A Chinese homecoming

[Figleaf]

Priceless Coin Collection Returns Home To China
by LOUISA LIM

In China, paramilitary police drill outside the Shanghai Mint. They're stationed there because it's literally a moneymaking plant.

It's also a museum and, on Friday, it received a new, welcome donation, hand-carried from the U.S. with far less security.

Gordon Bowker, one of the founders of Starbucks, and his cousin Carolyn Bowker packed up part of their grandfather's priceless coin collection in their luggage, brought it to China and donated it to the Shanghai Mint Museum.

"There really is no better place for the coins to be," says Gordon Bowker. "They would have much less interest to scholars and to the public anywhere else in the world. So it's a natural thing for them to be in Shanghai where they originated."

Collection Reflects 2,000 Years Of History

Gordon and Carolyn Bowker's grandfather Howard Bowker joined the U.S. Navy when he was 19 years old and was stationed in Hankou, China, in 1923. He taught himself Chinese, Japanese and Korean. He also began collecting coins, a hobby that Gordon Bowker says married two of his grandfather's greatest passions.

"He was fascinated by Chinese history. And he had a big background in money: He was a purser, and a paymaster, and he liked money. I think he liked to count it," Bowker says.

The resulting coin collection reflects the past 2,000 years of Chinese history. Its earliest piece is a coin mold dating back to 200 B.C., during the reign of China's unifier and first emperor, Qin Shihuang.

Michael Chu from the iAsure Group, which runs an auction house specializing in Asian coins, has been researching the collection for two years. He describes how the coin mold produces multiple coins.

"They pour very hard metal into this mold and then a coin tree comes out of this coin mold, and then they break off the coins from the tree individually. So when someone tells you money doesn't grow on trees, it actually does in China," Chu says.

Like A 'Mother Reunited With Her Child'

Chu says it's impossible to value much of the collection, since the objects are so rare, they seldom are sold on the open market. He says items such as the 2,000-year-old coin mold would be considered a "national treasure" in China.

Every coin in the collection is a tangible slice of China's history. One item with immense historical significance is a copper dollar featuring a sailing junk over three flying birds on one side and Sun Yat-sen on the other.

When it was issued in 1932, the Sun Yat-sen dollar was the first national coinage for the whole of China; until that point, coins had been issued regionally.

It's a testament to the chaos of China's recent history -- and the flow of valuables beyond its borders -- that the Shanghai Mint Museum didn't have a single example of this historic coin, which was designed in the U.S. by the Philadelphia Mint.

Zhang Yueqin is deputy general secretary of the Shanghai Mint's Coin Institute. When asked about the significance of this coin, his voice thickens and he becomes visibly emotional.

"We had the mold, but we didn't have a coin," he explains. "The coin has finally come home. It's as if after 80 years a mother is reunited with her child. It's a miracle. The friendship between China and America is embodied in this coin."

Only First Installment Of Collection

The bequest, including a library, was originally left to the Smithsonian, where Howard Bowker had worked as a curator. But his descendants decided the collection would be better served -- and more accessible -- elsewhere.

"There's no curator of Asian coins at the Smithsonian," Gordon Bowker explains. "Without the staff and the ability to display the coins, it would display much less interest in having that collection."

The restitution of valuables to their point of origin is an increasing trend, although in this case, the coins were bought legitimately, not looted.

"Americans could lose out in that they don't get a broader sense of world history by the coins not being in the U.S.," Carolyn Bowker says. "I don't think there's a passion in American history for learning about some of the ancient, whether it's coins or artifacts. And so to have them returned to where the passion is, it just makes total sense to me."

The Bowkers handed over more than 100 coins Friday. But the entire collection consists of more than 5,000 coins, and the bequest to the Shanghai Mint Museum marks just the beginning of a longer process of return: The family plans to make other donations to a variety of Chinese museums.

Source: NPR

Photo captions (all images are: Shen Cichen/NPR)

• Image1: More than 100 items from U.S. numismatic enthusiast Howard Bowker's coin collection were presented to the Shanghai Mint Museum on April 16. Some of the items are so rare that experts say they are literally priceless.
• Image2: The Sun Yat-sen copper dollar, issued in 1932, was China's first national coinage.
• Image3: The oldest item in the collection is a coin mold that produces more than one coin at a time. It dates back to 200 B.C. and the reign of China's first emperor. Experts say items such as this one are considered "national treasures" and cannot be valued.
• Image4: Another item donated to the Shanghai Mint is this mold for a bank note from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

[translateltd]

Sun Yat-sen *copper* dollar?  Must be a trial, or an off-metal strike of the regular *silver* issue.

