List of Chinese cash coins by inscription (and help requested)

Hello everyone,

Yesterday I launched the Wikipedia article "List of Chinese cash coins by inscription" which is an attempt to list every Chinese cash coin from the Zhou Dynasty until the Republic of China in 1912. This list is not the first online attempt to try and list them all, Charm.ru tried doing so during the late 1990's and early 2000's but only covered a very small part, Robert Kokotailo's Calgary Coin & Antique Gallery was the second one to try so, however this website has been "under construction" with no content additions for around a decade now, Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek tried but missed quite a lot of types (although I do have to credit it for having a great coverage of Wu Zhu cash coins), and finally Numista had their own take at it but they mostly just covered all "mainstream" types and left out all rebels, most of the Jurchen, Khitan, Tangut, and Mongol issues and most early Chinese cash coins. This is basically the first online attempt to actually be "a complete catalogue of Chinese cash coins" with lots of additional information behind an army of blue links to specialised articles including the 1st half of David Hartill's best selling book which he donated to Wikipedia in 2013. However one thing any reader might notice is that there are many images missing.

So I am also asking any collectors for help, how so? Well, if any collector here as any missing Chinese cash coin I am asking them to upload them to Wikimedia Commons and add them to the list, of course most missing types will be of the more rarer varieties but as I am asking this for coin collectors interested in Chinese coins I hope that y'all are willing to help.

And for everyone else this is a handy page to bookmark if you're ever interested in Chinese cash coins and want to identify them. ;-)
More information about particular varieties coming later.

Fun fact: In Feng Shui, Chinese fortune telling, and Traditional Chinese medicine every separate inscription and individual cash coin has separate properties, for example in traditional Chinese medicine the "Zhouyuan Tongbao" issued by the Later Tang Dynasty is said to prevent miscarriages (although if you actually believe that you need a neurologist to examine your head ), yeah it's all dumb superstition but it's interesting to learn how these cash coins are used in Chinese culture, which is also why I wrote a huge article on "Chinese numismatic charms" (as many Western collectors seem to think either that cash coins are "Oriental lucky coins"/"Chinese lucky coins" or that charms and cash coins are one and the same).



A "Zhouyuan Tongbao" for reference purposes, this image comes from the collection of Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts from the University of Southern California at Santa Barbara.

 

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A worthy effort, good luck!

Welcome to coin talk.

I have not collected Chinese coins (yet) but I am sure the folks who do here will be along shortly.

John

 

Wow! Good luck
You better slap that on a website and charge 4.99 for a copy of the list

 

This is a great project. I think a taxonomic classification key type of identification system would be great for coins. I've used some but haven't found any that are great.

 

I just looked at your page, and it is a very worthy endeavor. Most of my Chinese coins are common types already represented in your page, but I will see if I can contribute any types you are currently lacking.

 

I have started to put all of the Hartill into an excel spreadsheet to catalog my coins...not fun, but happy with each new section completed.


Edited to add - That is impressive. I know the amount of work that went into that. Just organizing and doing an inventory of Qianlong took me weeks to do.

 

Wow, thanks for all the reactions, I didn't get any e-mail notifications so I will see if I can add quotes here to reply.

@mrbreeze (I don't know how to reply to multiple people, I will just do this), concerning Qianlong Tongbao cash coins, I'm actually planning on writing a separate article about those, in fact in East-Turkestan they continued to be produced up until 1912 so some Qianlong Tongbao cash coins are fairly recent.

@Parthicus, well common types are fine too, I only have common or less common types myself from China as that's all that my budget allows (I only spend the big bucks on commemorative Euro coins and banknotes), but you'd be surprised how many minor differences there are in common types or even how many common types are simply not represented on Wikimedia Commons because people don't upload them.

 

The whole point of Wikimedia projects is that they're free and that anyone who wants to write a catalogue or do additional research can freely use it, heck I used David Hartill's £ 40,- book for most of the information, to me free knowledge is more important than profit, in fact I've seen Yahoo! Finance and plenty of websites use the images I donate to Wikimedia Commons and I don't think "oh, I could've made money off of it" I think "I'm glad that I could help those people in some way", this list is for collectors like y'all, and for anyone interested in the monetary history of China.

@frech001 have you tried David Hartill? He's kind of the writer of almost every definitive work in Asian cash coins... Well, Dr. Wybrand op den Velde for Korean cash coins, Dr. R. Allan Barker for Vietnamese cash coins, and no English language work on Ryukyuan cash coins exists, but he's kind of the authoritative figure (in fact he donated half of his book to Wikipedia just for collectors like us).

When it comes to cash coins and the internet there used to be many websites but most are gone, I imported literally all of the rest (information-wise) like Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek, Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts' East Asian Cash Coins, John Ferguson's Sportstune.com, Etc. To Wikimedia, now Wikimedia is the #2 website as Zeno.ru remains the top website on cash coins. But unfortunately most information is offline so those interested in cash coins are forced to spend money on books, that's another reason why I wrote that list so people can have a basic understanding of them, but as Wikipedia is not a (cash) coin catalogue I deliberately didn't add any catalogue numbers, but such numbers are acceptable on the English Wikipedia and would be helpful for numismatists, I just don't own most catalogues.

 

This is a good initiative. Happy to load what I have. As a Chinese coin enthusiast I tried to collect coins that span at least each era. However you missed a few such as the spades

 

I didn't "miss spades" I deliberately left spade money, knife money, Etc. Out as this is a list of Chinese cash coins and not cast coins, in fact there are these Wikipedia articles that cover other Warring States period coinages:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Chinese_coinage

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_dynasty_coinage

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spade_money

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_money

David Hartill donated the first half of his book (which became the "Ancient Chinese coinage" article linked above) and that one covers these other ancient Chinese coinages in extraordinary detail, however the list I made is very specific to Chinese cash coins.

 

Done. I have uploaded some missing pictures in my collection.

 

Thank you so much, a lot of your pictures are of very rare coins.

 

Thanks.. I do have some very common coins but you already have them posted so no need from my side already

 

Kind of, but the common variants have a lot of calligraphic and minor differences most people wouldn't notice, I'm actually busy with a project making Wikimedia Commons into a great place for numismatic researchers by having as much images of Asian coins (both machine-struck and cast) for them to research, I know that it won't reach the scale of Zeno.ru anytime soon but if you're ever interested in posting your entire collection their (or anyone else reading this) then you're free to do so. It's just a shame that there aren't that many "cash coin contributors" to Wikimedia Commons, there are for Japanese cash coins just not the rest.

Suffice to say your rare pieces are of exceptional quality and your contributions will help illustrate them for many people.