Here is one I bought right before my self imposed coin purchase ban, (well.....more of a strong suggestion really). Like the Kai Yuan Tong Bao with tamgha, its a cash like coin made in Sogdia, (in this case in the city of Paikend near Bukhara), under the rule of the Chinese. This is kind of the second type of cash coin made. If you remember the first one, it simply copied the obverse type of the Tang dynasty Chinese, and placed their own tamgha, (symbol), on the reverse. Well this one, instead of copy chinese letters, replaces them with four local tamghas in the chinese symbols place. Just thought I would show this to anyone who liked the first type, as it shows the progression of taking chinese style coins and making them their own. Like other Sogdian cash pieces, you can see how the center hole was not cleaned out. Chinese coins always have the center hole cleaned out, since they used this square hole intricately in the manufacturing process. The Sogdians, though, did not know how this was done and was just copying the shapes. Heck, there are even Sogdian cash pieces where the center hole is completely filled with metal.
I always assumed the clean Chinese center was because they stacked coins on a square stick and filed the outside edges as a group. That may be a wild guess. I only have one Central Asian cash. I have it IDed as Ramchitak of Samarkand and realize the reverse is worn away (traces show if you tilt it just right). These always sell for more than I'll pay (possibly to you).
Yours Doug is an example of the next stage of Sogdian cash, where they replaced the tamghas wish Sogdian script letters. This is the biggest amount of Sogdian cash, with the script or script and tamghas on them. I have quite a few of these, (including a couple examples at least of your coin), and this is why getting examples of the first two types, the Kai Yuan and Paikend types, was important to me, to show the progression. The prices of these used to be very high, but in the last couple of months there seems to be a LITTLE more on the market. Used to be sellers would have 15 chach bronzes and one or two cash coins, but sometimes there are about as many cash as earlier bronzes on some auctions. BTW if you want the Smirnova reference for yours I can look it up Doug. I have her 1982 standard for the series at home.
