Ancient Chinese Coin?

I need some help on this one. Like dealers, I have a junk box I have tossed stuff into when I got a hold of something I didn't know what to do with. I just came across this Chinese coin from that box which I think may have had some kind of tag on it that said "Sung Dynasty", which I guess would make it more medieval than ancient. I know that Chinese coinage was very conservative with design change so, perhaps it is earlier as in Han or Chin, but maybe later as in Ming. Anyway I would like to properly identify and catalog it. The reverse has no image at all. Anyone here who collects or knows Chinese coinage, can you help out here? Thanks a lot.

 

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Paging @AnYangMan

 

Looks like:
Emperor Shenzong
1078-1085 AD
1 Cash
Yuan Feng Tong Bao

https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces34504.html

 

Spot on! One thing interesting about it is that it’s not in normal Chinese script. Instead it is a more archaic seal script. Most Song coins came in three main types: one in seal script, one in caoshu script (also known as running or grass script, like cursive), and regular script (also called clerical script).

 

My son really likes Chinese cash coins and I have learned a lot while working to identify them with him. I'm still not good enough to really tell between seal/grass/normal script.

 

Interesting coin! It still uses seal script characters, which are much more sinuous in stroke style than modern Chinese. Seal script was pretty ancient by the Song Dynasty, but I guess it still had enough prestige to use on coins.

 

Thanks. That's it. I wonder how I got it in the first place

 

Thanks for your reply.

 

A question: Are coins of this period readable to people for whom modern Chinese dialects are a primary language? Showing this coin to an elementary school boy who collects coins can produce an ID 'Yuan Feng' and he is aware of things like the meaning of tong bao etc. To some of us, it is mostly a mystery. If you showed this coin to the man on the street in Beijing, would he be able to read it or is the language more like Latin is to English speakers?

 

I have several friends who are fluent in Chinese and they have been able to read some of the coins I have shown them with varying degrees of success.

 

Interesting question. I had the experience once of having a coin from the Middle East. it was written in Kufic script, the writing of early Islam. I wanted to know what it said. As it turns out I had a student in my class who had emigrated from a Middle Eastern country whose father was an imam. While the student could not read it his father gave me a complete description of the coin. It dated to about 100 AH or early Eighth century AD. I also had a large, thin Asian coin that I showed to an Asian friend. Fortunately I showed it to the guy, not his mother or wife, and that was indeed fortunate as it was a token from a, well, gentleman's club on the West Coast of the US circa 1900 with an explicit advertisement as part of the legend.

 

I really like that coin, @kevin McGonigal ... The older script really makes it interesting. Since I have been to China (all over), numerous times, I am fascinated with their rich, and LONG history. What strikes me is that, generally, their writings can be read / recognized over millennia ! Also, I found it fascinating that even today, although folks in various areas of the country spoke a different language, they could READ the same script and communicate! My personal experience is between Chinese of the South speaking Guangdonghua (Cantonese) and those of Middle China speaking Pudonghua (Mandarin). They may not understand each other verbally, but would it write down during meetings, and they understood each other perfectly.

Fascinating to a Westerner, exposed to many verbal languages, but our alphabet system does not universally translate like written Chinese to the Chinese people.

I have a CHARM coin from the Song (Sung) Dynasty that I can toss out...

Not an official currency coin, but it has a HORSEY!


China
Song Dynasty 10th-12th C CE
AE Gaming Token
29mm 6.42g
Zhui Feng Zhi Ma -"horse following wind"-
Horse galloping left
Classic Chinese Charms Vol I 2149

 

Kevin, What is the diameter and weight of your coin?

I ask because there are other coins that use the same characters but were different sizes - mostly smaller - and issued in different places and times.

Just yesterday I was cataloguing some of my own 16th century Vietnamese copies of this same coin - they are know as Nguyen Phong Thong Bao (the Vietnamese names for the characters - the Vietnamese used Chinese characters for their own language before switching the the modified Latin alphabet created for the by French Jesuit priests).

