I was saving this particular coin from a heavy verdigris damage which took me more than half a year to deal with - some of the coins have been in olive oil bath more than one year (changing them out when need be). This coin was completely covered in green - if you look them up on ebay, you can see good examples of them full of verdigris damage. This one turned out to be ok after conservation. Didn't pay a lot for it back then. I found the string like damage to be interesting. You can actually look through it. Note, this is a cast coin. The Chinese call it the "sand variety". Maybe to describe the coarse details of the "coin"? Here's a similar coin but struck. Note the resemblence? If I am not wrong, the second coin is actually the original coin that circulated, originated from Shanxi Province. The first coin however seems to be a comtempory counterfeit issued by Chinese warlord in Gansu Province. I haven't got to the point of researching how bad the Gansu economy became but I'm suspecting that because they needed a lot of money to finance, possibly military. Both coins are actually quite easy to obtain and you don't have to fork out a lot of money to collect interesting pieces of history.
I wonder - did the warlords really produce very many of the cast copies? What was the relative mintage of the coins & their relative scarcity today?
I'm not too sure what the mintage is like but they are definitely not scarce. They are both dated 1919. Tried a search on ebay and they should be obtainable at under 20 dollars each. Not sure about the mintage but I would have trouble believing any of the figures because a lot of the coins have been melted down during the Cultural revolution.
