Featured ∷ Sumatran coins imitating Javanese coins imitating Chinese coins ∷

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Hello everyone! I've had these two odd tin cash type coins for awhile now and am finally getting around to researching them more and wanted to share the odd story of the coins' history here. These two examples are part of a scarce series of tin coins in the style of Chinese cash coins that were apparently minted locally in Palembang, Sumatra in present-day Indonesia.

If you're familiar at all with Chinese cash coins then you know that they are easily recognizable by the square center hole surrounded on all four sides by a Chinese character that together reads the legend, usually the emperor's name or the name of the era of rule. The hole in the center allowed for merchants to put standardized amounts of the coins onto a closed string for quick and easy trading.

Northern Song Dynasty
Emperor Renzong | 1023-1031 CE
AE Cash | Regular Script | H#16.76
Obv: Tian Sheng Yuan Bao (top-bottom-right-left)
Rev: Plain​

The Chinese style of coinage proved to be incredibly successful throughout Asia, slowly leaking into other regions such as Central Asia, Vietnam, Japan, Korea, and the island kingdoms that would become present-day Indonesia.

Despite having deep trade connections to China dating to well before the Common Era, the island kingdoms of Southeast Asia seem to have rejected coinages in their domestic markets until close to the end of the eighth century when a standardized gold and silver coinage begun to be produced in central Java by the Mataram Kingdom. Despite their presence, the adoption of the native coinages seems to have been slow with their earliest uses being primarily taxes and religious gifts. Quickly, the indigenous coin series evolved into smaller denominations, likely to aid its use in small and medium scale commerce. They also spread outside of Java to influence new coin types in Sumatra and the Philippine Islands.

Mataram Kingdom of Central Java
c. 800-850 CE
AR Massa (slightly scyphate) | 2.44 grams | 12mm
Obv: Incused sandalwood flower
Rev: Nagari ma character​

The relatively high value of the precious metals in Javanese coins proved to be of varying usefulness and it is believed that the Javanese markets never fully adopted the gold and silver coinages for day-to-day transactions. The silver and gold coinages of Java continued to be issued for centuries by various successor states after the Mataram Kingdom fell in the eleventh century.

It wasn't until close to the end of the thirteenth century that a major shift occurred. The Majapahit Empire of Java appears to have quickly abandoned the gold and silver coinages of the earlier kingdoms in favor of imported copper Chinese cash coins. The exact reason for the shift is never stated but it was likely to help ease the adoption of coins into day-to-day domestic transactions. Around 1350 CE the shift appears to have been complete according to both a local inscription called the Jaya Song Decree and foreign sources commenting on the currencies used in Java.

As the copper cash coins of China flooded into the markets of Java to replace the now-abandoned native gold and silver coinages the same trend seems to have been replicated in Sumatra and the Philippine Islands as both appear to have abandoned their own indigenous coinages around this time. In fact, Sumatra may have adopted the Chinese coins in part earlier than the Javanese. The archaeological site and cosmopolitan trading port of Kota Cina in North Sumatra is believed to have been established and peaked from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, yet there were no native Sumatran gold or silver coinages discovered at the site. Rather, thousands of contemporary Chinese cash coins were found indicating that the copper coins were readily accepted and used for trade at the Sumatran port during that time.

On the Chinese side, the production of copper coins had long been on a decline by the time the coins were adopted widespread in Java and Sumatra. The Chinese reportedly reached their top coin production in 1073 CE and had slowly tapered off before drastically cutting back mint capabilities during the Yuan Dynasty of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The markets of Java and Sumatra at this time were entirely reliant on imports of Chinese copper cash for their coinages and so, when the amount of available copper coins dried up, the markets were quick to react. Locally manufactured coins directly copying the legend from earlier Chinese coins were probably the first cash coins cast in Java and Sumatra. The mints, both official and unofficial, in present-day Vietnam and Japan also directly copied legends from Chinese coins under similar pressures. It's unclear when exactly the practice began in Sumatra or Java but it appears to have been well established by the time European colonial powers settled in and better documentation about coinages occurred.

The locally manufactured cash coins of Java and Sumatra were further debased from the relatively pure copper of China with tin and lead sourced regionally. This made them quite brittle, short-living, and relatively valueless, resulting in many local coin types being neglected or not reported on by the Dutch or British.

