Well I'm an avid coin roll hunter but covid has put a damper on my abilities to get my hands on unsearched coins in my area so I have taken to buying different bulk lots of world coins from eBay and amazon. Sometimes I get lucky and find a few nice silvers, sometimes it's coins with under 1million mintage, sometimes it's just common BS. Guess it's just the luck of the draw with the lots.. recently I bought one that had an absolute TON of tokens In it, and these three items as well (won't call them coins just yet lol) when I run the coin scope over them it comes up saying they are "chinese dynastic empire" 1 cash coins.. I have looked around a little trying to mabey find something that can give me a list of characters to try and figure out what I got on these, but as usual I turn up nothing so I come here and ask y'all.the picture with two pieces in it both have the same exact marking front and back. And sorry about the picture quality I took them on my phone while I'm here at work, I can get better pics with my scope later.
These are chinese cash coins. They look like Kwang-Tung to me, I am not an expert though. worth less than a dollar apiece. 1892-1908 is what I have written in my collection catalogue, but I can't verify right now as I'm starting class.
Awesome thank you very much, that's alot more info than I could drag up on them..it's not as much a how much can I make off these right now as it is what can my kids do with them in 50 years.. I'm just accumulating the hoard, dealing with it is their problem when I'm gone lol
The two photos at the top appear to be modern replicas. The others are late milled coins of Kwangtung as noted. Mintage somewhere around one billion.
The last two coins are indeed from the Guang Xu emperor (1875-1908), from the Guangzhou mint in Guangdong province. Interestingly, these are machine-struck rather than cast as was traditional for Chinese cash for the previous 2000 years. The type catalogues as Hartill 22.1335. There are two varieties, distinguished by weight- over 2.8 grams was struck 1890-1895, under 2.8 grams was struck 1895-1899. Value is listed at $1. The first coin is... weird. Obverse looks like it is from the Shun Zhi emperor (1644-1661), and the reverse has the normal Manchu mintmark for Fuzhou mint in Fujian province. But I can't find a listing of this mint for this emperor, and most of Shun Zhi's reverses are in Chinese or Chinese/Manchu bilingual, not Manchu alone. Also, the way his name is written is wrong. The top character on the obverse, Shun, should start out with three vertical lines that are not connected to anything, but ton your piece the third line connects at its top to the rest of the character. Very strange, I'd like to hear an expert's take. Edit: Looks like @Muzyck beat me to it while I was typing, first coin is probably a modern fake. The wear on the reverse does look oddly flat, and a modern faker would explain the poor obverse calligraphy. Though I don't really get the point of faking a variety that doesn't exist, especially when genuine coins of Shun Zhi are available in the $2- $5 range.
Awesome awesome thank you all very much for all the replies..my big thing is I buy up a couple lots here and there from eBay (I have found the ones on Amazon tend to be junk and loaded with tokens) and then my kids and I will just go thru them a handful at a time and as we go along we put em in flips and put all the info there and log them on numista. But from time to time we run across ones like these, all three of them were in the same lot so if one is a fake them I bet closer examination will put all three as fakes.. thank you all again for the help and info
Based on what I have experienced, it is not uncommon to have modern cash type replicas mixed into lots with genuine items so I would suggest you check each one. The two on the bottom are the real deal.
I've been to China and they are still cranking out stamped copies of the old cash coins to use in Taoist and Buddhist temple ceremonies. You could put a yuan coin in a machine and get a handful of these repros to use at the temple.
