The Cents And Sapèques Of French Indochina

This is a companion thread to my thread The Rise and Fall of the Indochinese Piastre. While that thread deals with the silver piastres of Indochina and their fractions, this thread is oriented towards the low denomination copper (mostly) coins.

The piastres described in my parallel thread represent the monetary high end of the financial landscape in French Indochina. At the high end we have merchants, traders, and government institutions moving hundreds or thousands of silver piastres between cities and across borders. That end is very different from the low end, where we have peasants and farm workers, servants, shop clerks and the like, people who rarely or never see even a single piastre (at least if we stay in the 19th century). Their economy was that of the cash coins, tied together in ligatures for all but the tiniest transactions.

The high and low end were like two separate economies, not independent, but not tightly connected either. There was no fixed exchange rate between cash coins and piastres, it could vary from 300 to several thousand cash coins for one piastre. Both economies are interesting from different perspectives and each has its own monetary history. Because of that, I run separate threads for the two. If you are interested in the coinage of French Indochina, do follow both.

In this thread then, I will discuss the small denominations, the cash coins and French Indochinese cents (centièmes), from the mid 1800s to the end of World War 2. Coins and banknotes shown are from my collection.

Like my other thread on the piastre, this is not primarily intended as a "Post Your ..." thread. But like I do there, I welcome contributions from anyone who has Indochinese small change to show!


Post #1:

Cash To The People

or

The Square


Sapèque, French Cochinchina, 1879. Bronze, 2.0 g, 20 mm.



Sapèque is French for cash coin (see Note 1). In 1879 the French authorities introduced their own sapèques, or cash coins, in the recently established colony of French Cochinchina. It is valued as 2/1000 of a piastre (the piastre de commerce introduced by the French at the same time, or equally of a Spanish dollar or Mexican peso). The value is stated in Chinese only (see Note 2): Top and bottom character on the reverse means "value two". The remaining characters are read counter-clockwise from 5 o'clock to 7 o'clock and translate literally (but in slightly different order) to "Great Country France, Annam Part" (see Note 3 and Note 4). The coin was minted in Paris and shipped to Cochinchina.

The introduction of the sapèque followed after fruitless efforts to introduce French small change in the colony (efforts that I will describe in a forthcoming post). Cash coins were the regular every day currency that had been used in Vietnam for more than a millenium and they were part of every day life for anyone who had to do even the smallest transaction. They would not easily be replaced by something else just because it seemed better and more practical in the eyes of the French.


The indigenous coins

I will say more about the original cash coins in my next post, but for the time being let's just have a quick look at a contemporary Vietnamese cash coin.


10 van, Vietnam/Dai Nam, emperor Thàn Thái, 1888-1907. Copper alloy, 4.4 g, 27 mm.



This cast copper alloy cash coin weighs 4.4 g and has the value 10 van (see Note 5), or 10 cash if you like. The 10 van is a larger denomination, ordinary cash coins had a value of one or a few van. The obverse states the emperor's name (vertically) and that this is "circulating currency" (thông bao, horizontally). The reverse states the value, 10 van. All with Chinese characters.

Already here we see an important difference between the high end and low end economies. The high end economy was successively taken over by the French when they took control over French Cochinchina. The traditional indigenous Vietnamese minting of silver and gold coins and ingots declined and was gone by 1900, except for ceremonial issues. Cash coins, however, were permitted and continued to be cast locally in Vietnam until the 1930s. Otherwise minting of colonial coins - piastres as well as sapèques - was mainly done in France, by Monnaie de Paris.


The reasons for a French cash coin

So why did France bother to mint "French" cash coins, if they anyway permitted local manufacture of those? There were several reasons: Firstly, the French presence stirred an increase in the economic activity, both high and low ends, and the limited capacity (and perhaps incentive) of the Vietnamese imperial cash mints resulted in a lack of the small change needed for the everyday small scale business. Secondly, the local cash coins were of inferior quality, often made of brittle zinc that easily broke and corroded. Bringing the fruits of civilization to the locals, in the form of struck coins of superior quality might well have been a reason. And thirdly, ideally France preferred to have total control of the economy, both high and low. That the low end was permitted to have a co-existence of local cast coins was probably a concession to the resistance towards the foreign French coins.

Whatever the reasons, one must give it to the French that they took the task of providing a good version of the cash coin seriously. Quality-wise, struck instead of cast, durable bronze instead of copper alloys of varying quality (or zinc). Local adaptation with denomination in Chinese/Vietnamese, certainly important to gain acceptance among the targeted users, who did not speak French. And, last but not least, a square hole just like the traditional cash coins. This last thing was something the French were particularly proud of, especially as the British in the decade before had attempted to replace Chinese cash coins with their own struck version in Hong Kong. They settled for a circular hole in a square marking, as shown below:


1 mil, Hong Kong, 1863. Bronze, 1.0 g, 15 mm.



This is a tiny coin! The denomination is 1 mil, that is, 1/1000 of a dollar (Spanish or Mexican). The reverse states, in Chinese, "Hong Kong" and "1 wen" ("1 cash" in Chinese).

Making a square hole in a struck coin so that it aligns with the design is not trivial. While the British proud themselves with having made the first struck cash coin (the one above), the French do not quite think it counts. The first real struck cash coin, with a square hole, was of course the 1879 Cochinchina sapèque.

Despite all the efforts by the French, the struck sapèques were only accepted with reluctance. The Vietnamese preferred their cash coins of the old well-known type. France continued to strike the sapèque until 1902.


Next time

In my next post, I will write a bit about the Vietnamese cash coins before the French arrival, before moving on to later decades in subsequent posts.


Notes

Note 1: "Sapèque" is possibly derived from Malay sa pek, which I think means "one pack [of cash coins]" (someone knowledgeable in Malay can perhaps confirm or correct?). Why that and not, for instance, the Vietnamese dông tiên or Chinese tóng qián was chosen as inspiration, I don't know.

Note 2: Although the characters are Chinese, the language is Vietnamese. The two characters for the value on the coin are read dáng nhi in Vietnamese (dang èr in pinyin Chinese). For the counter-clockwise characters around the rim: dai pháp quôc chi annam in Vietnamese (dà fàguó zhi annán in Chinese).
Chinese characters were commonly in use to write Vietnamese until the 1920s.

Note 3: This should be interpreted as meaning that Annam is part of greater/extended France. The French view of colonies as extensions of the motherland prevails still today. A travel from Paris to French Guiana in South America is thus a domestic trip, from the French point of view.

Note 4: Translating from Chinese can be tricky, especially if you don't know the language . A literal translation may sometimes need a bit of interpretation to make sense. Fortunately I have a good friend of Chinese origin, who has kindly helped me do that for this and other objects I present here.

Note 5: The denomination van was in use from the late 19th century until World War 2. It is probably derived from Chinese wen, the currency unit sometimes used to denote the smallest value for Chinese cash coins.


LITERATURE

The suggestions at the end of post #1 in the piastre thread apply to small change as well.