User:Donald Trung/Websites about Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms (is Wikimedia now an inferior Primaltrek?)

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Chinese cash coins from every major Chinese Dynasty.

There are many websites about Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms, and with this edit (Mobile 📱) I’ve imported literally every page containing information from Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, why? Primal fear 😱 (and no, not primalphobia), over the years I’ve seen many websites on Chinese cash coins pop up with lots of information and wonderful images, most of these websites now unfortunately don’t exist anymore and as time passes by not that many new websites on either Chinese cash coins or Chinese charms have come by, is this a bad 🙅‍♀️ thing? Maybe, it’s certainly bad that most older websites have disappeared but a need for a lot of websites containing basically the same information isn’t always helpful (though I would advocate for it on the virtue that if one of these websites would cease to exist that others would continue thus the information would continue to be accessible online. Several years ago while looking for information about Korean cash coins and found Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, at the time the Wikipedia article listed almost no information, but that was to be expected from the English Wikipedia at the time as very little information on cash coins existed, then one day David Hartill donated half of his definitive book 📖 “Cast Chinese coins”, this book single-handedly replaced all preceding reference works on Chinese cash coins both in detail and in depth. After that I started relying on the English Wikipedia again for information about Chinese cash coins. Sometime later I found Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts’ web-page on Ryukyuan cash coins (University of California at Santa Barbara) and decided that one day I'll write ✍🏻 an article about Ryukyuan cash coins on the English Wikipedia, so I bookmarked 🔖 both websites and… years passed… but one day I found the free time and wrote that article but the details around that and subsequent expansions and article creations and my motivations I have already well documented, what hasn't been documented yet is the evolution of websites about both Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms on the internet, and how I now have officially not only supplanted them… but replaced them, largely. Here I wish 🌠 to explore if in fact Chinese numismatic websites have been replaced either in part or wholly by Wikimedia.

As I’ll mostly be exploring the availability of English (and French 🍟) information on Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms online I simply can’t stress enough how important David Hartill’s donation to the English Wikipedia was in this respect, in fact on Lars Bo Christenson’s http://chinesecoins.lyq.dk/ the main page 📃 even links prominently to this Wikipedia article (while he also links to Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek), in fact around this same period in time ⌚ many prominent websites of Chinese cash coins started treating this article as an extension of their website and other than Gary Ashkenazy no other person has attempted to try and tell a more complete story of the monetary history of China online. As I imported basically all the information to be found from every website on Chinese numismatics both major and minor it’s only natural for Wikimedia right now to be the best website to find information on both Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms... Well.... Yeah, it actually kind of is, almost every website on Chinese numismatics lists historical background near most major categories of Chinese cash coins, charms, amulets, and talismans and with an army of blue links it's really easy to link 🔗 to pages with more detailed information on those subjects, and in cases where almost none to no information was previously available I imported all. So now let’s smoke 🚬 a big cigar[a] and explore all the websites on Chinese numismatics.

This page 📃 also explores why Wikimedia Commons is so important for “the last missing information” and why and how you could help too with this by uploading images of Chinese cash coins, charms, amulets, and talismans to Wikimedia Commons.

Background (404 galore)[edit]

As the years passed I have learned one thing about websites on Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans.. They expire, in fact if you want information you'll either have to jump deep in the archives of various coin forums (by doing things like this and this, by people like this Skinny Rooster 🐓) or be doomed to read 📖 information that won’t be there when you rely on it a couple of years later. In fact that issue has become so prevalent that only a couple of major websites are still extant. In fact very few people still seem to be writing ✍🏻 about Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms outside of Zeno.ru, in fact some posts in a coin forum here and there seems to be the only search 🔍 results if you look for information about Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms, what’s even more disappointing is the fact that 75% of these refer to books that are only available offline and the 25% either refer to a website that no longer exists or “the Big 4” (Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, Vladimir Belyaev’s Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru), John Ferguson’s Sportstune.com, and/or Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts’ East Asian Cash Coins), by virtue I’ve already imported all information from the first two websites into Wikimedia and all the images + information from the other two, so even if they would “go dark 🌑” the information would be preserved, so yeah, my two main motivations for all of these edits (1) the simple fact that information on Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms online is scarce, and (2) where it information does exist it’s very likely to “disappear” as time ⌚ progresses.

The Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru) was launched in 1996 by Vladimir Belyaev to provide a global platform for collaboration for anyone interested in Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms, this mission actually was mostly successful as it attracted the comments from many experts in their respective field, in 2003 the Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru) was superseded by the Zeno Oriental Coins Database (Zeno.ru), this website has now become the de facto “central website” for people to share (high quality) scans of not just Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms, but “related subjects” as well. As I had stated before my (short-term) goal 🥅 for Wikimedia isn’t to become “the all-in-one website for Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms” but to be “the only website you need alongside Zeno.ru for information about Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms” a goal 🥅 we just reached. As the main reason I even set this mission was because several websites I used to rely on for information about Chinese cash coins and Chinese charms simply don’t exist anymore... Well, information about Chinese cash coins, before User:Baomi asked me if I had more images of Chinese numismatic charms and later about the copyright © status of some images from the Etnografiska Museet I had zero interest in the subject, I knew that Gebruiker:Quistnix collected them and liked them more than actual (Chinese) cash coins and I was very much aware that Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek was mostly about “educating people about Chinese culture/taking a journey through Chinese culture with (the power of) Chinese charms”, and upon further inspection literally every website about Chinese cash coins and even David Hartill's definitive work “Cast Chinese coins” seems to reference these Chinese numismatic charms so I thought 💭 “why not write ✍🏻 a little bit about them?” to myself... This would open up a whole new world 🗺 of content I didn't forsee.

At first 🥇 I started reading 📖 about Chinese numismatic charms, note that prior to this I had viewed Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans as “dumb superstition” and although I still see the usage of Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans as such, as a narrative device to tell the story of not just Chinese culture but every detail of the daily lives of Chinese people with they're amazing, you can learn about their religion, their desires, what they viewed as important, their sex lives & sexual activities and positions,[b] how they viewed their relationships (including friendship, which according to My Little Pony 🐎 is magic), how their education system looked like and worked, which Gods did what, every mythological creature 👻, what they feared the most, what they found to be auspicious, what they found to be inauspicious, how traditional Chinese medicine 🏥 worked, literally everything Chinese is told in one way or another through Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans, in fact Chinese numismatic charms were so prevalent in the daily lives of the Chinese people that the moment you were born you were given a lock 🔒 charm around your neck and after you died 💀 special burial cash coins were placed in your mouth 👄.[c] As these things were involved in the daily lives of the Chinese people from the cradle to the grave (literally) since the Han Dynasty until today (in the Republic of China on Taiwan, among overseas Chinese, in Hong-Kong and in “China’s Little Brother”, Việt-Nam) it’s not surprising that they also reflect all these things into the smallest of details. Chinese cash coins also tell the story of China’s history, but mostly just its economic history, the cultural values of the Chinese aren’t reflected in its money 💴, at least not before the Guangxu Era.

Although I really don’t want to start collecting Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans myself but did develop a strong 💪🏻 interest in covering literally every aspect about them I have grown to understand why literally every website and book 📚 that covers Chinese cash coins also covers Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans, it’s also inevitable as Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans are an evolution of Chinese cash coins that occurred in the Han Dynasty and even today the tradition of Chinese cash coins survive as they’re actively being used as “Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans” and in Feng Shui literally every different cash coin has its own unique properties so writing ✍🏻 about one without writing ✍🏻 about the other simply does the reader a major disserve, for example Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek is a website about Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans but also gives a full overview of most Chinese cash coins and their history, while the Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru) by Vladimir Belyaev is about Chinese cash coins but covers Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans to the extend that their name is CHARM.RU. As Vladimir Belyaev’s Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru) was created in 1996 the online Chinese numismatic journey to get here took 22 (twenty-two) years to complete, and at this point we're still not there. Lars Bo Christensen has the largest online collection of Chinese cash coins and with his help Wikimedia could literally in one go become “a full Chinese cash coins catalogue 📇” effectively rendering 99% of all preceding literature obsolete, of course anyone else with a collection similar to his could simply donate their images directly but I can’t stress how vital the Lars Bo Christesen Collection could be to the end-goal, it would instantly make the dependence on Zeno.ru effectively obsolete, when it comes to online collections of Chinese cash coins images the Lars Bo Christensen Collection is far beyond unmatched, however his website lists only a token number of Japanese, Korean, Ryukyuan, and Vietnamese coins and Bamboo tallies, and unlike literally every other website on Chinese numismatic charms no images of Chinese numismatic charms, previously that was something I actually respected about him. As time progressed since the launch of his website Gary Ashkenazy (Hebrew: גארי אשכנזי) started his Primaltrek / Primal Trek website (http://primaltrek.com/) and David Hartill donated the first half of his book to the English Wikipedia, both of these are prominently linked on its mainpage. Lars Bo Christensen’s website contains very superficial information regarding Chinese cash coins in general while in other areas such as how they were manufactured contains even more information than David Hartill’s Cast Chinese coins book 📖. As both all the information from Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek and David Hartill’s Cast Chinese coins are imported to Wikimedia in their entirety the lack of illustrative images is painfully obvious, the addition of the John Ferguson Collection did little but added a basis for complete coverage of Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans and gave an opportunity to allow for a “two-systems model” of categorisation on Wikimedia Commons and a justification to add “exemplary images” to the FULL list of symbols, hidden meanings, hidden messages, and rebuses on Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans.

