Beginner in Chinese

[mmarotta]

Ten or 15 years ago, when I started collecting, I got into "everything" and as I was working for a Japanese company and could read some characters, I bought cash and attributed them, and actually, did some dealing, buying lots, culling out the fakes and then selling those for I Ching Tosses and jewelery. But that was then... and time goes by .... (play music) ... and now, I am signed up for a class in Chinese History. So, I am starting again.

 

I contacted Frank Robinson.

I know of Scott Semans, and a few years back, bought some Tibetans from him, actually.

 

I just bought Schjoth and Fisher's Ding.

 

One problem with Chinese cash is the immense tonnage of modern products. When I was with the Japanese, the company treasurer was a young guy who had majored in Chinese in college and worked for the company in China. He told me that stuff like this is made afresh every night, pickled in "pig brine" to give it "color" and then sold to tourists at The Great Wall.

 

So, the books mean more to me than the coins.

 

The class I am in supposedly moves quickly through the centuries to land in the 20th for the last half of the class. For that, I have other resources, including banknotes and coins of less doubtful heritage. Although...

 

As it happens, working at a college, I have access to these four-decimal chemistry lab scales, a rack of them in a prep room. And I weighed my Chinese dragons from Chih-Li and they run quite a range... It's kind of scary how nice a coin can look and then weigh up light.

 

Comments? Questions? Criticisms?

[gxseries]

I'm afraid the "easiest" way out to learn Chinese is to brutally learn / memorize the characters (there are some generic way of telling what a character could possibly mean though)

 

Even after learning it for 6 years, Chinese characters are just nasty to write and if one just doesn't practise writing it for months - you just forget it sooner or later. The cruelty of Chinese characters is that one cannot write it in any form whereas in Japanese you can get away by using hiragana / katakana. To top up with the difficulty, learning modern Chinese will not help one out with the traditional format of Chinese characters which was used in the past (simplified has only existed since 50 odd years!)

 

The reason why I avoided Chinese numismatics was the mad number of counterfeits that float around in the market. This had been made worse probably by these recent 20 years or so, when tourism in China became popular and more unwary tourists are buying "coins", bringing them back home and hence increasing the supply of such.

 

In fact, the quality of counterfeits are said to be so high that some people are speculating that in the future one might have to send it to a lab to determine the genuine age.

 

However putting all the cruel aspects aside, perhaps identifying Chinese characters against the other Asian languages like Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, it probably seems almost impossible, but I think it's doable after learning perhaps 100 characters. A site that I would recommand is actually a Russian site, http://www.zeno.ru

[mmarotta]

Personally, I do not find the characters that difficult.

 

I agree that fakes are a major problem.

 

I knew about zeno.ru and thanks, also, for the reminder.

 

Aside from Frank Robinson and Scott Semans, who would you look to as knowledgeable dealers in this area?

[gxseries]

Besides these two dealers, no, not that I know of. Besides, counterfeits are not only in mass volume but high quality in China that experts themselves get puzzled.

 

One of the most notorious example is porcelain, as in the example in this site: http://www.cityu.edu.hk/puo/bulletin/issue17/e1704.html Appearently one of the major hiccups was made by an expert while lecturing in an university and talked about how the clay texture of genuine porcelain differs from modern day because of wrong ratio. An extremely smart crook took this to his advantage and dug out the clay samples that were found around the area of the discovered porcelains and created high quality porcelains that the expert himself got trouble. Thanks to such incident, it seems that ways to tell counterfeits have either been kept in secret or the technological level of counterfeiting has sped up greatly.

 

There is another good reason why I have avoided Chinese coins more than ever before:

 

 

This is a spectularly well made counterfeit die that popped out from sellers from China at one stage. At what price did I purchase it at? 20USD or so. Perhaps it had no value to the counterfeiters because it had a great die crack in it. The greatest joke is how Heritage Gallery seemed to make a major hiccup.

 

http://cgi.liveauctions.ebay.com/14140-Jap...591175531QQrdZ1

 

There is no way such dies were shipped out of Japan AND the structrual design of the die looks awfully similar to the copy that I have.

 

After seeing all these episodes - I admit, I have lost the will to continue collecting Chinese coins. I used to have a fair amount but packed them all up somewhere locked up. Perhaps one day I will photograph them, but I know I have been disappointed too many times. I know that I have a counterfeit 1998 1 yuan coin some time ago, which is just a miserable 12 US cents...

 

Best of luck to you Michael - I have my white flag up so long ago that I forgot it must have turned black

[ccg]

As you mentioned in another post, this is one of those area where if you have a dealer locally who handles some of the material, that'd be the best way to learn - from seeing and handling.

 

Unfortunately, there are a number of dealers out there who unknowingly sell fakes because they've never seen what a genuine piece should look like.