or mintmark was not to produce a "general issue" coin for China as a whole, but rather, to produce a coin that people would not be able to tell which province made it.
The monetary situation in early Republican China was complex and chaotic, as I said earlier. Central control was non-existent; the provincial mints could in effect be considered as mints from separate countries. Many provinces passed laws and edicts that only coins of their own province would be accepted as legal tender for full face value; coins of other provinces would be accepted only at a discount (say, 300 cents to a dollar) or were rejected outright.
For criminally-inclined warlords who were making money by melting down heavy coinage of neighbouring provinces and using the metal to strike coins of their own that were more lightweight, this posed a problem: how to get people in neighbouring provinces to accept your coins, if the governments of those provinces were actively discouraging it? The answer: hide the origin of the coin, to try to trick people into accepting them. It was not all that much different from officially sanctioned counterfeiting. The goal was the same: to try to fool ordinary people into accepting a coin that was worthless, or worth less than the face value stated on it.
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
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Posted 03/19/2018 5:55 pm