As the majority of my personal collection actually includes commemorative € 2,- coins as well as commemorative issues from the Royal Dutch Mint, general exonumia, and banknotes from all over the world 🗺 this specialisation in Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans on Wikimedia actually might not make that much sense, but it’s not the surplus of information but simply the lack thereof that inspired to start writing ✍🏻 about them. It’s the fact that the German Wikipedia lists literally every commemorative coin issued by West-Germany with a high quality image accompanying it that there’s simply no need to write ✍🏻 about that. When I started writing ✍🏻 about Ryukyuan cash coins on the English Wikipedia no information on the subject existed there, the Japanese Wikipedia is actually extremely detailed when it comes to Japanese cash coins. The Korean Wikipedia has... Ehhh... some coverage of Korean cash coins but the strange thing is that unlike with other countries who have a strong and well-established tradition of coin collectors and other hobbyists where definitive collectors’ guides and numismatic clubs can identify every variant, every fake, every fantasy, and in fact just about every coin, the coverage of Korean numismatics is done by the governments of North-Korea and South-Korea, respectively.[d] In fact I wish 🌠 to write ✍🏻 a page 📃 like this about websites that cover Korean cash coins but as Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek is effectively the only one (and now by extend Wikimedia) other than the Bank of Korea 🏦 (South-Korea) I will mostly cover Chinese cash coins, information about Korean numismatic charms is even more scarce but that’s to be expected as in Korea they were only for the Yangban bourgeoisie as opposed to the Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese traditions which extended from the lowest of the homeless to the Emperor himself. Websites about Vietnamese cash coins are... Well, there is either one (Dr. R. Allan Barker's Sudokuone) or two if you count Sema's Art-Hanoi which only includes Eduardo Toda y Güell’s Annam and its minor currency as well as some images of Nguyễn Dynasty cash coins, both are fully imported to Wikimedia (see: User:Donald Trung/How Sema (or User:Pyvnet~commonswiki) indirectly made Wikimedia the number 1 website on Vietnamese cash coins). As all of these traditions were based on those from China and the Chinese tradition dates back a millennium over the rest (and in case of Việt-Nam they had been a Chinese province for over a millennium so there was neither a separate culture nor monetary system to compare to quote Eduardo Toda y Güell from his book 📖 Annam and its minor currency “Nothing else could be expected from a country which has no real civilization of its own, but is only a reflex of China in everything relating to art, religion and government.”) there simply is a lot more to cover, and fully completing this will inevitably cause the coverage of related subjects to expand.

With the advent of a new era of Western coverage online Chinese numismatics we could divide it in 3 (three) parts, (1) the pre-Primaltrek Era or the Charm.ru Era (1996-2011), this period is marked with the launch of many websites about Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans with the launch of Charm.ru signifying the start of this era. This period is characterised by lots of websites containing a relatively small amount of information on different sides and aspects of Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans, this era also saw the launch of Charm.ru in 2003 and was marked with a lot of real world 🗺 experts on Chinese numismatics coming together online to collaborate and this only expanded with Zeno.ru, during the later stages of this period almost all smaller Western websites on Chinese numismatics started to disappear and archived traces of them were exclusively preserved on Charm.ru and Zeno.ru (or now by searching 🔍”User:Donald Trung/” on Wikimedia Commons because there is no such thing as “too much back-up's” and the long list 📃 of “404’s” below will stress that importance), as this era came to an end the majority of websites on Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans were fully retired with only Zeno.ru currently being active, at the end of this period experts stopped collaborating online and although full collections such as the John Ferguson Collection from the United Kingdon of Great-Britain & Northern-Ireland and the Lars Bo Christensen Collection from the Kingdom of Denmark were enough to work with as references, many aspects of Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans remained uncovered. What started as an exciting and hopeful era ended with an exodus from the internet of experts and a retirement of all but one website. (2) the Primaltrek Era or the Gary Ashkenazy ( גארי אשכנזי) Yoke (2011-2018), this period started with the launch of Primaltrek / Primal Trek in 2011, the online culture around Chinese numismatics has changed to focus more on the offline than the online, where once 🔂 stood an army of websites existed only inactive archives directing people to what now are “404’s” or “404’s” themselves, the archived websites included Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts’ East Asian Cash Coins, John Ferguson's Sportstune.com, Vladimir Belyaev’s Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru), and Lars Bo Christensen’s Ancient Chinese Cash Coins. Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek itself was a refreshing new take on Chinese numismatics, rather than depending on Western reference works Gary Ashkenazy used Chinese and Korean reference works and greatly expanded the Western coverage of Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans covering subjects such as “flower (Rosette 🏵) holes” in Chinese and Korean cash coins (such as the one minted by the Pukhan Mountain ⛰ Fortress), “turtle shell holes 🐢”, creating a whole system of understanding ancient Chinese culture, religion (including mythology), and languages through Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans, Gary Ashkenazy ( גארי אשכנזי) created an overview of Chinese cash coins never seen online before, one that even rivals David Hartill's Cast Chinese coins. Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek was also the first online Western work to give an extensive coverage of the monetary history of Korea, but the coverage of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese numismatic charms is basically lipservice, only slight less than what Wikimedia covers over these subjects as of writing ✍🏻 this. This era also marked the crucial event that kickstarted in the next, the honourable David Hartill donated half of his book 📖 “Cast Chinese coins” to create the English Wikipedia article w:en:Ancient Chinese coinage, prior to this the English Wikipedia articles about “Chinese cash” (both the coin-type and the currency unit) were heated battlefields where constant arguing in talk pages caused for the articles to stagnate and the article on Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans which at the time was nothing more than a bad translation of a badly written Baidu Baike article was still called w:en:Yansheng Coin (yes, the “Coin” 👛 part is capitalised), articles on Chinese cash-related subjects were either a collection of mostly rotten external links to auction sites with minimal or confusingly written information or a collection of external links to the aforementioned websites with more information about the etymology of “cash coins” in English than about the coins themselves. Other than Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek no new websites about Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans were created during this period while forum and blog posts about these subjects popped up here and there all the time the responses either lead to Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, or to archived discussions about the same subject leading to Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, while the other half of the time offline sources were mostly mentioned with very little non-identification information posted online, on the other hand the Zeno Oriental Coins Database was thriving and all leftover experts posted there once in a blue moon 🌑. It’s pretty safe to say that during this period Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek pretty much “monopolised the online narrative on Chinese numismatics” as discussions became isolated to forums where he under the username “manymore” linking people to his website. During this time ⌚ period all the definitive Western works on Chinese cash coins of today were already written which gave me the opportunity to utilise them and write ✍🏻 a complete story about them on Wikimedia projects, as before this page was launched Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek was the definitive online English language source on Chinese and Korean numismatics I had to mostly depend on it to write ✍🏻 “the skeletons” of every Wikipedia article on Chinese numismatics, however during my global lock 😒🌏🔒 rather than seeing that I was using inline citations to properly source content bad faith was assumed by Dirk Beetstra who accused me of being a paid editor and even references placed 5 (five) years before I had ever used Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek were removed, as “reference-remover” is an actual “trusted position” in Wikimedia communities. After my global unlock 😃🌏🔓 all of these were restored except for one in the user 👤 space of a Serbian Wikipedia user, (which obviously wasn't well-received by Корисник:Neboysha87 just showing the damage done by assuming bad faith) and one in the “External links” section of Serbian Wikipedia. During this period I had also extensively contacted the owners of “the old” Chinese numismatics websites and in the context of the aforementioned events only Gary Ashkenazy ( גארי אשכנזי) acted hostile towards me and the idea 💡 of having their images of Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans on Wikimedia Commons. However others were more than welcoming to allow their images to be hosted on Wikimedia Commons, this trend started with the Vietnamese and French Indo-Chinese coins and paper money expert Sema (known locally as User:Pyvanet~commonswiki on Wikimedia Commons) which would become the category Media contributed by Art-Hanoi followed by the (mostly Japanese) cash coins website from the University 🎓 of California at Santa Barbara contributed by Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts creating the category Media contributed by East Asian Cash Coins, and later with John Ferguson whose website was the first to completely bring Schjöth (Schjøth) and Edgar J. Mandel’s "Metal Charms and Amulets of China" online with recognisable illustrations creating the category Images contributed by John Ferguson (Sportstune.com). Information “missed” by Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek such as the complete manufacture of cash coins as well as very crucial things for the basic identification of Manchu Qing Dynasty era cash coins using Manchu script mint marks, something I had to fetch from Ulrich Theobald’s ChinaKnowledge.de website, although this could have two reasons, (1) either Gary Ashkenazy ( גארי אשכנזי) simply preferred to cover the Chinese character inscriptions because these were also as Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans by creating classical Chinese poetry using mint marks, or (2) Gary Ashkenazy's computer or website simply didn't support Manchu Unicode character input. Although Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek had “the edge” over almost every other Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans it did miss some information “here and there” for which I used other websites to complete. After User:Baomi had inspired me to find images of Chinese numismatic charms (Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans) I used the images from the Etnografiska Museet (see: Category:Images of Chinese numismatic charms from the Etnografiska museet) to get “mediocre coverage” (so basically one (1) or two (2) images of almost every subject named by Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek) of every major category of Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans. After I had combined all information from the leftover websites and David Hartill's “Cast Chinese coins” book 📖 into a set of “nearly complete” articles on the English Wikipedia we entered... the Post-Primaltrek Era or the Wikimedia Era (2018, with the launch of this page 📃), now this era is symbolised by the existence of one website containing a detailed overview of the entire monetary history of Chinese cash coins and a large 🤪 and detailed overview of Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans using categorisations from both Edgar J. Mandel's “Metal charms and amulets of China” and Gary Ashkenazy’s Primaltrek / Primal Trek, as large online collections of Chinese numismatic objects have been imported to Wikimedia Commons lots of images are used to illustrate all these subjects. During this era a collector of Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and/or Chinese talismans could find almost all the information they need by just browsing two (2) websites... Wikimedia & Zeno.ru, all the information such as historical backgrounds, cultural origins and influences, categories and variants, as well as information about calligraphic styles and mint marks could be found on Wikimedia while “missing images” and a few minor “missing categories and variants” would have to me found via Vladimir Belyaev’s Zeno Oriental Coins Database (Zeno.ru). As most information about Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans has been added to one website Wikimedia automatically supersedes every other website on Chinese numismatics, this market dominated by two players only leaves room for extremely specialised websites to pop up (such as one exclusively dedicated to Wu Zhu variants or to the variants of the Qianlong Tongbao).

