Chien Lung Cash public works question

[SpaBreda]

Typical Sunday afternoon activity, checking Chinese Cash coins 

I have identified the 3 coins in the picture as Public Works Mint ....
Still there are some differences that make me doubt that (see red markings)
Am I looking too precise or is there another problem ... other mint/fake ...?

Thanks, Paul.

[Figleaf]

The mintmarks of the ministry of public works, Yunnan and Sichuan are very similar. I would take the upper and lower left coins for Public works and the lower right coin for Sichuan.

Writing style was up to the "mintmaster", but on some occasions, the emperor would take a personal interest and write the characters himself. A forceful handwriting was considered important and one of the characteristics of a gentleman.

Peter

[RVCOINS]

Hi,

I discover on these cash coins for Chien Lung that beside the different sizes you have that there are also variants exists of writing the empirial titles on the revers.

It is fun to collect as much as possible variants.

Roland
 

[SpaBreda]

Thanks Peter, you may well be right about the Sichuan mint.
100% sure you never can be I think with these ...
And with the different reverse .... and all the handwritings...

... well, that's what coin collecting is all about ! 

[Afrasi]

All three are clearly public works. The Mongol letter from Szechuan has the significant second "I" in the first line of my "picture". This one is missing at all three shown coins.

                                              I_I
                                                I
                                              CI
                                           ___I
                                           ' __I
                                               <     

[SpaBreda]

Thanks Afrasi !
That's a very clear answer.
It's seems it's all about knowing what lines to look for, some are more important than others ....

Paul.

[RHM22]

Out of curiosity, what is the most expensive cash coin? Most of the coins I've seen are priced very low. The low price makes them very attractive to me, but I haven't really collected them because I can't read Chinese at all. The only one I have is a very common Ching Dynasty type.

[Figleaf]

All cash coins of the Liao dynasty (922-1208) are rare and expensive, with the exception of the coins of emperor Shih Tsung (1161-1189). From time to time, there were experiments with multiple cash coins, bigger in size and heavier. These coins are all expensive. You should be able to buy the vast majority of the rest below $30, most under $10. However, the major problem with collecting Chinese coins is not price, but the vast number of imitations, even of very common coins. You may safely assume that all Chinese cash coins offered on eBay are imitations. The few exceptions aren't worth the bother. One of the few dealers who can separate false and genuine is Scott Semans.

Reading Chinese on coins is not as difficult as it seems, as the number of characters used is extremely limited. You will find most in the chapter on China in KM. As a rule, there are four characters on the obverse; you can ignore the horizontal ones and the vertical ones give the name of the emperor. The reverse is empty, or has one or two characters for the name of the mint. On some older coins, the emperor's name is given by the character on top and either the one on the right, or the one on the left. You can use this Wiki lemma for names, dates and Chinese characters. Mind that on coins, several different scripts are used that will change the appearance of the character.

If you don't have KM or want to see earlier coins also, there is a dirt cheap booklet I can recommend: Chinesische Käschmünzen, by A. A. Remmelts. It's in German, but there is virtually no text beyond names. This booklet will allow you to identify any Chinese cash coin, so you'll be an instant expert.

Peter

[SpaBreda]

When I started with Chinese cash coins, this website was a great help to me :

http://www.sportstune.com/chinese/coins/idpage1.html

It's an easy step-by-step way to identify them.

Paul.

[Figleaf]

That link went into the link collection. Thanks, Paul!

Peter

[weepio]

Out of curiosity, what is the most expensive cash coin? Most of the coins I've seen are priced very low. The low price makes them very attractive to me, but I haven't really collected them because I can't read Chinese at all. The only one I have is a very common Ching Dynasty type.

I remember a story about a coin sold in China for about 100.000 USD and they still argue about it being real or not. Recently a Liao dynasty coin was sold for about 65.000 USD. There are a lot of R-RRRR cash coins.

