Is My 1898 Chinese Kiangnan Dragon Dollar Real?

27.38g is unusually heavy for this type. Technical weight of 1 mace is 3.78g which means that it should be around 27.2g. However most examples from this era are often underweight at 26.7g. My three examples are consistently underweight at 26.1 to 26.7g. Some mints were more notorious for making their coins underweight - Kirin stands out to be the worst. From memory Kiangnan is also one of them.

I also do have some concerns with the edge. I acknowledge that it could be just the photography that makes it difficult to tell what I am looking at.


Unfortunately there are a lot of counterfeits of this type and this is one of them.

https://www.ngccoin.com/resources/counterfeit-detection/top/chinese/16/

 

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Well, for $80 I paid for the lesson, but they offered me no explanation why. At least I got another cool PCGS box out of it...

 

@JickyD ouch! Well like I said, these are highly counterfeited, heck the chinese are making them out of real silver as well. If I was to buy one, has to be NGC/PCGS slabbed already

 

No kidding. I really was split on this coin. I guess it just shows you how hard it is sometimes with counterfeits. For that kind of money I really just wish PCGS would take the time to give you an explanation of how they came to the conclusion, without that, they could say whatever coins are fake that they wanted, not that they would, but solely that they could...

Sorry it's counterfeit.

 

Actually they cannot be too generous in giving reasons why it is a counterfeit. Counterfeiters got too smart and have used online forums and sites to look at how to improve their wares. This was first noted in early 2010s.

 

It is to the TPGs benefit not to reveal how they can tell. They make money on very good counterfeits that are detectable. It drives submissions, but they catch them and don't have to worry about paying out the guarantee. Why would they teach others to identify these coins?

 

That's a very valid reasoning I completely overlooked.