So as we enter an era where “one website rules them all”, is there still room for new websites? And would I advise creating them? Now that requires some complicated answers. First 🥇 of all I would actually recommend that you cite your sources on Wikipedia[e] and upload the images to Wikimedia Commons, of course if you’re banned for wherever reason then upload your images with detailed descriptions to Vladimir Belyaev’s Zeno Oriental Coins Database (Zeno.ru). I would personally advise against creating a new website about Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and/or Chinese talismans as many of them will simply get “lost to time” without archives, but if you do create one (and you want to create a new website about Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and/or Chinese talismans and are reading 📖 this to get overview as to what “those who came before you did”) then periodically archive it with the InternetArchive, personally I prefer every minor change and mutation to be documented but that’s where Wikimedia projects (usually) shine at so my response would again be to contribute your knowledge about Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and/or Chinese talismans to Wikimedia projects. An advantage to having your own website is that others can cite your work on Wikipedia, a disadvantage would be that very few people are actually interested in writing ✍🏻 about Chinese numismatics on Wikimedia projects and those that are can’t just copy your entire work but will have to completely re-word it and maybe even leave out some crucial detailed due to copyright © restrictions. You could choose to be like David Hartill and Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts (University of California at Santa Barbara) and donate your work using an OTRS ticket 🎟 . But to get back to my original question ❓, is Wikimedia today an “inferior version of Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek? Yes and no, it’s the superior website information-wise. To give just a few examples like almost every website that came before it Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek has very little information about “Ta(r)tar Dynasty coinages” (Khitan Liao, Tangut Western Xia, Jurchen Jin, and Mongol Yuan Dynasty coinages) while other than the Tangut Western Xia Dynasty Wikimedia contains a lot of information on those subjects, though Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek lists all Chinese script mint marks of the Manchu Qing Dynasty it actually lists not a single Manchu mint mark (the mint marks most frequently used by the Manchu Qing Dynasty) and websites like Numista, Ulrich Theobald’s ChinaKnowledge.de, and John Ferguson's Sportstune.com all do list 📃. Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek is still superior in many image fields largely due to Gary Ashkenazy’s bitterness towards and unwillingness to donate his images to Wikimedia Commons. But as Wikimedia also incorporates from basically all of David Hartill's “Cast Chinese coins” and a myriad of other sources creating “a skeleton based on Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek fleshed out with other works” was always bound to be the superior website.

As Chinese numismatics online has evolved to be a great source of information it’s most unfortunate that most Western websites dedicated to this subject no longer exist as is demonstrated in the next chapter.

Vladimir Belyaev’s list of Asian numismatic websites[edit]

The Muscovite Vladimir Belyaev lists the following websites on the Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru), in an attempt to showcase how bad 🙅‍♀️ it has become with the availability of websites dedicated to Chinese numismatics and exonumismatics I will list 📃 which ones are still in operation today, and which ones aren't, as my main and primary motivation for importing all of the information from Chinese numismatics websites to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons was to make sure that the information wouldn’t be lost to those with internet access the fact that this list contains so many 404’s simply how important it is for us to work to preserve this information right now.

“South-East Asian Coins and Related Web Links” (from Charm.ru by Vladimir Belyaev):

  • Website: Chinese coin and charm images.
    • Bare URL: http://www.sportstune.com/chinese
    • Description: Chinese coin and charm images from John Ferguson collection.
      • Owner (country): John Ferguson (United Kingdom of Great-Britain & Northern-Ireland).
  • Status (as of July 17th, 2018): ✓ Still online, and being imported to Wikimedia Commons (See: [[:]]).
  • Website: ANS East Asia department.
  • Website: [hhttp://www.amnumsoc.org/search/ ANS coins database].
    • Bare URL (2): hhttp://www.amnumsoc.org/search/
    • Description (C): Search ANS coins database
      • Owner (country): ANS East Asia department (United States of America).
  • Status (as of July 17th, 2018):  Hmm, we can’t reach this page. (Microsoft Edge standard message.)
  • Website: Grifter.
  • Status (as of July 17th, 2018):  Oops! That page can’t be found.
  • Website: Sycee on-line.
    • Bare URL: http://sycee-on-line.com/
    • Description: Web site of highly proffesional expert in Sycee's.
      • Owner (country): Stephen Tai (Republic of China – Taiwan).
  • Status (as of July 17th, 2018): ✓ Still on-line.
  • Website: Asian Numismatics.
    • Bare URL: https://www.tera-byte.com/ (http://sol.spaceports.com/~asiacoin)
    • Description: Dedicated to the Study of Ancient Coins from Asia and the World. Very imteresting and important information about Chinese and Vietnamese cash coins, including anti-forgeries guide.
      • Owner (country): Allan Barker (Singapore).
  • Status (as of July 17th, 2018):  Automatically redirects to tera-byte.com.
  • Website: Chinese Silver Sycee.
    • Bare URL: http://www.sycee.net/
    • Description: This site is for all sycee collectors and fans.
      • Owner (country): Danny Cheng (Hong Kong).
  • Status (as of July 17th, 2018):  The domain is for sale.
  • Website: The coins of Xinjiang.
    • Bare URL: http://www.xinjiangcoins.com/
    • Description: Well-organized website devoted to China's Western Frontier coins.
      • Owner (country): Not listed (United States of America).
  • Status (as of July 17th, 2018):  Darlinghurst Home Renovation Services (Darlinghurst – Xinjiangcoins.com), well “Darlinghurst” has got to be the most spammy name ever spammed, no wonder they bought a completely unrelated webdomain. Strangely enough they talk about contacting them if you need your home 🏠 remodeled yet there are literally no contact details, this is really bizarre.
  • Website: VIET NAM COINS & PAPER NOTES.
    • Bare URL: http://www.viettouch.com/numis
    • Description: Vietnam coins, banknotes, ingots - very informative site.
      • Owner (country): Chi D. Nguyen (United States of America).
  • Status (as of July 17th, 2018):  Hmm, we can’t reach this page. (Microsoft Edge standard message.)
  • Website: Coins of the Orient.
    • Bare URL: http://www.mother.com/?f
    • Description: Very nice site with some interesting information
      • Owner (country): Greg Kareofelas (United States of America).
  • Status (as of July 17th, 2018):  Some really weird domain people could lease.
  • Website: Rare Chinese coins.
  • Status (as of July 17th, 2018):  This is somewhat embarrassing, isn’t it? It seems we can’t find what you’re looking for. Perhaps searching can help.
  • Website: Tibetan Numismatic Homepage.
  • Status (as of July 15th, 2018):  Internal Server Error – “The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, support@mindspring.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log.”
  • Website: The Home page.
    • Bare URL: http://chinesecoins.lyq.dk/
    • Description: Lovely and interestingly made website devoted to Chinese coins.
      • Owner (country): Lars Bo Christensen (Kingdom of Denmark).
  • Status (as of July 15th, 2018): ✓ Still operational and accessible.

Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek (Primaltrek.com)[edit]

Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal trek / Primal Trek (http://primaltrek.com/) is a website primarily dedicated to Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans and it's primary purpose is actually teaching people Chinese culture through the perspective of these Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans. The original reason (as mentioned above) why I started using this website was for Korean cash coins, but then I discovered the fact that this website also has a page 📃 showing the full history of cast Chinese coinages from the Zhou Dynasty until the Republic of China, but as the nature of Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek is to teach people Chinese culture through Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans this page mostly exists for overlap. Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek also hosts pages about both Bamboo tallies and Jiangsu tokens (called “Chinese tokens”) which were both listed as “Chinese charms” (See: http://primaltrek.com/types.html), these two (2) pages formed the basis for two English Wikipedia articles (of which “Bamboo tally” got translated by User:Baomi to the Mandarin Chinese Wikipedia), the website also curiously lists horse coins 🐴 and metal 🤘🏻 elephant 🐘 chess pieces as separate subjects. The pages on Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek about Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans are extraordinarily detailed but mostly tell stories through images, a common trend I ran into while importing all of its information to Wikimedia projects, for this reason I often tell detailed stories about images not on Wikimedia to describe a numismatic category, the odd thing is that having all information about a subject without having an illustrative image feels odd, in some cases I just happen to run into an image I spent a lot of words on Wikipedia describing but doesn’t have an image and then I found an image such as “the happiness is before your eyes 👀 charm” (http://primaltrek.com/blog/2013/11/04/happiness-is-before-your-eyes/) which I imported from the Etnografiska Museet to become File:Happiness is before your eyes amulet (Etnografiska museet).jpg. As I’ve already explained most of my imports from Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek in A LOT of details on MANY other pages I will only add the stories I didn't write ✍🏻 earlier to finally (and officially) “close this chapter” but will mostly write ✍🏻 about the website itself and where Wikimedia stands today and just the sum of all information on Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans on the internet in general.

Primaltrek / Primal Trek is run by Gary Ashkenazy (Hebrew: גארי אשכנזי), an American who spent 13 years of his life in the continent of Asia 🌏 residing in the countries of South Korea (Republic of Korea), Taiwan (Republic of China), the Kingdom of Thailand, and the People’s Republic of China. While in Beijing he took the time to collect Chinese charms, amulets, and coins. His statement regarding his motivations for creating a website dedicated to them is “they serve as examples of Chinese popular culture through more than 2,000 years of history”. (Source: Skinny Rooster 🐓 / http://www.skinnyrooster.com/, the website "Skinny Rooster" is based on a childhood nickname from his grandmother). Personally I think that he named “Primaltrek” / “Primal Trek” as a reference that it's “a primal trek through Chinese culture” or that “primal” refers to something ancient based more on instincts and gut feelings showing very cavemanesque logo’s and concepts while the official emblem of the website is also VERY caveman’esque and this could indicate towards something “older than time” or “beyond time immemorial”, while “trek” refers to the “journey through Chinese culture” we take while reading 📖 about Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans and their symbolism. Unlike most other websites Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek’s / Primal Trek’s name doesn't seem to explain it right off the bat 🦇.

The website tells an interesting story about Chinese culture by delving very deep into the symbolism and the origin of all of it's symbolism. The blog is quite interesting as ¼ of its “blue links” direct people to either the English Wikipedia and/or the Mandarin Chinese Wikipedia, ¼ of the links go to various other websites while ½ of all blue links go to Gary Ashkenazy’s page about hidden symbolism and implied meanings in Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans (http://primaltrek.com/impliedmeaning.html), in fact if you go into “Primaltrek / Primal Trek proper” about 95% of the website go to this page so it’s quite clear that this entire website was built around this single page 📃 explaining all the symbolism and hidden meanings. This didn’t become as apparent to me until I started importing ALL of the non-Chinese coin information from Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, during the long period of collecting information to expand the Yansheng Coin article (Mobile 📱), in fact from that point onwards I decided that I wasn't going to import that entire list 📃 and started focusing on getting the images from the Etnografiska Museet, as I got these images I realised how many images were missing, by this time ⌚ I had succumbed to the inevitability of importing this entire list 📃, it would be the last page from all of Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek I didn’t import to Wikimedia, I imported literally every other page 📃 from Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek including way too detailed information about swords 🤺 in Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans as well as information about “Flower 🌷 (Rosette 🏵) holes” and “Turtle shell 🐢 holes” as a form of procrastination.[f] Now it was importing this truly HUGE list of symbols that started to take a mental toll, the repetition of 3 (three) particular meanings were so pervasive that I made a pun about them every seven (7) seconds, these three meanings were longevity, high rank, and to a lesser extend fertility, in fact for a couple of months now 80% of the conversations I start with my wife, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances start with “Get it, it’s a visual pun, it means high rank and longevity” pointing out to any random thing and animal and telling people that something was an auspicious symbol 🔣 in Chinese culture used on Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans symbolising high rank (success in the imperial examination system) and longevity, in fact my wife complained about me waking her up several times by saying “Get it, it’s a visual pun, it means high rank and longevity” in my sleep 💤 a couple of times, and she walked out on me while buying Pampers night time diapers for our youngest when I pointed to the logo of a bunny 🐰 sleeping on the moon 🌑 and telling her that it’s a Chinese visual pun for longevity because the moon-hare makes the elixir of immortality, it has become so pervasive that I started seeing how the Chinese could see literally everything as an auspicious visual pun for high rank and longevity. Once while going out to a coffee shop to smoke 🚬 some marijuana a friend of mine said that he was also getting high rank and longevity because weed makes him “high” and the reduction of stress makes him live longer so this obsession with seeing auspicious high rank and longevity symbols everywhere is already spreading, in fact my wife made a few high rank and longevity puns. It’s probably going to take years of therapy and going cold 🤧 turkey 🍗 from Chinese culture to stop 🤚🏻 seeing auspicious high rank and longevity symbols everywhere, Leigong help me with the speed of Lǜ Lìng.

I’ve personally always found that the form and format of Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek were wasted on Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, the integration of blue links is so reminiscent of Wikipedia that linking to only a more limited page 📃 on a Chinese cultural subject on Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek would be wasted as Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek wouldn’t contain as much information on some aspect of Chinese culture as the English Wikipedia has, right? Unfortunately I was wrong 👎🏻 and almost immediately after researching how much (or how little) information there was about a certain subject I decided that I basically had two (2) options, if the information was already present on the English Wikipedia then I would not have to write ✍🏻 a detailed explanation at the entry of the Chinese charm, Chinese amulet, and/or Chinese talisman and an internal blue link 🔗 would suffice, if however the information wasn’t previously available on the English Wikipedia then I would either have to fully add the information next to the information about the Chinese charm, Chinese amulet, and/or Chinese talisman, or to the Wikipedia article about the concerned subject (Mobile 📱). Often I did both and then I imported THE FULL LIST 📃 from Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek of symbolism and hidden meanings and/or messages on Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans. But then again one of my many motto’s is “it’s always better to have too much information than too little”. The rest of the structure of Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek follows the premise to keep you within the website (including the blog) as much as possible, I kind of find it odd since there are literally no advertisements or promotional materials anywhere. Although as the main purpose of the website (Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek) is to educate people about Chinese culture through Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans it actually makes sense and this is also something I think 🤔 the English Wikipedia does better, but as many of the subjects are still red links it’ll take some time ⌚, but as an Eventualist I think that adding red links does more good than harm to the project and users 👥 should be encouraged to do so.

Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek also hosts 2 (two) articles about Japanese numismatic charms, 2 (two) articles about Korean numismatic charms, and 1 (one) article about Vietnamese cash coins and numismatic charms. These entries all became the basis for their respective English Wikipedia articles, so if you’re reading 📖 this in an era where you can find lots of online information about those subjects in European languages it’s very likely that those people came to be inspired to write ✍🏻 about those subjects because they saw very little information on the English Wikipedia about them, and if you’re reading 📖 this and those articles are still small while there’s plenty of information online (and offline) then please 🙏🏻 start writing ✍🏻 about them now.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Vladimir Belyaev’s Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru)[edit]

