First Chinese square hole coin

[MangoAve]

Saturday was a beautiful day to get out. Mark, Robert, and I planned to hit a few cellars. They had three spots planned out, but there ended up being four cellars total. I had the final cellar planned. We hiked in for a ways to find that some of the trail and a few spots had been chewed up by equipment. It looked like they might be planning to log soon. It made It really hard to swing with all this chewed up brush on the ground. I didn't get any luck at the first site. There wasn't much hiding there, or that could be found due to conditions. The second site was good to Robert, but I still hadn't found anything more than the surface find of the shells. They were prob just recently dropped by the hunter we saw, who made a mention of wearing bright colors. He was hunting woodcocks. I Expected something to be hanging like a duck from his shoulder. There'd need to be like four of those birds for one meal. Lol.
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The third site was also desecrated by the equipment. Idk why as I didn't see much out there worthy of logging. They took the equipment over the stone wall, although it didn't appear as if it was done this time. It did look like the wall was toppled in that spot years ago. Finally I managed to find a folded dandy near a tree. And the bigger iron piece which looks like the pedal portion of a stirrup was in this field too.
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I took a close up pic of the designed scalloped edge.
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On the way out my eagle eyes caught a cellar that we completely missed on the way in. We gave it a quick look but nothing looked appealing there. It was a small site. So we drove out to my spot, watching these old mill sites and cellars off the side of the road. We parked and hiked in. It was moderately far into the woods, unfortunately we weren't the first ones there despite NO iron on the rocks. In one of the back fields I managed a domed button . We gave the site our best shot. It was a huge site, too. The mangled iron square shoe buckle came from this site. It was right on top of the ground next to a tree maybe 10 ft from the cellar walkout.
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Then we went to the spot they had picked me up at in the morning. We were allowed to detect there. The owners are a friend and it is near an old section of town. They told me there was a nearby carriage house that is no longer there. The neighbor looks like it was the older house, despite them having the same build date on the prop card. Out back I got a WM rogers spoon with almost full plating on it. I took a pic of the bowl having a design as I was unaware that the back side of a spoon bowl would have a design. I have not looked into the meaning behind the monogrammed G, but there were other designs with such.
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The front yard is what made the whole day. This is my second Chinese coin, but my only one having the square hole and being from colonial times. I was able to match up the symbols and I could come up with the Shan-Lung Boo Ciowan coin. The mint name is Pao-Ch'uan. The primary series of the Ch'ien-Lung was minted from 1735-1795. There was speculation on the Shan-Lun variety. It is believed to be a commemorative coin thought to have been issued mostly between the ruler's abdication in 1795 to his death in 1799. There are Hartill records stating it was used as early as 1770 at some mints in Sinkiang Province. I can't tell the bottom character which defines it, however the top character (which first I ignored and thought it was the 1875-1908 variety) matches closer to the second variety. So happy to have a coin like this. Maybe, Drew, this will be my good luck charm to carry around at future hunts.
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[Digger Don]

Congrats on that 1700s Chinese coin. I give you a lot of credit, the last time I tried to date one of those things, I almost went crazy. so many characters to look up.
Excellent find. :congrats:

[Tony Two-Cent]

Congrats on your first Chinese Cash Coin! :clapping:

That is a terrific find. Good job with the ID. :thumbsup02:

[Digger_O'Dell]

Congrats on your first Chinese square hole coin! Gotta admit that's really cool! Sounds like you've had some nice sites to hunt, too bad about all the destruction done to those places. But on the bright side, it may open up other swinging room you didn't have before.

[MangoAve]

Correction. Once I looked again at the coin I realized I was trying to match the exactness of the top character with subtle things to the two choices. The first machine struck Chinese coins were 1889 or 1890. That's why any milled coins have differences in the exact length of lines. It is actually NOT the Shan-Lung coin which appeared as early as 1770, but is in fact the primary series coin the Ch'ien-Lung which means it can actually be as old as 1736. There is a nearby church as old as 1703. The 'commemorative' Shan-lung coin had only two horizontal bars on the bottom character but with two upward lines. The original coin had the three horizontal bars (only), which the coin I dug has. Here's a non dug example and maybe you can see the tiny difference that made me swap back.

