I have three Tao Kuang cash coins which appear to be milled rather than cast. According to Hartill, these coins were milled at Yunnan mint only, yet one of my coins has a Board of Works mint mark, another has a Board of Revenue mint mark, and the reverse of the third coin is blank. Is there anybody in the USA who is an expert on cash coins and is willing to offer an opinion?
There are several forum members with moderate to great knowledge, but you probably won't get any useful opinions until you post pictures. In addition to the small minority of genuine milled cash coins, there are tons of fakes pouring out of the Chinese counterfeit factories on a daily basis.
Dao Guang (Emperor Xuan Zong) reigned 1821-1850. (Tao Kuang is the same name using the older Wade-Giles romanization system.) I am not really familiar with Chinese struck coins but, as far as I know, the first machine-made Chinese coin was a trial-minted silver coin in 1882. The first machine-made cash coins were struck in 1886. Therefore, there could not have been any authentic struck coins made as early as the Dao Guang era. Images of the actual coins, as hontonai suggests, would be most helpful. Gary
An update on this: The coin with the BOW mint mark is a tourist fake. The BOR marked coin was actually made in Szechuan and is very collectible. The blank reverse may have been a trial or set-up piece. I recently found another one.
The blank reverse may be a trial, but I have seen many fakes with blank reverses. I would need quite a bit of convincing before I accepted such a piece as authentic. Trial pieces by their nature are rare, (usually only need to make a couple to test something), so finding another REALLY throws up red flags for me. These are tough coins, since they were not made for that long, are still cash, but most cash collectors do not have that much experience with them. As others have said, they are highly faked, and since they use the real metal in them as opposed to silver fakes, can be quite difficult to authenticate.
Well if Frank authenticated them, I would believe him too. He is not foolproof, but I would accept his position by default unless I had a reason to doubt it. For anyone else wanting to get into ancient Chinese coins, google Frank Robinson coins. He is a great dealer in these, possibly the leading US dealer. Great guy, he also wrote a cool book, (now OOP), called Confession of a Numismatist Fanatic, (I think, or similar). Great reading if you can find a copy. I have two copies, so I can read it twice!
