These coins belong to a member of the Avoca and District Historical Society, who has a small collection of Chinese coins found by her father more than 60 years ago at the Percydale diggings, ten kilometres or so northwest of Avoca.
The coin on the upper left is the most legible.
Turn the image 45 degrees anti-clockwise. In the three o’clock position you will see the word 通 ‘tong’, which means ‘circulating’. In the nine o’clock position is 寶 ‘bao’, treasure. Reading these two words from right to left you have the word 通寶 ‘tong bao’, which means ‘currency’.
The characters at twelve o’clock and six o’clock give the date of the coin, not as a number AD, of course, but by the name of the reign period when the coin was minted. The ‘reign period’ was the name of the imperial era, a bit like ‘Georgian, at the time of George II’. This coin is from the Qing dynasty Kangxi 康熙 period (r. 1661–1722). It was a widely-circulated coin of low value.
The third coin in the grid is another example of this coin.
The second coin down dates from thereign of Qianlong 乾隆 (r. 1735–1796).
They are probably brass (copper and zinc) or copper and lead. Their value was one 文 ‘wen’, a thousandth of a 圓 ‘yuan’ (a dollar, in modern terms). The collective term is ‘cash’.
By convention the Manchu mint marks are taken to have been stamped on the reverse (tails) side. The Chinese characters are on the obverse (heads) side.
The coins have Manchu mint marks. In 1657 bronze cash coins were introduced with Manchu script on the reverse side. Many coins have the Manchu word ᠪᠣᠣ (Boo) on the left. To the right there is often the name of the coin’s issuing agency. This coin appears to have been issued by the mint attached to the Board of Revenue at Beijing.
Similar coins were found at Wagga Wagga; they were possibly used as gambling tokens.
Further reading
- Chinese Australian Historical Society. (2025, October 4). Thematic Essay: Chinese coins. Scattered Legacy. https://scatteredlegacy.org.au/essays/chinese-coins
- Chinese Australian Historical Society. (2025, October 6). Treasure: Coins, Chinese, Wagga. Scattered Legacy. https://scatteredlegacy.org.au/posts/coins-chinese-wagga
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