Eventually entirely new inscriptions and coin types were invented and minted in the form of cash coins. The locals minted inscriptions ranging from blundered Chinese script to local Arabic legends, geometric patterns to entirely blank coins with rims. Many of the types seem to have been produced in small numbers and in crude conditions and went unnoticed by outside numismatic materials. Some types were produced with state authority and in large numbers such as the pieces issued by the Palembang, Jambi, and Siak Sultanates.

In the last decade or so there has been an influx of new coin types reported from the region, primarily the city of Palembang in Sumatra. The Musi River that flows through Palembang had been dredged and uncovered tens of thousands of lost coins of unimaginable range. Many new types emerged thanks to the preserving quality of the mud river bed that had protected the coins over the centuries. One newly documented type is this odd cash coin with four dots on each side of the inner square.

Tin Cash | 0.92 grams | 18mm
Four dots on each side arranged as uneven squares



Tin Cash | 0.64 grams | 18mm
Four dots on each side arranged as diamonds​

In the place of the standard four Chinese characters lies four sets of four raised dots. They are sloppily arranged on either piece. The first coin example shows much higher relief on both the dots and the obverse rim. The dots on this piece are arranged as uneven squares facing the center hole. The second piece appears much more crude but the design appears to have been arranged a bit more elegantly and even than the first with the dots arranged as diamonds facing the center hole.

The website Zeno, accurately dubbed the "Oriental Coin Database", has an entire category for the cash-like coins of Southeast Asia. You can view it here. The category has grown to include nearly one thousand examples of the locally manufactured types and it has led to Zeno quickly becoming the de facto standard catalog for the region's coinages.

Within the top category lies the "Palembang Sultanate-style flans, with geometric arrangement of dots" folder that displays my coin type. There are currently ten coins of the type uploaded to Zeno (soon to be twelve) with some close to my first example, such as this, and others closer to my second type, like this one. All ten coins on Zeno are believed to have originated from the Musi River of Palembang.

One coin on Zeno, or should I say one comment, stood out and suggested that the Sumatran coin was based on a Javanese coin type known from the region of Central Java near Surakarta. This coin type is known by only a few examples but has strong cross symbols in each quadrant with smaller raised dots between them. There are even fewer examples of this Javanese coin on Zeno but placing a couple of them together allows the evolution of the coin from the cross type into the odd dot type to be seen. Below is a transition display from the earliest example of the Javanese type to the degraded Palembang type showing only the four sets of four dots.

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The exact origin and age of the Javanese prototype coin is unknown and it remains even more uncommon than the Sumatran type which has now become known due to the Musi River findings.

Dutch historians Netscher and van der Chijs included the Surakarta type in their De Munten van Nederlandsch Indie published in 1863. Despite the early Dutch report, the Javanese coin type seems to have been forgotten from numismatic references and sources until fairly recently. As subsequent numismatists and authors failed to locate and describe the coin again, it is quite possible that the Java cross series was minted not terribly long before 1863. Furthermore, the Java coin series was probably short lived due to few examples surviving, or at least circulating, in the numismatic community.

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Commentators and posters on Zeno are quick to point out the similarities of the Sumatran coin types and the coin flans used by the Palembang Sultanate, leading to the suggestion that they were minted concurrently. As the tin coin production of the Palembang Sultanate peaked in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, this timeline would potentially line-up with the Sumatran and Javanese types being minted around the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, with the Javanese coins possibly being older.

The Sumatran type is curiously included by David Hartill in his A Guide to Cash Coins under the section of Bangka Island tin tokens (gongsi), albeit without much detail. He lists the coins as GCC #3.226 and writes that the Sumatran type "appears to belong" along with the Bangka gongsi tokens.



In the end, not much is known about these coins but there is still a surprising amount of information available and I had a fun time digging deeper into it. I am not aware of any other coin types that imitate an imitation coin but if they exist, I want to know about them! If anyone else has any coin imitations that followed surprising paths of evolution or anything else noteworthy or related, I'd love to learn more.

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There was a fairly recent article in Coin World that stated that the reason why Asian coins have holes is that they were cast from a mold. When the coins were broken out of the mold, they were put on rods to facilitate filing the burrs off the edges from where the molten metal was poured in.

 

That's a good call out! The square holes definitely helped ease things in the manufacturing process. Although as you can see from my top example, the local cash coins from Sumatra and Java frequently retain part of the cast sprues on the edge due to poor work conditions and little care towards quality apparently. Such leftover metal on the copper cash from China would be a significant error but with these types it is the norm.

 

Change through successive imitations is a common pattern in the early middle east and India. Page through Mitchiner's Oriental Coins and the Values series to see Greek portrait and standing-god types evolve into patterns of lines and dots.