[Chinasmith]

All three of these coins are from the Board of Public Works Mint in Peking. There were variations in the writing of the Manchu words over time. In addition, around 1800 the two mints in Peking were divided or expanded to include branches. There were three branches of the Board of Works Mint and four branches of the Board of Revenue Mint. The spike at the top of the Manchu word "boo" to the left on the reverse, is the mark of one of the branch mints. Werner Burger's 1976 work "Ch'ing Cash Until 1735" was the first work I know of in any language to mention the branch mints and certainly the first to identify them. I am not convinced his attributions are correct, but checking Chinese sources, there were indeed such branch mints, and the markings he notes do seem to match the number of branches for each mint. David Hartill's recent book on Qing cash also details these branch mints. It is strange that Chinese coin catalogs never recorded the Peking branch mints. The Japanese catalog, Shincho Senpu, published in the early 1970's, did record the branch mint varieties, but apparently did not know what they were.

[bgriff99]

Chinasmith, it was myself who figured out the coding of the 4 BoR submints in Chien-lung, but I connected them incorrectly to Burger's attributions shown for Tao-kuang.   That was published in the old 'Cash Coin Connection' newsletter around 1987, and in Europe, along with an entire date chart 1736-1821.   By that time David and I were working together.   We did not know how Burger derived his attributions for later reigns.    David figured it out, and he told me how it came to him when he was looking at an old Chinese map, and realized they put south at the top.   The arrangement of special marks on Chien-lung BoR cash is by N-S-E-W except upside down.   For each branch, a special mark is added to the character at its appropriate position.   It was put in place around year 23.

Both David and I spent a lot of time trying to see if that carried back any farther, as Burger said.   We separately concluded it did not.   I am very confident of that.   There are a lot of somewhat brazen mistakes in Burger which unfortunately undermine peoples' willingness to extend him any credibility.

The privy marks were continuous until it was found that they had to be changed for Chia-ching because two of them were in reign title characters.   A further complication arose because of the Shan-lung issue at the same time as Chia-ching.   They did not want different marks used at the same time.   On Shan-lung they were changed in mid-issue, and it is only by following what they did there that the continuity with Chia-ching can be traced.   In this case we agreed with Burger.

David disagreed with me that Chekiang was divided into 2 branches with separate privy marks but later he discovered and forwarded to me documentary evidence that it was indeed divided into two foundries, which were encouraged to compete with each other, in exactly the year the separate marks appeared, in Yung-cheng.    There is a lot more detail (and correction) which could be added to parts of Burger's charts now, but which is so esoteric nobody would care.   

[Figleaf]

There is a lot more detail (and correction) which could be added to parts of Burger's charts now, but which is so esoteric nobody would care.

I disagree. If we manage to care about the progression of die cracks in US coins or furnace numbers on Roman coins or die numbers on Pobjoy mint stuff, we can care about minute indications on Chinese coins. An attempt to let mints compete in China is IMHO of historic value and may even be relevant for such things as the privatisation of British railroads or the double electricity grid in Lubbock TX.

David is a (not so active) member here. We have East Asia experts from other countries like Weepio (Netherlands) and Pigu (Germany) and maybe another one lurking. You are now officially encouraged to use this site to post, publish, to meet, to research, to compare with coins in other collections and what not. A lot of us may have trouble following the discussion, but that is not an issue. We have very active discussions of tokens, medieval Indian coins, Karoshti and Brahmi texts and conservation, to name a few that are not everyone's cuppa either. However, I have seen remarkable developments, people taking on additional interests and joining tiny bandwagons. If you can put up with the questions of non-experts, I doubt you'll find a better place to continue your fine research than here.

Peter

[Manzikert]

Might I second Figleaf's comments.

I have a copy of Burger's book (acquired before my Chinese collection was stolen many years ago) and I have been quietly rebuilding my collection, so I'd be most interested in any corrections to Burger and any other information about the different mints.

Best wishes

Alan