This has been an interesting challenge. Haven't completed it yet but it seems somewhat doable. The portrait was to feature Sun Yat Sen who was the first president of the Republic of China. These coins were struck when China was literally falling apart as various provinces were striking their own coinage. A unified coinage was required and this meant huge production was required. The only mint that could fulfill this was from the other end of the world - Austria (!). This can be easily identified by the "A" mintmark. Mintmark "A". 20 fen with mintmark "A" can be surprisingly difficult to find. Something interesting to note is that master dies were prepared in Philadelphia and shipped to Shanghai. Coins struck in Austria do have some minor differences. Even at the start of this coinage, nickel coins were meant to be struck in pure nickel. However at Tientsin mint, 1936 10 fen coin was struck in nickel alloy as an attempt to cut cost. This is somewhat scarce to find. This is also an era when the Japanese started to occupy China in 1937, leading to WWII. This meant that good quality nickel coins were quickly withdrawn from circulation and were replaced with cheaper base metals such as brass and aluminum. Supposedly the Americans were involved with the production of aluminum coinage. Mints were relocated towards the West as the Japanese started invading on the Eastern end. Aluminium coin This particular 1 fen coin is supposedly struck in Yunnan Province and is known as Shi Kwan type. I don't quite know what it's meant to mean but I'm assuming it's to do with the border design instead of the Greek inspired design. Mintage figure of this is not known and technical details found online are all wrong. In 1940, pure nickel coins were down sized and were struck in nickel copper and in small size. This did not last long as WWII continued on and nickel copper coins were last struck in 1943. The last coin struck was a copper coin in 1948 before China declared herself as communist. I made a type set of this - only 20 different coins but it may prove to be a real challenge. https://issuu.com/gxseries/docs/china_republic_type_set_1936_48 Also done up a page of what I have http://gxseries.com/numis/china/republic/china_republic.htm Please feel free to post yours!
Yeah, it looks like it. I'm away from my books and I don't know enough from memory to identify the emperor, but I'm sure someone here could! @TypeCoin971793 @Ken Dorney?
According to Kann, the spade is meant to represent the coin that circulated in Shantung, Shansi, Shensi, Chihli and Honan from 6th to 3rd century. The characters on the spade coin is meant to represent an area in Shantung Province. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015025952790&view=1up&seq=299 Pretty neat book to read
