I have been collecting oriental cash coins since the day I found my first Qing dynasty cash in a junk box in a coin shop in Chicago, Illinois. That was in 1963.
Do I still have that coin? Well, yes—It's on page 57 of the collection, marked by a red arrow.
What did it cost me? Eh, ten cents, I think. I couldn't read Chinese yet, and the coin was not in my copy of the Yeoman catalog, but I was pretty sure it was Chinese. I had never seen a round coin with a square hole before. It was a cash of the Board of Revenue mint (Beijing) of the Jiaqing emperor, as I learned several years later.
It was only about 1981, after I was married and starting a family, that I began to collect Chinese cash in earnest. I had found an old copy of O. D. Cresswell's
Chinese Cash in a used bookstore in Portland. It cost me $1.50. The images of the coins were sketchy, but the text was enlightening.
Not much later I bought a new copy of Schjöth's
Chinese Currency for about $35, and finally had a numbering system I could use. I was still putting the coins in 2x2 white mylars in coin pages.
My collection really got serious however, when I bought two Japanese catalogs of Northern Song dynasty cash varieties,
Fugo Senshi, and
Kosen Daizen. I studied these catalogs and then translated and organized them with variety numbers that I later published, but for the first
ten years or more, my research, translation and organization of the rubbings and descriptive names in these two catalogs went only into my personal collection.
That collection was mounted, finally, on to 63 "boards," with the coins carefully and painstakingly sewn on, in the Chinese fashion that I'd heard about and seen in "missionary" collections. My collection has grown to at least five times the size of that original collection and is no longer sewn on to boards, but stored in envelopes in a sorter. Before I dismantled the original collection, I scanned every board, and it is these scans that I am presenting in this post.
My hope is that other collectors, especially new ones, may find these images of my first collection helpful. I wouldn't recommend storing your collections in this traditional manner, but at least it enabled me to have easy physical contact with each piece. The 2x2 white mylar storage system prevents me from easily laying out a series of coins on the table to handle, inspect, and study, and so I have found that envelope storage, with a label showing the rubbing of what is inside, works best for me.
The 63 pages below represent the extent of my oriental cash collection about 1992. It ranged from the earliest round coins to those of the last dynasty, and also included a page of Japanese cash. Click on an image of the page you want to see or download, and it will display full size.
1. Ancient China
2. Tang Dynasty
3. Five Dynasties & 10 Kingdoms
4. Northern Song Dynasty
5. Southern Song Dynasty
6. Jin and Yuan Dynasties
7. Ming Dynasty
8. Southern Ming Pretenders
9. Qing Dynasty
10. Japan
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