Old Chinese cash coins can be read multiple ways, but one traditional way is clockwise. The bees are likely to be at the top and bottom, but since there's otherwise no real "top" or "bottom" to it, it can probably be read "properly" no matter which way you hold it. I can't read Chinese and I'm relying on translation websites like
this one. So let's have a go at translating it on that basis:
Left side:
wu zi chu shen, literally "5 son happenings life".
Chushen together means "life experience", and
wu (the number five) often seems to mean "multiple" when used in a poetic sense; thus I would read it as "may your life be filled with many sons".
Right side: your mystery character is ambiguous to me, too; my best guess is
ji, "festival". It certainly seems to be something with the "shi" radical at the bottom, which usually denotes some kind of ritual or omen. In any event, reading it as
ji would give us
ji bai nian tong, literally "festival 100 year together" - which in the context of the reading on the other side I would translate as "may you have a long and happy marriage".
Running my phrases back through Google Translate gives "Five sons born / Festival with a hundred years", so I'm probably not too far off in my translations.
As for the date: yours doesn't "look old"; it was probably cast sometime in the last 30 years or so. The one in the Zeno link I posted above looks older, but now that I look more closely at it I can see the characters appear to be the same, so the design has probably been around for a while. And given the wishes expressed upon it, it probably doesn't come from mainland China itself, where the one-child-policy is in effect. The Zeno one is labelled as "Korean", and I've heard of many kinds of modern copies of old charms like this coming out of Vietnam, so I would suspect either of those places as the origin for this piece.
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
Posted 03/11/2010 10:41 pm
, to the community.
