大明泉谱 Dà Míng Quán Pǔ

Today I received a copy of the catalog 大明泉谱 Dà Míng Quán Pǔ from an eBay Chinese coin dealer with whom I have had successful dealings in the past. This catalog is a well organized variety catalog of the cash coins of the Ming Dynasty, including the coins of the Southern Ming loyalists, and the Rebels at the close of the dynasty.

Anyone who has used my Northern Song Dynasty Cash Variety Catalog would have no trouble navigating around the 大明泉谱 Dà Míng Quán Pǔ. Though the text is Chinese, if you have used my catalog and become familiar with basic Chinese coin terms, it will be easy to use this catalog as well.

Incidentally, I recommend the Penpower Chinese Expert (Pen Scanner version) as a quick way of getting not only translation but also pinyin romanisation of Chinese coin catalogs. This product is excellent, and their customer service (phone assistance getting it to work the way you want it, if you’re having a problem) is also ‘over the top.’

The edition of the Dà Míng Quán Pǔ which I bought here is certainly going to be a useful addition to my collection of Chinese cash references, and I can’t wait to use it in further classifying and understanding my collection of Ming era cash. I do have a problem with it, however, and that is, it is not an original edition, but probably a hacked version. It appears to be a high-quality photographic copy of the original book (probably scanned to JPG or PDF and then reassembled and published in a sturdy soft binding). This is evident from the occasional missing text of some of the notes at the bottom edges of a few pages, where the text exceeded either the edge limits of the scanner or the printer that reproduced the pages, and a line of Chinese text is simply missing its lower half.

I found that authentic copies of this book are available on the web, and they have a hard binding with an illustrated cover. Here is a source of the authentic edition. The cover on my copy is as the images show, a plain red cover with a faint photocopy image of the four characters that constitute the title of the catalog, 大明泉谱. It’s probably because the book is a cheap knock-off that the eBay vendor does not give the actual title, but calls it ‘Chinese Ming dynasty cash coins collect Book.’ The dealer is not being dishonest, but until the book arrived and I could inspect and research it, I didn’t understand what the description meant: ‘this book is private print, not public publication.’ Now I understand, it means, the book is an unauthorized copy. No matter, except for the occasional cut off note text on a few pages, the overall quality, even for being a copy, is excellent.

I just noticed that this dealer has also listed another cash catalog copy, this one for the cash coins of the Qing dynasty reigns Kang Xi, Yong Zheng, and Qian Long. This is apparently a Japanese work, as the text, I notice, is in Japanese. Having just discovered it, I don’t know what the original edition is called, or if it is even available.

By the way, this dealer also sells an excellent Kai Yuan variety catalog, and a copy version of the excellent catalog 北宋铜钱 Bei Song Tong Qian, which is also available in a hard bound original here. This last catalog is by far the best I have seen and is a worthy acquisition for anyone who is serious about collecting and studying Northern Song dynasty cash.