does anyone know a website where I can find information and images of Vietnamese cash coins from the Tran Dynasty?
Toda is the standard book and it is online here. There's also a page to help with identifying them. Here's the Tran dynasty page.
Toda is not the standard book, in fact it's horribly obsolete with many mistakes, Barker is the standard book and Toda's works and images are also already on Wikimedia Commons, see here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...m_Annam_and_its_minor_currency_(Trần_Dynasty) Barker is a better work but I can't view his book online. As for Zeno all the images from there (as admitted by the person who uploaded them there) were taken from either Dr. Barker directly or auctions that sold off his cash coins.
I'm currently working on this list on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_cash#List_of_Vietnamese_cash_coins and I really can't seem to find any free images of Tran Dynasty cash coins online to place there. :-(
I agree, Barker is best. Heck, his is even the best book for explanation on how the Chinese, (and later others) cast their coins. Great writeup of the process in the beginning of his book. Highly recommended.
Yeah, I even spoke to the man and he seems like a really knowledgeable person (obviously since his book is #1), as much as I like Hartill, in his book "Cast Chinese coins" he barely explained how cash coins were made, Lars Bo Christensen did it better here: http://chinesecoins.lyq.dk/casting/casting.html
I stand corrected! Sounds like I'll have to pick up a copy of Barker sometime if I want to really understand my couple dozen Annamese cash.