Chinese cash coin sword

I have shown the sword to several people over the years and never found anyone that new anything about it. I will have to dig it out and start researching.
Rick

 

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It's more of a novelty or souvenir from Asia. It's like a pet rock or the talking stuffed bass you saw on TV last year. If you ever get to Rome one day, you will find tons of things made from old world coins and excellent copies (Not marked either) of older Roman silver coins. The same around the ruins of Greece.

 

Just kind of neat to me because I have had it for 50 years. Rick

 

Might make it to Rome someday - I am retired now and plan to go back to England and see what I remember or recognize. Will maybe get over to Italy as well.

 

In both countries its illegal to import those coins back to the US, so I would never advise anyone buying anything over there. Especially around tourist areas, I here most of the "coins" are fakes anyway.

 

Yes and no. For most of its life, the cash coin circulated as one cash. Most of the markings were just telling who the emperor was. It was not until the Northern Sung dynasty that multiples of one cash were produced, and even then a two cash was double the weight of a one cash.

But, like almost all copper money, the copper in the coin was not quite worth the face value, so in that way all chinese currency from the very beginning was fiat money. In the west we made gold and silver money basically at metal value, but the copper was fiat. People always forget that Europe has had fiat money forever as well, since almost all copper that was ever struck for coinage has innately been valued higher than the copper in the coin.

What is funny about cash is how dramatically they illustrate inflation. Back then inflation was declining coin weight. I can tell you over the course of 2000 years when in the course of a dynasty a coin was struck. All of them start off full weight, then slowly they start to shrink. By the end of the dynasty the coin only weighs about half of what it started at. Then they have a revolution, and the new dynasty immediately issues full weight coins, and the cycle starts all over again. Its simple the nature of government to steal from the people it seems.