Chunk of Chinese Silver

Please see this discussion of sycee at:

http://www.coinworld.com/sycee2_0228.asp

 

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His hands never leave his wrists ...

I am duly impressed and suitably humbled -- not only at your knowledge, but also at your ability to get the characters in your post.

 

Signed, sealed, delivered

Thanks! I have printed much of this discusion out for archiving in my own files.

I recently read THE SOONG DYNASTY by Sterling Seagrave and used it to put some of my Chinese banknotes from the 1920s-1940s into context. Your sycee and the letter describing it fit that history. Thanks for providing the documentation.

Michael

 

I agree the authenticity is questionable. The picture is upside down even though the text are going in 2 directions on the nugget. These four-character idioms do seem to be of modern generic newspaper/computer type font. Also notice that the first/top character is not aligned with the rest, and that happens uniformly on all 3 stamps, which is kinda strange.

However, one can use the middle character as a reference which IS upside down in the picture. The middle character is an archaic script for 萬, which means 10,000. Whether it signifies the value I'm not sure. It may mean 10,000 mil (the common denomination the time) or just a decoration as the character come to mean the idea of "plenty", sorta like how we use "million" as an arbitrary big number. Otherwise, there is nothing on this nugget that denotes it's value. In practice there wasn't really a need for inscription as people simply weighted the nugget to get its value.

The alleged source of this nugget from Taiwan gives some credibility to the piece as many people did took their wealth from the Mainland during the civil war between the Communist and Kuomintong. Items like these were less likely to survive in the Mainland during the Japanese Invasion, and the Cultural Revolution that followed.

 

Just found this "chunk of silver" on Ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Worth-Collectin...8365560495QQcategoryZ4740QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

 

Chinatown-antiquer??? I wouldn't trust anything from CHINATOWN, not even over dimsums!

 

:goofer: hey bone, how much silver is in that? looks to be around an ounce to me..

 

The one I have is MUCH smaller, only 2.8 troy oz's.

B

 

THAT BIG?! Shoot, sign me up, i want 600 of them

 

I do not want to comment on authenticity as such, since I have NO experience with these things.

But...something to note. The ingot is silver, and it was given to the museum by someone who says they got it in Taiwan in the 30's. This is all circumstantial evidence, not proof of authenticity. The museum is not attesting to it's authenticity, only the circumstances of it's purchase and the silver content.

I hope it is real - it is a great "coin" or whatever it is called.

P.S. - was Sterling the normal fineness for Asia? I know is it British purity, but maybe that practice rubbed off in China from some colonialism in the area.

 

If it has a provenance going back into the 1930's and you can verify that, I would believe it was most likely authentic. These things were only bullion back then and not widely collected.

I used to want one of these, I have a collection of Chinese cash coins from the first century AD on up to the early 20th century, but even some of those now are faked.

 

A fuller picture comes from THE SOONG DYNASTY by Sterling Seagrave. The Communist Party was nearly inactive. People -- including the Soongs (Madame Chiang's family, and also Mme Sun Yat Sen's) -- hid their wealth from the Kuomintang (KMT). In the late 1920s, the Soongs gave China a stable silver-backed currency and then Chiang kai-Shek looted the banks. For most of the 1930s and 1940s, Chiang's KMT basically counterfeited their own national currency, forcing worthless paper on the people they robbed. Through most of this, the Reds were hard to find and had little to do with this. The communists were not the good guys by any stretch of the imagination, but neither were they actually involved in the legalized looting that drove people to get their wealth away from Chiang and the KMT.

The numismatic angle can be documented many ways. For one thing, look at the banknotes of the period.

 

Here's a nice Silver sycee posted on another site. This person is an expert in the sycee field and could help on your piece.

http://www.zeno.ru/showphoto.php?photo=25445&limit=recent