Reflection for TWO: Coins
Frank van den Boom
11 April, 2024
This article is originally written in Dutch and automatically translated by DeepL AI.
Fresco puts down the table in front of me a tray, a kind of felt tray with twenty coins on it, in four rows of five. The coins all look alike: there are (I think) Chinese characters on them, there is a square hole in the middle, and they are all weathered. I can guess that these are ancient coins that must have something to do with the history of Asia. Fresco begins to explain the purpose of his lesson:
How can I use these coins to learn something about the history of China without great prior knowledge?
I indeed cannot pinpoint what period or region these coins would be from. I am not a sinologist, but a classicist. I have taken the necessary lectures on Greek and Roman coins, although that too was several years ago.
You are so used to just being allowed to look - I see the marks, see the hole, see the weathering - but then Fresco asks if I want to pick up the coins as he explains to me that the coins are from 17th-century China. Immediately they turn from museum pieces into real money. I now let slip through my fingers what the Chinese people threw over the counter hundreds of years ago. I smell the coins, nothing strange. My first thought: the wear on the coins comes from frequent use, as coins do. Yes, almost right, indeed they did not sit together in a piggy bank, but they have been passed around and found in different places in China and in different types of soil, so the wear on each coin is different. Some are copper rusty turquoise, others black brown.
Then we turn to the signs on the coins. Fresco guides my eyes past all the signs. "Do the coins all have the same character?" No, each coin has a differentand different character. Could it perhaps describe the value? Or could they be slogans from the maker? Fresco asks me to turn the coins all over (it hadn't occurred to me that Fresco had tactically laid them all out with the coin side up), and on the obverse side I see that all the characters are the same. So is this a message from the ruler? That's how I knew it from Roman times. And indeed, Fresco translates for me what it says: Kangxi tong bao, "may this coin circulate freely under the reign of Kangxi." Suddenly those coins can tell what period specifically they are from, and there is a person - an emperor note - associated with the coins.
Fresco now asks me to look even more closely to see if all the signs are the same. I hold the coins in front of my nose. "Yes, I think so, right? You can see here and there that what should have been dots has become a line, but that doesn't seem significant to me." Fresco tells me that those are precisely the important details! Apparently an awful lot of coins were counterfeited at the time, and the emperor had a new coin printed every three months with a minuscule adjustment, so they could distinguish their coins from counterfeits.
I get to turn the coins over again, and Fresco asks me to look more closely at all these different marks. It takes a while, but then I notice that the sign on the right side of the coins does not look like Chinese as it does on the left side. "That language is Manchu, the language of power," Fresco tells me, "why do you think it says Manchu AND Chinese?" I am reminded of the power of language and its influence on cultural formation. "They wanted to let the people know there were Manchus in power?" I am close, but apparently I am not fit to be emperor! I really need to put myself in Kangxi's shoes. The Manchus were just a small people, ruling over the huge Chinese-speaking people, so no one could read that Manchu. If you could read it then you could measure yourself against the court, AND it was an additional means of prevention against forgery, because nobody could write those characters!
After making a few more discoveries, Fresco puts the coins away again. It is a shame that in museums we are not allowed to touch, smell, hold things before our eyes, because how much more do you learn from an object if you are allowed to?"
Frank van den Boom
The Netherlands
Designer of object based workshops for Things That Talk.