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Congrats on that 1700s Chinese coin. I give you a lot of credit, the last time I tried to date one of those things, I almost went crazy. so many characters to look up.
Excellent find. :congrats:

Thanks, Don. I'll admit it was a lengthy research. There are a few sites online that I found which provided most info right away. Calgary coin was the one that helped the most. The homeowner first went to eBay under the Chinese square hole coin and came up with a few hits. Mostly the sellers had no idea of anything about the coin they were selling. The 3 o'clock symbol matched (but the 12 o'clock didn't). I didn't realize as he was using his phone, but mine was taking forever to load webpages. I was certain the house next door on the same prop was a colonial, but the assessor says different for some reason. He came up with the date of 1908 provided by one seller. Of course, that's because the Ch'ing Dynasty went all the way from 1644-1908. That's why the symbol on the 3 o'clock matched. As well as the back. The back symbols are for the mint which were used like the reales throughout a few hundred years. I found info that the Te Tsung was from 1875, that's what I originally went with. Knowing this is a newer country, there shouldn't be anything older than the Ch'ing Dynasty so it was easy to rule out the earlier dynasties from like 600AD or 1300AD. The first hit was an Australian site where the guy found a coin on the shore thought to be from trading. Then things just fell into place. First time going through something is always an issue.


Congrats on your first Chinese Cash Coin! :clapping:

That is a terrific find. Good job with the ID. :thumbsup02:

Thanks, Tony. Happy to finally say I got something like that, even if it isn't a high value item. Ref my reply to Don on the ID. I know a few languages, just not Chinese. Not sure why English is thought to be hardest (yes there are some idiosyncrasies) when there are only 26 characters to learn.


Congrats on your first Chinese square hole coin! Gotta admit that's really cool! Sounds like you've had some nice sites to hunt, too bad about all the destruction done to those places. But on the bright side, it may open up other swinging room you didn't have before.

Thanks, Chris. Every once in a while some good sites come along. I think I got a nice one waiting. And finally after months I got a smaller coil that will work on my machine. Four coils later.. wow. First two NEL and one Whites were bad coils, all sent from the same distributer. Maybe now I can hit these sites harder. Idk, we'll have to see about these wooded sites with the logging and destruction. There was more room opened up, but they used one of those farm tractors with the rotating blade attachment. The same one they use on the side of the road for cutting back brush. So it kinda just shredded the stuff and its now on the ground making it tougher to swing around. Then logging. Idk what it will look like by next year. Logging actually decimates these places. They leave logs to rot. They leave the brush which covers potential swinging area. Maybe we can get lucky and they do things right.

[wisconsin digger]

Great find and great research. Never found a Chinese coin, old or new. Nice job WD

[OxShoeDrew]

That's great Jim! I don't remember your other cash coin, without hole? I still carry my aluminum "7"...I don't know if you noticed but I found an aluminum "4" this week :lol:
I have a 60 acre permission adjacent to my property that was recently logged :(

[Digger_O'Dell]

Lately I think most logging practices are cleaner. The hammer bar mower is efficient and about all that can be used in those applications. I used one on the farm growing up, worked great! But my point is that because of the environmental concerns yh ed logging operations have been cleaning up after their cutting is done, and later they come in and plant new seedlings.
I did cringe when you said they drove over a colonial wall! Probably some minimum wage kid or drunk guy driving and being irresponsible. Hope it's the exception and not the rule.

[MangoAve]

Great find and great research. Never found a Chinese coin, old or new. Nice job WD

Thanks, WD. They aren't the easiest to come by, but hell, I've found more of them than I have Spanish Reales or GW buttons. :lol:


That's great Jim! I don't remember your other cash coin, without hole? I still carry my aluminum "7"...I don't know if you noticed but I found an aluminum "4" this week :lol:
I have a 60 acre permission adjacent to my property that was recently logged :(

Yeah. The other one was a big brass coin like the size of an LC. I added the link. I took a few pictures as I thought they were just zoomed, which might have made you not remember seeing the big coin, but I think it just has to do with the fact you didn't dig it and it was almost a year ago. Hard to keep track of your own finds let alone someone else's. I did see that #4, however, I didn't pay any mind to it for some reason.

http://www.americandetectorist.com/forum/showthread.php?18820-Mixed-hunt-Saturday-in-the-wind-and-a-short-hunt-back-at-a-permission-house&highlight=chinese

I'll add the pics I took anyway, and two better examples I found from online. Idr if I determined then, but I am certain the OLD one is a 5-cash Hu Poo 1905.

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Non Dug examples.
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Lately I think most logging practices are cleaner. The hammer bar mower is efficient and about all that can be used in those applications. I used one on the farm growing up, worked great! But my point is that because of the environmental concerns yh ed logging operations have been cleaning up after their cutting is done, and later they come in and plant new seedlings.
I did cringe when you said they drove over a colonial wall! Probably some minimum wage kid or drunk guy driving and being irresponsible. Hope it's the exception and not the rule.

They might be. Maybe the remnants I see are from like 20-30yrs ago with the old rotted logs. And this time was just preparing for the process. I have not seen any seedlings planted by the workers. Just whatever happens to grow from the seeds of nearby trees that fall on their own. The one time I know they did plant something, was when they redid some landscape to a 350 year old ferry landing. SMH that they had to do anything to it at all.