DescriptionThe story that goes with these coins is that the Khan was conquered by the Chinese Qian Long Emperor, who demanded a certain amount of tribute. The Tribute was paid in coins shaped like the tears of the defeated Khan and his people.Xinjiang (Sinkiang, Hsin Kiang), translates as “New Territories.” In the Chinese sense, that means since the Tang Dynasty, when they first sent troops to try to control the Turks. When I was a kid it was called “Chinese Turkestan” in the Yeoman catalog, which was all we had back then in the early 1960s. The Turks, during the coinage era, were in the Central Asian, Islamicized, trimetallic economy, in which gold, silver, and bronze were all under the direct purview of governments. As opposed to China proper, where the government supplied tokens for use in the market and let the private interests handle the bullion supply. Therefore, the early government issues of silver coins in the Turkish zone, because that’s what the local market wanted.The big player in East Asia is China, of course. Then there is Japan and Korea, throw in Mongolia. South of China and east of India, but not including, for the most part, the islands to the east, is what we call Southeast Asia. From Burma to Malaya there have been a series of local kingdoms for about 2000 years. Russia, with its Asian Siberia, doesn’t count. We consider it part of Europe.By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.