Vladimir Belyaev's Chinese Coinage Website (http://charm.ru/) was created in 1996 by the Muscovite Vladimir Belyaev (Cyrillic script: Владимир Беляев) being one of the earliest European language websites about Chinese cash coins, Chinese numismatic charms, Chinese numismatic amulets, and Chinese numismatic talismans. Vladimir Belyaev’s Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru) was in operation until 2003 when it was superseded by Vladimir Belyaev’s Zeno Oriental Coins Database (https://www.zeno.ru/), this website is currently the largest online database of Asian (from Istanbul to Ambon) coins and charms, Zeno.ru also hosts a large 🤪 amount of banknotes.[g] Charm.ru itself was quite revolutionary in both its content and its style. Vladimir Belyaev’s Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru) is as far as I’m aware of the first 🥇 European language website to attempt to create a full chronological list of Chinese cash coins by inscription and one for Vietnamese cash coins as well (which became the inspiration for how I later differentiated known cash coins from later discovered and never found ones). In fact what most other websites on Chinese cash coins, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans later did could largely be seen as a continuation of the work Vladimir Belyaev did. It’s also quite important to note 📝 how the website operated, anyone could e-mail 📧 Vladimir Belyaev with a comment and he would publish it below the entry of the concerned subject, and a lot of experts utilised this system to improve the website (something I have yet to see experts do with Wikipedia, I often see experts criticise misinformation on Wikipedia and explaining how dangerous it is but rarely ever see them correcting it, but knowing how revert happy the average rollbacker and sysop is it’s quite obvious that facts always take a backseat to “community culture” on Wikimedia projects, and an expert editing as an IP removing fallacious information simply cannot be differentiated from “a troll” or a vandal by rollbackers, sysops, and stewards, in fact I used to blindly trust information on Wikipedia before seeing first-hand ✋🏻 how “the sausage 🌭 got made”, so basically don’t believe anything you read 📖 on Wikipedia without verifying it yourself, and it's extremely likely that actually updated and better information gets removed due to not here policies such). This expert-centric culture helped correct a lot of mistakes for example a Japanese Kokuji coin charm that was misidentified as a Chinese coin charm with “a mystery inscription” (http://charm.ru/u.htm) and helped identify many fakes and replicas. Vladimir Belyaev’s Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru) is organised into several Chinese categories and some for its “neighbours”, these categories for Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese coins all contain separate sections for coins and charms. In some pages the bulk of the entries seem to be about coins and in others they seem to be about charms (such as the Japanese and Korean pages).

John Ferguson's Sportstune.com[edit]

Main gallery: Category:Images contributed by John Ferguson (Sportstune.com).
A Cháng Mìng Fù Guì (長命富貴) from John Ferguson's Sportstune.com website.

John Ferguson's Sportstune.com (http://sportstune.com/chinese/charms/index.html) is a website created by John Ferguson from the Kingdom of Scotland in the United Kingdom of Great-Britain and Northern-Ireland, John Ferguson was originally born in the British colony of Hong Kong in East-Asia, the origin of his collection is quite interesting, John Ferguson's parents lived in the British colony of Hong Kong during most of the 1960's, in fact John Ferguson himself was born there in 1966. His parents had a good friend in Hong Kong named Willie Howard who's friend's father has passed away. The dead old man was Chinese and had built up a collection of can coins and charms over the years of his life. His son then took a few of the coins to a local coin dealer who told him they weren't originals but replicas. As he was not interested in collecting coins the son had then decided to sell them all as a collection rather than selling them individually in an attempt to get them off his hands 👐🏻 as he was quite disinterested in them. Willie Howard then asked John Ferguson's father and another one of his friends if they would like to each buy half the numismatic collection as it was a very good and relatively low price. The Ferg’s Father and the other friend had agreed and the son of the dead old Chinese man started bringing them out of the bank vault. No one had any idea 💡 how many pieces there were in the numismatic collection. The Fergusons had moved back to Scotland by this time (which was in 1975) so Willie Howard sent them half the coins in a box through the mail 📧. There was no catalogue or any form of organised listing of any sort. All the cash coins and charms of the John Ferguson Collection are mounted on plaques numbered 1 (one) to 60 (sixty) making a total of 1187 (one-thousand-one-hundred-and-eighty-seven) items. These objects seem appear to be in no sensible order or any sort of arrangement. John Ferguson's mother took a few of these plaques to the United States of America, where she now resides, to mount them in frames which are displayed on her walls. The remainder of the cash coins and charms are on John Ferguson's Sportstune.com website and then I uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons. To this day John Ferguson odd trying to find out what ever happened to the other half of the (original) collection. It’s kind of funny 😁 how because the son of an old dead Chinese man didn’t want to have a collection of Chinese cash coins and Chinese numismatic charms that they even came online in the first 🥇 place.

Some other interesting points about the John Ferguson Collection is that because the identification is based on a lot of older works so the images are identified in Wade-Giles as opposed to Hanyu Pinyin (e.g. Taipei instead of Taibei, to use the capital of China as an example, or Nanking instead of Nanjing if you’re convinced that that’s still the capital of China), this is something I adopted and imported all of his images to Wikimedia Commons using this romanisation, as no other website still uses this unphonetic spelling it now serves as “a blast from the past” on Wikimedia Commons. John Ferguson has never actively collected Chinese cash coins and claims to know very little about the subject. John Ferguson also claimed that had difficulty finding information as there aren't many experts on the subject he could find in the Kingdom of Scotland. This is the main reason why I wanted to build his website about Chinese cash coins and Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans, so he (John Ferguson) could learn something about his own collection and possibly also help other people looking for information on Chinese cash coins. Everything John Ferguson does know he learned from Vladimir Beljaev's Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru) and working with him on the Sportstune.com website. As John Ferguson isn’t necessarily an expert in Chinese numismatics one would often find some rather obvious Chinese characters being unidentified, but on the other the irritating mistake that people who are interested in Chinese numismatics almost always make is calling the Jurchen Abkai Fulingga Han Jiha cash coin the “Tianming Tongbao” cash coin simply because Nurhaci cast a cash coin with that inscription (or legend) during the same period.

The name of the website is “Sportstune” which alludes to some of John Ferguson's other hobbies such as sports cars, and I managed to contact him through his business 🕴🏻 e-mail 📧 address as the one on the Sportstune.com website itself seemed to be well hidden. As John Ferguson comes from a novice standpoint the information on his website is way better presented for someone who is just beginning to collect Chinese cash coins, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans. In fact a lot of common mistakes in “the community” would be solved if we didn’t treat everyone like they’re experts and already know all the categories without even being able to read 📖 the Chinese and Manchu characters, for that reason I had also adopted all of the explanatory information I could find to Wikimedia and also adopted Edgar J. Mandel's Metal Charms and Amulets of China-system of categorisation (plus with how many different types of Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans there are it would be suicide to do anything else). For all that it’s worth, I think 🤔 that history will probably remember John Ferguson's Sportstune.com for “completing” the categorisation of Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans on Wikimedia Commons and being the basis for why there are examplary images at the list 📃 of symbols of Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans on Wikipedia. Or WikiHistory, at least. As a general website about Chinese cash coins, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans it provides a lot of images often without story where others provide a lot of story with less images and it's only through combining both that we just the full story.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

David Hartill’s Cast Chinese Coins[edit]

Main gallery: w:en:Ancient Chinese coinage.

David Hartill's Cast Chinese Coins ( https://www.amazon.com/Cast-Chinese-Coins-David-Hartill/dp/1787194949) is a book 📖 that is the current Western definitive work on Chinese cash coins, it replaced Schjøth, David Jenn, Krause, Kann, Etc. and stopped the era when multiple reference works had to be used to identify cast Chinese coinage, a second edition has been released now but I only have the first one. To understand the significance of this book 📚 one need not look further to how the Chinese cash coin community referred to their Chinese cash coins with reference numbers, it addressed almost all of the issues people had with earlier works and basically made this the only book people needed who were either experts or beginnings in the world of Chinese cash coins, it was originally published by Trafford Publishing but illegal copies of it could easily be downloaded through Russian pirate websites. But this is a book 📖, isn’t this about websites about Chinese numismatics? Yes, and in fact David Hartill did publish a large part of his book online, in fact he published half of it on the English Wikipedia, it became the “w:en:Ancient Chinese coinage” article, and many years later I “published” the “other” half in the form of the w:en:Liao dynasty coinage, w:en:Western Xia coinage, w:en:Southern Song dynasty coinage, w:en:Jin dynasty coinage (1115–1234), w:en:Yuan dynasty coinage, and w:en:Qing dynasty coinage articles, but more on the plurality of those articles later. David Hartill probably donated half of his book 📖 as a form to advertise it, others split “his” article about Zhou Dynasty era coinages into smaller articles and as I saw his book 📖 referenced so much I decided to acquire a copy myself to use as a reference on Wikipedia, so in my case the advertising worked, this doesn’t mean that I promote the book as my goal was (and still is) to present the most complete information hoping to supersede it. So how am I certain that the donation was an advertisement?[h] well the article describes in detail how every Chinese cash coin looks and what inscriptions and in what script are used... But most of the images came from other Wikipedians, not David Hartill. This leaves the information deliberately only “half complete” and this is also the reason why I almost obsessively add wikitables with “image boxes” to Wikipedia articles, information without illustrations are the main reason why I click on sources in the first place and probably are so for many people (if not most). If there's a dead body 💀 on Mt. Everest you want to see that body (file 📁) and not just read about a detailed description of it, I used to hate the saying “An image speaks a thousand words” as a kid 👶🏻 and I thought 💭 that it was a stupid saying, however years of reading about subjects without illustrations has proven this saying to be true. In David Hartill's Cast Chinese Coin every Chinese cash coin is represented with an image, and every (minor) variant too.

