Another Coin I Think, Asian, 24.07 MM And 3g

Looks like this one...

https://goccf.com/t/381916

https://en.numista.com/6817

I will let the experts confirm.

My pleasure.

Image search on Google found the CCF topic, then I searched Numista for the details.

In my case, identifying it was easy because I have seen a rather large number of this specific coin type. They are quite unique and distinctive, and often turn up in caches of mixed cash coins.

For over 2000 years, Chinese "cash" coins (round coins with square holes in them) were traditionally produced by casting - pouring molten brass into a sand mould. When "western" style coinage presses were first introduced to China in the late 1800s, the Kwangtung mint (and a couple of other provincial mints) tried their hand at using those presses to make cash-shaped coins. Thus were created coins like the one in the OP - a fusion of ancient Chinese design with modern Western production methods. Being restricted to just a couple of mints and a narrow time window, there were only a handful of different designs of machine-struck cash used across the Empire.

While over a billion of these coins were indeed made there this way, in the end it proved unsuitable to continue to produce them. The extra time and labour needed to punch out the central square hole was not justifiable for a coin that was literally only worth 1/10th of a cent. The next generation of machine-struck cash coins were smaller, and had a round hole: https://en.numista.com/22475

The original purpose of the square holes on cast cash coins was part of the production process.

When you cast a coin, the edge is quite rough - the casting seam is there, and there's also a "sprue" where the coin was attached to the "tree". To make the coins nice and round, they need to be lathed. But rather than lathe each coin one at a time, they would push the rough coins onto a long metal rod with a square cross-section, so they can then lathe a hundred or more coins all at once.

You can sometimes find coins with "star-shaped" holes; this originally happened if a coin fell off the rod during the lathing process, and had to be pushed back onto the rod at a different angle to lock it in place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huachuanqian Later collectors began to appreciate the (relative) rarity of star-shaped hole coins, which then led to such holes being deliberately made in various charms and amulets.

Over time, the round-coin-with-square-hole acquired mystical symbolism (the square hole is "Earth", and the round coin is "Heaven"). But originally, the hole was put there for purely practical reasons. A machine-struck coin, of course, has no practical need or use for such a hole as part of the production process; on the OP coin, the hole is there purely out of tradition - people "expected" their coins to have square holes in them, so square holes had to be put there.

But the holes did indeed serve another important function: tying them together in bundles, to make them easier to count and transport. Under the Imperial system, 1000 coins would be tied together to make a "string", and 1 string was worth 1 tael (an amount of silver worth slightly more than one silver dollar). In the late Imperial period, the silver dollar was adopted as the standard unit of currency instead of the silver tael, and one string of 1000 cash were retariffed to 1 dollar - making the cash worth exactly 1/10th of a cent.