Beautiful Chinese Spade Coin - Replica Or Real?

I do not believe this specimen to be genuine, it exibits some modern tooling marks and signs of artificial aging.
the Chinese made zillions of these things in the recent years.

@nor, first welcome to CCF. Second, I'm moving your thread over to the ancients subforum to try to get some good eyes on it. We have had a few experts in Chinese numismatics hang out here in the past, but I'm not so sure that they are still as active. My recollection is that I personally have zero aptitude for figuring out this.

It is, absolutely and definitely, a modern replica.

I believe the spade is intended to be this type, on the zeno.ru database: Warring States, Wei Kingdom: https://www.zeno.ru/showphoto.php?photo=19740

As you can see, there are several notable differences. The hole at the top, for starters, which is probably put there to allow the tourist buying it to use it for a keyring; plus the general lack of a rim or border around the edge on the genuine item. The characters are close, but somewhat garbled - I doubt a literate person from ancient Wei could have read your coin.

Finally, as you point out, the patina is all wrong for a piece of bronze that's allegedly spent 2200 years buried underground. As you are probably aware from your more general antiquities experience, bronze patina is thick and crusty even after just a couple of centuries, and on ancient bronzes you rarely see anything resembling bare metal, unless there's been either a very bad or very very good cleaning job done on it; it looks like a thin dusting over bare metal on your piece.

Artificial aging has a whole spectrum of believability, from the laughably silly to the very-genuine-looking. There are lots of different methods they use, too, depending on who they're trying to fool. The tourists in China? They usually get coins dunked in vinegar and left to dry in the sun, which may have been the technique used here on your coin. Simply tossing them into a fire works pretty good too; they've learned what else needs to be tossed into the fire to make the coins "look old" rather than simply "burned". Sometimes (particularly in Vietnam, or so I'm told), genuine old copper coins (that are too badly corroded and damaged to identify) are crushed, and the green powder thus obtained is painted onto the replicas, to give it an authentic "old copper" colour. In the middle east, they feed their fake bronze coins to goats and wait for them to be expelled, though that's kind of hard to do with something as large as your spade. In Eastern Europe and the West in general, a common trend is to slather on a sulfur-laden petroleum jelly and wipe it off after a few days.

Very interesting thread. A learning experience as always here in this Community.

Bob...that's baaa-aa-aad. But...I know you're just calling a spade a spade!