Antique Way

Chinese Antique Coins

There are about 30,000 different Chinese coins over a period of 3,000 years in China. They have many shapes and sizes, Since Han Dynasty, the coins are standardized into bronze items with round shape with a square hole in the center, and a rim at the edge. It is quite impossible to present such a vast amount of information in a web site, so we choose to present several hundred of the rarest types.

Bronze knives and bronze spades were common barter items in ancient China, but a bit awkward or hazardous to carry around to trade. Some of China's first coins were made to look like a knife or like a stylized spade, so that people would think of them as money, however they were too thin and fragile to be used for anything but money. The knife coin and the spade coin developed in different areas of China about the same time.

Those coins are rare and interesting examples of early coinage that was issued while the economy evolved from a barter to an monetary economy.

Chinese coin collectors have evolved a rating scale of ten. Those that are found in ten of thousand has a rating of ten, while in the other extreme, those that have known records for not more then five in the world received a rating of one. Those that exist with less than fifty are give a rating of two.

Those extremely rare ones are not listed in these references or only show up in one or two. So, being listed or not is also an indicator of rarity. Most of these are donated to the museums and hard to come by in the open coin market.

Most Chinese coin publications do include such rating, so such rating is a consensus of many collectors over a very long period. These ratings do vary with time and authors, but seldom exceed one order of magnitude. According to my impression the scale of ten system is really in exponential scale.

Hong Kong, being the gateway of Chinese antiques to the outside world, is a great resource of Chinese coins. Prof. Kai Keung Mark has been collecting Chinese coins for twenty years and would like to share with you some of his rarest collections with ratings of one or two.

All rare coins are subject to forgery, and there is no official scientific method for authentication yet. So authentication of coins is only through experience judgment.

As a scientist, Prof. Mark approaches this issue on the conservative side using certain criteria: style of calligraphy, patina, weight, metallurgy, and reliability of the source. Therefore this display can serve as reference material, point of discussion, place to meet friends with common interest.

He considers Chinese coins a good reflection of Chinese history in the areas of economic development, Chinese language and calligraphy, metallurgy technology, and social styles. Therefore, Chinese coins can serve many different interest groups.

He strongly recommends overseas Chinese to use them to teach Chinese culture to their next generation which he himself have done the same. These days, the skill to fake coins have significantly improved.

The rarer the coin, the higher the chance for forgery. From his 20 years of experience, Professor Mark can differentiate the authentic coins from the forgeries in most cases. He is developing a scientific authentication method using non-invasive surface science and advance instruments like XRF and PIXI.