Just to give an example, the reason I published this page 📃 is to celebrate the fact that I’ve imported all of the information from Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, but unlike that website Wikimedia doesn't have an image to illustrate every subject discussed, want to how an Open-Work charm with a temple ⛪ design looks like? Well, Wikimedia Commons doesn’t have the answer... yet. For that reason I’ve imported literally thousands of images of cash coins and Asian numismatic charms to Wikimedia Commons to the point that most subjects can now be somewhat illustrated. Without those images David Hartill's Cast Chinese Coin shall remain the definitive work on Chinese cash coins and Wikimedia will remain in the second spot 🥈. Of course this can all improve over time ⌚, but today this is the reality. Also I would like to note 📝 how completely different my vision for cash coin coverage is from David Hartill’s. At “User talk:Rincewind42 § Separate article on Spade money” David Hartill wrote (Mobile 📱):

“Surely the way forward is to improve the indexing in Wikipedia. Otherwise the subject will become fragmented, and each fragment will not be up-dated consistently. To take an extreme example, one might end up with information on Ban Liangs under the main article, under a separate article on Ban Liangs, Ban Liangs, under Qin State coinage, under Qin Dynasty coinage AND W. Han Dynasty coinage. A significant discovery of Qin State coins might not be reflected in all these articles.

Most people will want to read about the coinage as a whole, will not want to go to other articles for sections of it.”

This is directly against my approach but that’s probably because David Hartill is an author of “paper works” in “paper space” while I mostly write ✍🏻 “digital works” in “cyber space”, for him creating a whole large 🤪 article that covers a large variety of areas and a long amount of time ⌚ makes sense because that’s how books 📚 work, on the other hand ✋🏻 as I’m more used to websites with lots of IBM blue links directing people with more detailed information to me creating more detailed articles makes sense, that’s why I chose to “split” the Khitan Liao Dynasty, Tangut Western Xia Dynasty, Jurchen Jin Dynasty, and Chinese Southern Song Dynasty articles quite early on in “the concept phase”, they went from initially all being one article to being 4 (four) distinct articles. I created the article on the Kaiyuan Tongbao as an individual cash coin simply because then I could list 📃 all the variants, its history, its external influence on Japanese, Sogdian, and Vietnamese cash coins, and a more detailed analysis of the coin. My personal vision for Chinese cash coins would be similar to what I did for Vietnamese cash coins, create a full list of all inscriptions and then create more detailed articles on individual cash coins by inscription, this way people interested in Chinese cash coins could look for the cash coins they’re interested in from the full list, and if they want to know more information about their individual cash coin they could simply click on the article (if it exists).

One of David Hartill’s concerns is that one could have multiple articles on Wikipedia that essentially cover the same subject e.g. “Ban Liang”, “Qin State coinage”, “Qin Dynasty coinage”, and “Western Han Dynasty coinage” but the solution is really simple, add introductory information about Ban Liang cash coins in the “Western Han Dynasty coinage” article, add general information about the inscription and a summation of its history to the “Ban Liang” cash coin article and then add more detailed information about its contemporary variants in the “XXX Dynasty coinage” articles. The blue links are what makes Wikipedia so beautiful, and it's always better to have more detailed information in lots of articles than say that a subject can only be covered in a very wide article. As time ⌚ will pass (and I hope 🤞🏻 with or without me) articles about individual Chinese cash coins will be created like they have for Vietnamese cash coins and all variants per inscription could be covered there as opposed to only very generaal articles that give an overview and a list 📃, but don’t really mention the whole story of each coin.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Lars Bo Christensen's Ancient Chinese Coins (chinesecoins.lyq.dk)[edit]

Lars Bo Christensen's Ancient Chinese Coins (http://chinesecoins.lyq.dk/index.html) can best be described as “the closest the internet comes to a complete collection of Chinese cash coins”, at least counting from the collection of a single person as Vladimir Belyaev’s Zeno Oriental Coins Database (Zeno.ru) would easily hold the top spot, and Wikimedia Commons would be a very close #2 (second) or #3 (third) thanks to Jean-Micheal Moullec (see below) and John Ferguson (see above). Sure there are a lot of specialised categories such as Chinese cash coins with “flower (Rosette 🏵) holes” and/or “turtle shell 🐢 holes” that both the Lars Bo Christensen Collection and Wikimedia Commons don’t have much of, however very few collections online have more than a handful of Khitan, Tangut, Jurchen, and Mongol cash coins and other than Jurchen Jin cash coins the Lars Bo Christensen Collection seems to have a lot more, or at least a sufficient amount to represent it online. Information-wise the website doesn’t contain much information beyond the manufacture of cash coins but it contains a handy list 📃 of trustworthy and bad eBay dealers and shops (http://chinesecoins.lyq.dk/eBaydealers.html) as well as a handy list 📃 pointing people to the definitive works on Chinese cash coins (http://chinesecoins.lyq.dk/Literature.html), at which David Hartill's Cast Chinese Coins is #1 and the English Wikipedia article “Ancient Chinese coinage” mostly donated by David Hartill (and containing half of his book 📚) is actually listed at #2, David Hartill seems to take the entire podium as his earlier work Qing Cash is at #3. The website is Danish using a Danish domain but all the information seems to be in English. There's really not much to say about this website other than that it contains a lot of images. As the website predates David Hartill's Cast Chinese Coins(, which is the definitive Western work on Chinese cash coins) some pages rely on several older works such as Schjøth for categorisation while a lot of “newer” webpages were added using Hartillnumbers (or “Hartill numbers”). The website also notably links to “Gary Ashkenazy's Blog” but not to any newer works which gives me the impression that this website stopped being updated before 2016.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts’ East Asian Cash Coins[edit]

Main gallery: Category:Media contributed by East Asian Cash Coins.
A Men Plow, Women Weave charm we have on Wikimedia Commons thanks to Dr. Luke Shepher Roberts of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts' East Asian Cash Coins (http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/roberts/coins/index.html ) is an American (United States of America) website hosted by the History Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara, like most of us Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts is an unpaid hobbyist who created his website to simply share information about East-Asian cash coins to others, and although the website contains a lot of information about privately cast and more obscure Japanese cash coins, all of which is imported to Wikimedia Commons… but as this information seems to be out of scope regarding Chinese cash coins, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans I will only write ✍🏻 about one of the more less developed areas of Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts’ East Asian Cash Coins... Chinese numismatics, as the website is centered around Japanese cash coins and most of the images surprisingly seem to be of Vietnamese (Annamese) cash coins it’s quite obvious that outside of Northern Song Dynasty cash coins the website contains very little images and information of Chinese cash coins, in fact one page 📃 about Tang Dynasty cash coins (http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/roberts/coins/Chinese%20coins/Tangetc.html ) is so well hidden that I only found it using Microsoft Bing by searching 🔍 for a completely different topic which gives the impression that Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts of the University of California at Santa Barbara just quit writing ✍🏻 the Chinese section of his website halfway and deliberately hid the draft from sight as it wasn't ready for publication 📤, for that reason despite being a very useful source on information about literally every other type of cash coin it’s not that handy for Chinese cash coins. As for information on Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and/or Chinese coin talismans we actually have Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts of the University 🎓 of California at Santa Barbara to thank for the Wikimedia Commons category Men Plow, Women Weave charms (URL 🔗 / Mobile 📱) as Gary Ashkenazy's bitterness would’ve prevented this image to ever be up on Wikimedia Commons, it’s very fortunate that the only other website on the internet at the time ⌚ that has an image of a Men Plow, Women Weave charm be the only Chinese numismatic charm (other than a rather useless image of a horse 🐴 coin) on Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts’ East Asian Cash Coins. Information-wise this is an amazing website for information on all cash coins other than non-Northern Song Dynasty cash coins and all the information is already on Wikimedia Commons so even if the website would become “a 404” tomorrow all the information would be preserved.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Jean-Michel Moullec (Flickr)[edit]

Main gallery: Category:Photographs by Jean-Michel Moullec.

