Korea: 1 mun 1757-1806, Pyongyang mint

[FosseWay]

Brass, 24.3 mm, 3.96 g

I can't make out the regnal era name, so can't therefore get any further. There appears to be a digit 5 on the other side. I'm fairly certain it doesn't belong to any of the official emperors of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), and it looks too recent to be older than that, so I'm wondering whether it isn't actually Chinese.

[SpaBreda]

Check Korea ... 

Paul.

[FosseWay]

Aha, thank you.

KM 21.1-21.10, 1 mun, Pyongyang if I'm not mistaken. Presumably actually KM21.5 given that this has series number 5.

Can anyone explain what the series numbers mean? Are they some means of dating? The coin in question is otherwise attributable only to 1757-1806 according to KM.

[SpaBreda]

Found this :

In addition to the mint mark which was placed at the top (above the square hole) of the coin's reverse side, many sang pyong tong bo coins display other symbols as well.

These markings began to appear in the year 1742 and are believed to indicate "furnace" or "series" numbers.

Many of the coins simply show a Chinese number.

But the sang pyong tong bo coins are unique in that they also use several other methods to express "numbers".

For example, some coins have dots, circles, crescents, horizontal lines, and vertical lines.  "Dots" represent "stars".  "Circles" represent the "sun".  "Crescents" represent the "moon".  The "horizontal lines" represent the "earth" and the "vertical lines" represent "man".

[weepio]

This Korean 1 mon coin is made 1757-1806, by the Treasury Department (Mandel 13.13.5).

Coins of Korea also sometimes have characters on them in accordance to the thousand character classic, a story (poem?) which uses 1000 different characters.

Though there were made a lot of these coins, outside Korea, and especially in Europe you don't encounter them a lot.