Peace Dollar vs. Trade Dollar

If you had to choose one or the other to collect, which would you choose, would you choose the Peace dollar or the Trade dollar?

 

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Peace for sure. A beautiful design as opposed to the Trade which is sort of "clunky".

 

I love both designs but the peace dollar edges it for me.

 

peace dollar here, the 1921 high relief is a beautiful coin

 

Peace Dollar is one of my favorite coins of all time

 

Ill go with the Trade....i was always a fan of those potty dollars

 

The peace design is much more appealing to me than the trade, so I vote peace.

 

For once one of these polls of your is with two beautiful coins...lol.
I'll go with Peace dollars.

 

pie is showing his colors proudly, bravo good sir!

 

Haha, yes he is!

Peace all the way.

 

trade dollars are tough to collect because most are fake. It's really a type coin for most, but people can assemble a peace $ set without it costing more than a house....unlike Morgans !

 

For the price I prefer Brit trade dollars. I voted Peace. Gorgeous luster.

 

Bump

 

peace all the way.

 

Trade dollar. The peace dollar is one of the poorest struck and ugliest designs.

 

+1
I go with the trade dollar

 

I've never seen a trade dollar yet that I've liked enough to buy it.
Guy

 

peace man :thumb:

 

Old "fakes" or new? In Silver or not? My no savvy; s'posey belongy pukkha or no!

For the Chinese, the trade dollar was a bullion coin ; heavier touch coins were favored and lighter discounted accordingly. Chinese didn't care who minted what, "fake" is in the eye of the beholder. What mattered was weight & purity. Better chop-marks traded at a whopping 30% premium, accord to one monetary expert of the day (c. 1880.) See Alexander Del Mar, Monograph on the history of money in China, from the earliest time sto the Present (1881) - Pg. 27

The foreign silver coins which circulate in China are chiefly Spanish and Spanish-American pieces-of-eight and dollars and American dollars and trade dollars. As these pass from hand to hand they are "chopped;" i.e., marked with the seal or stamp of the owner, by way of endorsement; hence the name of "chopped" dollars. When these chop marks become so numerous that there is no room on the coins for more, the coins are reduced to bullion. The value in cash of the various foreign dollars circulating in China is much subject to local caprice ; a given coin being worth more or less in one city than another. It is also subject to caprice in favor of particular coinages, a dollar of one date being worth more or less than one of another, although both may contain the same weight of silver. Something of what is regarded as caprice is, however, due to difference in weight and also to the presence of a small proportion of gold (from 2.5 to 5 per cent.) present in some silver coins, particularly the Mexican and old Spanish, 80 a fact due to the imperfect assays and mintages of Spanish-American silver. The presence of this gold is certain to be detected by the superior acuteness of modern Chinese bullion dealers.81The most extraordinary anomaly in valuation relates to the Spanish Carolus dollars, or more properly speaking, pieces-of-eight. These coins are no longer fabricated by the Spanish mint. The supply is thus very much limited, whilst the demand, due to Chinese habit, being uninterrupted, it has occurred that they have gone to a premium of 30 to 40 per cent, over Mexican dollars said to contain an equal amount of pure silver.82 I am, however, inclined to believe that these pieces-of eight contain more silver than the Mexican dollars.

Imagine the dizzying forex table of "Silver Dollars" with lower-weight 'reals' and heavier weight 'fakes'. Better fakes have the correct weight were competing bullion-coin for the period. I'm surprised no one mentions this historical fact (i.e. contemporaneous forgeries were specie) rather than assume all 'new Chinese fakes' designed to fool modern collectors.
http://www.cointalk.com/t63412/

This is invariably complex, to an absurd degree. See A glossary of reference on subjects connected with the Far East ; Herbert Allen Giles (1886) p.218
SHROFF: — silver expert; a corruption of the Arabic sarraf "banker," common in every Indian town. Chinese employed at banks and large mercantile establishments to check all dollars which pass through the hands of the firm, and eliminate the bad ones. These men pretend to distinguish three classes of good dollars, of first, second, and third qualities; but this "mystery" of the art has been exposed over and over again by their rejection of certain dollars as first class which had been paid out as such perhaps on the previous day. Shroffing schools are common in Canton, where teachers of the art keep bad dollars for the purpose of exercising their pupils; and several works on the subject have been published there, with numerous illustrations of dollars and various other foreign coins, the methods of scooping out silver and filling up with copper or lead, comparisons between genuine and counterfeit dollars, the difference between native and foreign milling, etc. etc. The best of these is the ******.— See " The Shroff's
Mystery," China Review, vol. III, p. 1;

Here's another mention of the shroff, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Vol 57 (1878) by John Comprador (p.418); his capriciousness is evident.

One day I drew some money from a leading house on which I had a letter of credit, and the amount was paid to me in Mexicans. I took my bag of dollars to my hotel, and locked it in my trunk; and a few days later, wishing to obtain some notes of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, I proceeded with the bag aforesaid to that establishment. I stated my wants, and the shroff was called to count my dollars. He rejected about ten per cent, of the coins; and on my expostulating, and saying that I received them from Blank & Co., and was sure they were all right, he turned on me a look that would have appalled a royal Bengal tiger. I felt my heart sink in my boots, and would fain have crept under a walnut shell had there been one handy. Not a word did he utter, but his contemptuous look and equally contemptuous wave of the hand spoke a couple of folio volumes (calf bound) at least. Verdantly I appealed to the meek foreigner to whom I had addressed myself at first; he spoke not, but shook his head to the extent of a small octavo, which said,"The shroff is king here, and I am nothing." Angrily I gathered up my money, swept it into the bag, rejected the notes which had been counted for me, and walked out of the place. Then they knew me for a novice; a year's residence in the country would have taught me to bow to the decision of the shroff as to that of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the land.


English-minted Carolus Dollars c.1800 are a similar phenomenon. For want of useful specie in trade, these "counterfeit" coins were minted in London to circulate in the United States, Caribbean & China (then, everywhere.)