Jean-Michel Moullec (Flickr-user enez35 / FlickrID #77612262@N07) is a Breton[i] school-teacher who is also a hobby photographer who has uploaded many albums to Flickr, initially User:Baomi uploaded almost all of their images of Chinese cash coins to Wikimedia Commons using Flickr2Commons and through looking at one of these image’s descriptions I myself “discovered” Flickr2Commons, due to Jean-Michel Moullec we have the Wikimedia Commons category Coins of China by period and for a long time most of its content, as I discovered that User:Baomi only systematically imported all of his images of Chinese cash coins while neglecting all of the Japanese and “Annamese” ones I started importing them too and all of the non-imported Chinese cash coins which included a lot from the Ming Dynasty and Britannian coins. Thanks to Jean-Michel Moullec we also have the Wikimedia Commons category Coins of Vietnam by period which just shows how important this single photographer has proven in visually documenting the monetary history of Asia and France on Wikimedia projects. I can’t really say much about Jean-Michel Moullec other than that we should be really grateful that he exists and has released his images with a copyright © license compatible with Wikimedia Commons on Flickr.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

François Thierry de Crussol‘s TransAsiart[edit]

François Thierry de Crussol‘s TransAsiart (http://transasiart.com/Numismatique/) is a French website operated by the renowed author on Ottoman history and Chinese and Vietnamese cash coins, coin charms, coin amulets, and coin talismans, as a website it can best be described as “a collection of directions to reference works and the definitive works in the respective numismatic fields”, although I don’t often use it as a source on Wikipedia I do look at the bibliographies to look for better sources in libraries and if in the public domain online to then upload to Wikimedia Commons. When it concerns information about Chinese cash coins, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans it works quite different from other websites, in fact while many other websites have traditionally used the works of François Thierry de Crussol as a reference to write ✍🏻 lots of content, François Thierry de Crussol‘s TransAsiart almost ironically has very little content, its forums seem to have stopped being used many years ago, the content of the website seems to have a lot of potential but not much is ever enumerated on, in fact the main message seems to be “buy these books 📚”. Notwithstanding this I would like to comment on how it actually does provide plenty of basic information on lots of topics, and lists probably a comparable amount of types of Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans as Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, however beyond the title and a handful of images very little is actually said about them, the titles are trilingual (French, English, and Traditional Chinese) but all content is exclusively in French 🍟, but as it’s a European language speakers of English will have no issue with this.[j] The oddities begin when he starts using terms like “Yinyang charms” (Traditional Chinese: 陰陽錢) at pages like http://www.transasiart.com/Numismatique/numismatique_chine/amulettes/yin%20yang/ncnamuyy.htm where the one thing all these charms have in common is they they’re Daoist (Taoist) and most of them actually have the eight trigrams (Bagua) while very few have the Supreme Ultimate symbol (the Yin & Yang symbol ☯). François Thierry de Crussol‘s TransAsiart seems to generally give only basic overviews to leave much to be desired, however it more information about Vietnamese numismatic charms than any other website I could find. Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Mywoodprints.free.fr (§ Asian Cash Coins)[edit]

Kosen nedantsuki, a Japanese coin collecting catalogue 📇, this image was originally imported from Mywoodprints.free.fr.

Mywoodprints.free.fr (http://mywoodprints.free.fr/coin/coin.html) is a French website operating today (July 28th, 2018), although the coinage part of the website isn’t regularly updated and the owner operated a user account on Numista called "ManuD" (https://en.numista.com/echanges/profil.php?id=54884), from what I can tell this account hasn’t been active since 20--, and the last update to the coins was around 2015. It hosts a pretty big collection of Japanese cash coins, and Chinese cash coins from the Kaiyuan Tongbao and later, what really impressed me was the amount of Sangpyeong Tongbo variants on the website being very comparable to that of Gary “I don’t want to donate my images to Wikimedia Commons because of Dirk Beetstra” Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, so I immediately took the chance to contact ManuD… but as of today (July 28th, 2018) received no response. ManuD’s coin collection, and collection of Japanese banknotes, and the catalogue come from his great-uncle (or grand-uncle) Lazare Montagu (1875 - 1959). Lazare Montagu was a Roman-Catholic missionary in Japan between 1902 and 1927, he was first stationed in Hakodate from 1902 to 1905, then in Hirosaki from 1905 until 1911, and finally went to Sendai in 1911 where he stayed until 1927 concluding his time in Japan 🗾. The cash coins were all on a string, which was looped around groups of them sorted by type of cash coin. According to ManuD they were left untouched on their string for many decades, until ManuF finally undid them all from the string and sorted them out in February of the year 2003. ManuD used the Kosen to order them. Interestingly enough NanuD used the website www.sportstune.com/chinese from John Ferguson which he described as being “very helpful to date them and to understand the guide” (as he doesn't seem to know either the Japanese language or any variant of Chinese). It became immediately obvious to ManuD that the cash coins in the guide he was using were arranged in chronological order. But it took his a while to comprehend that some cash coins were cast during the same period, and differed only by the script (e.g. Chinese seal script, Chinese grass script, etc.). He managed to organise these different possible scripts after he found a description of them on the internet. The identification of some of the what more difficult cases as well as corrections were provided to ManuD by Dr. Luke Shepherd Roberts of the University of California at Santa Barbara and his Japanese friends. The Korean cash coins are according to ManuD “not from my great-uncle” and with their identification and categorisation he claimed “For these {cash} coins the website of primaltrek.com was most helpful.” Which shows how unfortunate it was that Wikimedia couldn’t provide any information about Korean cash coins at the time, but unfortunately as there aren’t many images of Sangpyeong Tongbo cash coins on Wikimedia Commons the era of collectors looking at images of Sangpyeong Tongbo cash coins on the English Wikipedia is something that has yet to happen, but would be possible if ManuD would donate his images to Wikimedia Commons. The next step for ManuD after identification and categorisation was for him to post his cash coin collection and guide on the internet and to share them with the world 🗺 in the hopes to get some feedback.

The photographs of these cash coins were taken by a bloke named Jacques Cadaugade who photographed them with a Nikon digital camera. This however took several tries and Jacques Cadaugade used two halogen lights to light up the cash coins from the side and added a filter to make up for the colour temperature differences between the light and the cash coins that were being photographed. The result of this photography session according to ManuD is good for most Chinese cash coins, but he claims their colour is still a bit too much on the red side. He also claims that most Japanese cash coins turned out to be too dark, and that he redid the latter with a scanner. Thanks to Mywoodprints.free.fr we have the Wikimedia Commons category Kosen nedantsuki (URL 🔗 / Mobile 📱), and this website also contains a lot of PD-scans. The best description I could give this website is that “it's a contemporary version of John Ferguson's Sportstune.com website”, in fact ManuD claimed that he drew a lot of inspiration from there.

Y.K. Leung's Chinese Numismatics in Research & Chinese Numismatics in Hong Kong[edit]

Y.K. Leung's Chinese Numismatics in Research & Chinese Numismatics in Hong Kong (http://ykleungn.tripod.com/index.html) is one of the more illusive websites on Chinese cash coins I could find, first of all it’s actually Chinese… well, from Hong-Kong. The odd thing is that for years while looking for this website I’ve been unable to find it, it’s hosted on Tripod and although it’s current webaddress (as of writing ✍🏻 this on July 30th, 2018) is http://ykleungn.tripod.com/index.html, on websites like John Ferguson's Sportstune.com it is actually linked to as “http://ykleungt.tripod.com/” which means that the address changes every now and then, the odd thing is that I literally see Y.K. Leung's name everywhere and links to his website always link 🔗 to a Tripod website with a similar URL as this one but always one letter 📨 different, are these distinct websites that had different content? Maybe, however as Y.K. Leung's Chinese Numismatics in Research & Chinese Numismatics in Hong Kong tend to resemble typical “late 1990’s and early 2000’s” websites such as Vladimir Belyaev’s Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru) I highly doubt 🤷‍♀️ so. Y.K. Leung's Chinese Numismatics in Research & Chinese Numismatics in Hong Kong aren’t “just for coin collectors” but also for actual numismatists, however the website seems to not have been updated in a while and although many open 👐🏻 requests for feedback have been open for years sometimes more than a decade, the latest replies (if any) are equally as old. The website notably delves into a lot more details about Taiping Rebellion coinage and seems to focus primarily on the Qing Dynasty.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Helen Wang’s Chinese Money Matters (The British Museum)[edit]

An image shared by JP Koning of the British Museum on Twitter, I originally uploaded this image to Wikimedia Commons which was linked in the tweet.

Now let me finish this list with the only European language website on Chinese numismatics that I know of (as of writing ✍🏻 this) that is actively being updated today… Helen Wang’s Chinese Money Matters (https://chinesemoneymatters.wordpress.com/), which is a WordPress website operated by the Chinese coins and medals department of the British Museum. The name of the website seems to be a parody of the US American “Black Lives Matter” movement alluding to the fact that they perceive the study of Chinese numismatics to be generally neglected by (Western) society, although it might as well be an in-joke directed at the staff of the British Museum where I suspect that the budget of the Chinese coins and medals department would’ve been severely cut ✂ so Helen Wang and others created this blog to help spark interest in the subject. But diving further into the subject at hand ✋🏻 we'll find a plethora of articles discussing both historical and contemporary Chinese currency, among these articles one finds a lot of links to Gary Ashkenazy’s Primaltrek / Primal Trek,[k] Andrew West’s BabelStone, David Hartill's Cast Chinese Coins among many others. A common trend seems to be listing public domain works but then when you actually open 👐🏻 the work as a .pdf file 📁 it has “Copyright © British Museum, all rights reserved, do not use this work without permission” written all over it, which is kind of odd since (1) Museums should exist to help promote public knowledge, not limit it, and (2) you can’t claim copyright © on something in the public domain. The articles about Chinese numismatics themselves are sometimes “useable” but more often than not direct people to the standard written works. As a website it doesn’t seem to have an index of Chinese numismatic objects like all the other websites on this list 📃, nor does it discuss much when subjects are covered making this website run 🏃‍♀️ by some of the biggest names in Chinese numismatics at the moment “more of a blog” than Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek was until September 2016. Overall the website has potential but it seems to be emulating Vladimir Belyaev’s Chinese Coinage Website (Charm.ru) in attempting to get the experts online, but unlike Charm.ru it doesn’t seem to book a lot of success. Despite all of it's flaws I am still subscribed to Helen Wang’s Chinese Money Matters website in the hopes that they release “a usable” article every now and then by having content that’s not currently on the English Wikipedia or having good scans of public domain works to upload to Wikimedia Commons. As it’s basically “the last website on Chinese numismatics in a European language” I would advise you (if you’re interested in Chinese numismatics) to read 📖 it.

