8 Japanese and Vietnamese Coins Circulating in China: A Numismatic Approach
8 Japanese and Vietnamese Coins Circulating in China: A Numismatic Approach
复制标题
8 在中国流通的日本和越南硬币：钱币学方法
DOI：
10.1163/9789004288355_010
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发表时间：
2015
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Werner
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Burger;Werner
In my travels around the Far East for the last 45 years I was always on the lookout for old strings of cash. A small tag attached to many of them indicated when they had been strung up. Thanks to these tags I have a pretty good idea of what coins were when and where in circulation. This article is a very short introduction into the history of Japanese and Vietnamese coins in China. In the Nara and Heian Period, in the 8th to 10th centuries, Japan copied many aspects of the administrative system of Tang China and also cast its first coins, but after that time it stopped casting and relied totally on imported Chinese coins, primarily Northern Song ones. This is also the reason for why the first scholarly study of Song coins was done by a Japanese, Yamada Kōshō 山田孔章, in the early nineteenth century. 1 These so-called tōraisen 渡來銭 (‘imported coins’) were not sufficient to provide the Japanese markets with cash, and therefore, in the following centuries a whole industry of shichūsen 私鋳銭 (privately cast coins) developed, primarily copies of Song and Ming coins, but cast from Japanese-made mother cash. Naturally their size and quality deteriorated quickly. The Japanese then called them bitasen 鐚銭,‘bad coins’. When the Tokugawa 德川 Shogun came to power in 1603 they inherited a real mess in the field of monetary politics. In 1636 the Tokugawa started to build mints and from 1661 until 1863 they cast only one single type of cash, the Kan’ei tsuhō 寛永通寶, called so because they were created during the reign with the motto Kan’ei (1624–1645). Once there were enough of them available the Shogun forbade the use of all other coins. From Kan’ei 10 (1633) on Japanese were forbidden to travel abroad, unless authorized by the Shogun. Japanese merchants then found out that they could make a profit by buying the old, now