Hello, I'm LegendP, and I'm in need of some help. While looking through a box of junk, I happend to stumble across a coin. Problem is, I don't know where it's from and what exactly the coin is. So I come to you all, in hopes someone can help me figure out what it is. This is what it looks like:
Hi LengendP and welcome to the forum. I believe this is a China Republic of Taiwan 1 Yuan coin Y#536. Not sure of the date but they were minted between 1960 and 1980. Jimbo
Hi LegendP. Welcome to the forum. Your coin is indeed listed in the Standard Catalog of World Coins as Y#536, a copper-nickle-zinc coin from Taiwan, aka Republic of China. There is a highlight from your lighting that makes it difficult to read the first character of the date, just to the right of top dead center on the obverse (your lower photo), but I thought it was a 6 before I looked up the coin. The final character of the year is clearly a 3. Turns out that the only year ending in 3 in which the coin was minted is Republic Year 63 (1974), so that confirms my initial guess. There were more than half a billion minted that year, and the catalog value for an uncirculated example is 50¢. It's always tough to grade a coin from a picture, but my guess is that yours is at least MS64, which might be worth a little more than catalog to someone trying to put together a high grade set, even recognizing how common it is. (The zinc content in the coin does frequently contribute to a degraded appearance. Yours is one of the nicest I've ever seen.)