[Figleaf]

There are two varieties in KM, Pn 136 and 137, labelled K#628x and K#622x, whatever that means. The silver circulation coin is Y 344. "First national coinage" is not a very good description of this pattern. Obviously, the journalist is a novice to numismatics.

While I am happy for the Shanghai museum, I am more than a little shocked that the Smithsonian couldn't live up to the expectations of the Bowker family. I had heard before about severe neglect of the coin collection. In 2007, Smithsonian coin curator Richard Doty wrote: When I arrived on the scene in 1986, the National Numismatic Collection of the Smithsonian Institution had eleven people to watch over a collection of of 990,000 objects. As I speak, the figure of eleven now stands at three (and will shortly shrink to two), while the collection now numbers 1,600,000 objects. Of greater dramatic import (at least to members of the public) is the fact that our extensive display, the Hall of Money and Medals, was dismantled late last summer, with no concrete plans for its refurbishment or replacement on the premises. This really brings home how bad the situation is.

Peter

[chrisild]

Did not want to start a new topic for this, but ... Chinese researchers may have come across what could be the world's oldest mint. Well, this one is not in use any more of course and also note the "may" and "could", but it still is an interesting find. In the ancient city of Guanzhuang (Henan province) archaeologists found a place where, roughly in 600 BCE, the first Chinese coins were made.

Now whether these pieces are actually older than Lydian pieces from roughly the same time ... let the experts argue.   Here is a National Geographic article about the site and the finds, along with a link to the report in "Antiquity".

Christian

[Figleaf]

TFP, Christian. Personally, I don't care if coins came about first in China or in Lydia. I like them both. What I find far more interesting is that the spade coins contain much less metal than a real spade. So how were they used and why were they accepted?

Peter

[chrisild]

So how were they used and why were they accepted?

I am sure there are people out there who can answer those questions  At the end of the NatGeo article there is that bit about possible origins of money – "that it was created so that merchants and customers could barter, or so that governments could collect taxes and debts." Bill Maurer (UC Irvine) refers to "the hypothesis that anthropologists and archaeologists have long held: that money emerges primarily as a political technology, not an economic technology."

While I am in China so to speak, here is another interesting tidbit which also has something to do with those "odd" coin shapes. A few days ago I saw an exhibition about Qin Shi Huang Di's Mausoleum, particularly the Terracotta Army found there. One side aspect of the show was the emperor's economic reforms (also mentioned in your initial post); he did away with those weird shapes and introduced the Ban Liang currency, with those round coins that have a square central hole.

Later another emperor, Wang Mang wanted to re-introduce spades and knives as currency. That attempt was a failure. (Now those "spades" for example were small and thin, so the term only refers to the shape, but apparently people were then used to coins being round ...) As for "TFP", have a look at the two sources in my previous post – but I will attach three knives.

Christian

[Figleaf]

At the end of the NatGeo article there is that bit about possible origins of money – "that it was created so that merchants and customers could barter, or so that governments could collect taxes and debts."

Those are two completely different uses. The first is money. The second a tax token. Acceptance of money is either the trust that someone else will accept it as payment. In the case of the government, that's straightforward. If it is issued by the government, it must be accepted by the government. If that government is a city government (think of the Persian and Afghan civic issues) it's almost guaranteed that the government will accept them, because the members of that government are known to the whole population of the city. That doesn't necessarily mean any merchants will accept them also. They need a wider acceptance than just a local government.

Bill Maurer (UC Irvine) refers to "the hypothesis that anthropologists and archaeologists have long held: that money emerges primarily as a political technology, not an economic technology."

Same thing. A political technology makes them tax tokens and it is irrelevant if they are lightweight, but tax tokens are not money. An economic technology makes them money, but there is a relation between their intrinsic value and denomination. With the Chinese first coin, I think I look at a tax token. The Lydian coins look like money.

Peter