Mine are small coins, know as An Phap group, and are 21-22 mm diameter, 1.4-1.9 grams. Northern Song Yuan Feng Tong Bao (YFTB) coins, by contrast, will be roughly 24-25.5 mm diameter and 3-4 grams.

Yours uses the N Song design of Yuan, which differs from the Vietnamese design of Nguyen, so I doubt yours is an An Phap group coin. But if particularly light or small it could be something different from a proper YFTB.

SC

 

26 mm and 3.5 grams

 

Almost certainly an original N Song Yuan Feng Tong Bao then.

SC

 

Depends on the script. Seal, Li, Regular, and Slender Gold scripts are easily read by modern Chinese speakers. Grass and running script would be much harder

 

Damn. Like the son thing too

 

Classical Chinese is quite a bit different from Modern Chinese, and needs to be studied separately. But coins tend to have short noun phrases, which don't change much. Chinese words don't really take inflections, which makes them well suited to a character-based system, and more resistant to change over time than many languages. The pronunciation does change over time, and varies widely with dialect from place to place. But characters tell you almost nothing about the pronunciation, only the meaning. So even if we don't pronounce them the same way as ancient Chinese people, we could in theory still read them. (Kind of like how in reading Shakespearean poetry, some stuff which rhymed for him doesn't rhyme for us anymore. We can still pronounce it, but it looks a bit strange to us.)

I know Japanese better than Chinese, and one reason Japanese pronunciation of Chinese loan words sounds so different from modern Chinese is that they are based on a pronunciation from a long time ago (many words came over with the writing system around 500-700 AD). And the dominant dialect of Chinese at the time would have probably been from a city much further south than the Beijing dialect which is considered "standard" today.

As for reading different scripts, it's kind of like reading cursive in English today. It's falling out of use somewhat with people using computers more and handwriting less, but it's still a thing an educated person would be expected to be able to do. I use a very "block" style of writing characters, because that's closest to the printed characters I learned from, so I imagine my writing looks rather childish. The seal script is genuinely quite obsolete, and I think most native speakers would have trouble reading it except for the simplest characters.

 

@The Eidolon, I can't speak an honest word of Chinese, in any dialect, although I have an uncle who spent a couple of years teaching English in the "Yale In China" program, from which he learned fluent (...by me, anyway) Cantonese. Your point about the lack of inflection in various Chinese dialects, over the expanses of geography and time, has to make me wonder: is that at least partly because the language, as spoken, is tonal? ...In other words, along the lines of how different tonalities can make an ostensibly identical word morph into another one, can that affect grammatical connotations as well?
...If it wasn't suitably apparent, it's more like, Honest, I Really Don't Know!!!

 

The tones definitely distinguish one word from another, but the part of speech is more determined by word order than tone. Chinese has many dialects. Some have a few tones (Mandarin has 4 or 5, depending on how you count). Cantonese has about twice as many. I've heard Guilin has a relatively flat dialect with fewer tonal variations. All use the same grammar though. I don't think it's related to the degree of inflection really.

You know how in English, some tenses are designated by helper words ("I go" to "I will go") for future tense and others by conjugation ("I go" to "I went") for past tense? in Chinese, it's almost all helper words and no conjugation. So 去 qu (go) becomes 去了 (went) or 在去 (am going) 要去 (will go). You just add one more character to indicate the tense. Even if everyone pronounces those characters differently, you can still understand that they mean the same ideas. Except for a few word choice differences, you can't even really tell what dialect something was written in just by the characters.

When a heavily inflected language like Japanese uses Chinese characters, they had to make a lot of adjustments to make it work. They ditch (most of) the helper words and invented a whole new phonetic alphabet made of simplified cursive characters to indicate the conjugation sounds. So for "taberu" 食べる (to eat), the first Chinese style character tells you the meaning and the next one or two tell you the sound of the conjugation (present tense). You can change the phonetic characters to change to 食べない (not eat) 食べた (ate) 食べたい (want to eat) etc. But the root character stays the same. Japanese is also not very tonal, but I think that's just a coincidence.