I've been trying to ID this coin which I thought was Japanese, but I couldn't find a match. I did a Google image search and the top match is a Wikipedia page for a Chinese coin called a Yongle Tongbao from the early 1400s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Tongbao However, another match goes a Numista page for a Japanese 1 mon from 1587-1608. https://en.numista.com/221649 Both coins pictured look identical to me. So which is it?
Well, they're both right. This design (Yong Le Tong Bao) was first issued in Ming China. It was later copied in Japan (read in Japanese as Ei Raku Tsu Ho) from the 15th- 17th centuries. The Japanese versions seem to be scarcer than the original Chinese. As for telling the two apart... that's above my pay grade.
Both are correct. Did you read the wikipedia article, or just look at the picture? The coin started as a Chinese design. But the Japanese were trading with the Chinese. So they started making the same coin with the same design. I don't know how to tell the difference between the two, but the articles you linked clearly state that original Chinese pieces were made for trade, and Japanese pieces were made to imitate.
You got me. I just skimmed the beginning of the Wikipedia page as I was checking other sites to see if they agreed.
As for Wikipedia, a lot of shenanigans happen there. I know a guy who adds "content" to their posts, and they are hilarious. Eventually Wiki discovers them and removes them but they are hilarious while they are still up.
That's too bad because it's often the first listing at the top of a search. I feel the same about trusting the AI summary that shows up at the top when you search for anything. It might be right but I'd check the primary sources for anything important. Recently my son was trying the AI chat feature on a site, maybe Google. He was asking it baseball questions and it was giving him answers that were a few years out of date. He was asking who the best player on the Cubs was an it was saying Marcus Stroman, who got traded to the Yankees in 2023 I believe and might be out of baseball now.
We can go into great detail about why Wikipedia is one of the best references on the internet.... but people doing things like that really irk me.
It's for this very reason that wiki is not a paramount source for internet research. At least in my book. Any site that allows its' content to be added to or edited by anyone with a keyboard is subject to suspicion......
It's a good source of basic knowledge, at least on topics that aren't particularly controversial so there's no effort by people to push a certain point of view on things. It actually is a good way to start research, get you acquainted about the topic, then look at what they cite as sources for the article and look those up. I remember when they kept insisting that the Sacagawea dollar was the first US coin to depict someone still alive... something contradicted by their own articles. I mean, first of all, they were counting models that artists used, and if you count those... almost all US coins would count. If you don't count models, Sacagawea was obviously not still alive in 2000. Even if it somehow counted... it would not be the first, quite a few coins predating 2000 also depicted people still alive at the time, and they weren't just an image based on a model, but representative of the actual person. The real funny thing? When I tried pointing this out to the person that kept reverting my edits, they claimed that the Wikipedia articles that refuted the claim... weren't reliable sources lol. Well fine, I cited Red Book and many other sites that proved there wasn't any way to come up with any criteria that would make the Sacagawea dollar the first US coin depicting someone still living, I don't even know where anyone got that idea. (Fun fact: we don't even in fact know what Sacagawea actually looked like... there's no existing portrait of her done by someone that actually saw her during her lifetime. All portraits are basically just guesses at what she may have looked like. The portrait on the Sacagawea dollar is based on someone from Sacagawea's tribe that posed as the model for it.) Sorry if that was too long a detour from the topic at hand but I always remember this from the one time I attempted to correct a mistake in Wikipedia. BTW they did eventually remove the claim about the Sacagawea dollar anyway.