Fun fact: On July 8th, 2018 they tweeted the image File:為1917年，一位男子脖子上掛著13,500個銅板。 銅錢貶值，物價上漲，購物時不得不背上幾十斤重的銅錢串。(Coloured).jpg which I uploaded to Wikimedia Commons after spending hours browsing Sinophone websites for a good version of this image. Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Conclusions (and where do we go from here?)[edit]

When I started writing ✍🏻 this page 📃 I was pretty confident that Wikimedia is the website not just to get information about Chinese cash coins, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans, but also those same subjects from Japan, Korea, the Ryukyu islands, and Vietnam... And after comparing it to all the other (current) websites I’m even more confident, however the offline literature is (unfortunately) still the top champion 🏆, however not the unchallenged one anymore, by integrating David Hartill's Cast Chinese Coins the information on Wikipedia is either as good or better than any preceding works, and although most variants of most individual cash coins aren’t listed, I hope 🤞🏻 that by creating articles about “individual cash coins” like w:en:Kaiyuan Tongbao where all different variants are listed that this will inspire a trend 📈 in the future 🔮 for other editors to make one about let’s say the Hongwu Tongbao (), the Qianlong Tongbao (), Etc. I hope 🤞🏻 that I’ve sufficiently laid the groundwork for that to happen, only that way can the information online ever be “complete”. And although I was quite certain that after I would be done importing ALL of both Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek and John Ferguson's Sportstune.com that I could paint 🎨 a very complete sketch of Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans,[l] but then I contacted David Hartill... He shared a very small preview of his upcoming book about Cast Chinese Amulets and this extremely small preview already contained more images of Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans than Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, in fact in a single moment I saw all my hard work become obsolete, David Hartill said that his book 📖 will contain over 5000 (FIVE-THOUSAND) Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans, now this amount is comparable to the amount of Chinese banknotes produced between 1912 and 1949, but unlike with those Chinese banknotes where we could simply upload images of them to Wikimedia Commons the moment they’re online because they’re in the public domain, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans are 3D objects and scans of them are copyrighted ©. David Hartill also proclaimed that his book 📖 on Cast Chinese Amulets will be the new definitive Western work on Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans, definitive works are only released once in several generations and whole generations of collectors are often dependent on a definitive work, in fact Eduardo Toda y Güell’s Annam and its minor currency was published in 1882 and remained the definitive work for Vietnamese cash coins until 2005 or so. As I completely emulated Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek’s / Primal Trek’s organisational for Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans on both Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons I literally witnessed a new work rise that will make that largely obsolete (not incorrect, just deprecated). David Hartill understands that there are too many categories of Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans to organise them based on anything but their first 🥇 Chinese character. I’m not saying that all of my work was for nothing, but simply how different the new definitive work it will reflect on Wikimedia in the long run 🏃, especially since I started co-using both the J. Edgar Mandel's Metal Charms and Amulets of China and Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek systems.

My main conclusion is going to be more sobering than anything, it’s this Victory ✌🏻 over all other websites on Chinese cash coins, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans showcases just how little information is available online in some cases, I was able to integrate most of David Hartill's Cast Chinese Coins into Wikipedia but without the images I could call it all but superseded, I can say that I’ve “rescued” basically every old(er) website on Chinese cash coins, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans, but as the definitive works offline change the culture online will change, the online culture influences the novices but unfortunately “the exodus of experts” as I call it unfortunately shows that although online collaboration in the field of Chinese numismatics is certainly possible, most have simply given up on working ⚒ on the online canon.

And just to show how gravely underrepresented the online information on Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans, remember how I wrote ✍🏻 that David Hartill's upcoming new definitive work on cast Chinese amulets will include over 5000 pieces, comparatively Vladimir Belyaev’s Zeno Oriental Coins Database only contains 2428 images of Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans,[m] that's roughly half, which by itself is quite amazing, but the website doesn’t require the copyright © holder to upload it so basically any image as long as it's a scan of good quality is allowed, this would put the online total number safely around 3000. So if you have any Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans you better start uploading (Mobile 📱).

So what comes next in the world 🗺 of online Chinese cash coins, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans? Well, it’s up to all of to try to convince more experts like David Hartill to donate their works online, for a long time the “Ancient Chinese coinage” article on the English Wikipedia was my go-to guide for Chinese cash coins, and when John Ferguson realised that he couldn’t identify most of his collection because the books 📚 about them were rare in Scotland he shared what he had learned with the world 🗺. If you’re reading 📖 and for whatever reason the online culture surrounding Chinese cash coins, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans has entered “a second 🥈 dark ages” then you should do what I did and contact the experts, bring their work online, we shouldn’t have to use dozens of websites with minimal information, use one or two with ALL the information.

And as I stated above creating new articles on individual Chinese cash coins by inscription would also help “compete” with offline sources, the Wikimedia Commons categories are already there, now just the Wikipedia articles.

Long live “the Wikimedia + Zeno.ru Era” in Chinese cash coins, Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans online. 🀄

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Original publication 📤[edit]

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 13:31, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Notes 📝[edit]

  1. ↑ I don’t actually smoke 🚬, I did smoke 🚬 until I was 12 (twelve) years old and a 5 (five) year old boy 👦🏻 actually convinced me to start by taking all the half discarded cigarettes from taxi 🚕 drivers, but since I was 13 (thirteen) I didn’t smoke 🚬 anything, my phablet 📞 just suggested those words and I typed them in. Note 📝: I do not advocate smoking 🚬, it’s unhealthy and bad 🙅‍♀️ for your lungs and fertility, Etc. I don’t smoke 🚬 and never will again (mostly because of money 💴, which is why I quit smoking 🚬 when I was twelve (12) years old.
  2. ↑ This is why some of these coins are even referred to as “Chinese kama sutra coins” or “Chinese Kamasutra coins”.
  3. ↑ This tradition also happened with regular cash coins, in fact Numista user 👤 “SquareRootLolly” told me that the main reason why they don’t collect Chinese and Vietnamese cash coins is because they’re all very likely to have ever been inside of the mouths of a dead person, and some story about his father’s friend (or just his father) being spooked by evil 😈 ghosts inside of some haunted cash coins. As Japanese and Korean people (thankfully) didn’t have this (sick 😷) tradition he actually does collect Japanese cash coins and Korean cash coins.
  4. ↑ To get your hands 👐🏻 on a good book 📚 about Korean cash coins you must (1) be proficient in the Korean language, (2) know all Traditional Chinese characters (Hanja), and if you don’t know Hanja your only option is (3) go to North-Korea and actually manage to enter their State Bank... Yeah, good luck with that, but thankfully there are plenty of Mainland-Chinese people who have and they can sell you those rare North-Korean books 📚.
  5. ↑ Especially if they’re in Chinese languages, which they probably are as I integrated most (if not all) Western works into Wikimedia.
  6. ↑ Note 📝: At that time ⌚ there wasn’t a single European language website other than Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek that covered “Flower 🌷 (Rosette 🏵) holes” and “Turtle shell 🐢 holes”, this would officially make the English Wikipedia the #2 European language 🏰 website to do so.
  7. ↑ I’m actually planning on importing these banknotes to Wikimedia Commons, although I’m not sure if I’ll ever get to it so if you’re reading 📖 this maybe you should do it. 😉
  8. ↑ which isn't even against any policy as the donation of educational content is always acceptable, well unless the policy is WP:EVASION because then the readers aren’t important anymore
  9. ↑ As in someone from Brittany, which could also be called “Bretagne”, “Little Britain”, or “Lesser Britain” and someone from Brittany can also be called “Britannian”.
  10. ↑ Although this is something I assume as I’m a native Vietnamese speaker and as our vocabulary is 60% Chinese I have very little trouble understanding written Japanese and Korean when they use Kanji/Hanja as both of those languages are also 60% Chinese, half of the English language’s vocabulary is derived from either Latin (an Italic language) and French (a Romance/Latin language), this indicates that at least half of the text should be comprehensible to English speakers 🔈 without any form of study. Of course one shouldn’t overestimate the readers to put two ✌🏻 and two ✌🏻 together as I’ve had experience with Germans not being able to comprehend that the Dutch word “Lekker” is not only cognate to, but a direct translation of the German “Lecker”. But then again some people are bad at math…
  11. ↑ Because of their association with Gary Ashkenazy’s Primaltrek / Primal Trek a staffer of the British Museum actually told me that after I pointed out the above bad faith edits removing references from articles by “the trusted users 👥” of Wikimedia projects that he was afraid 😨 that if they would donate things to Wikimedia projects that they could get globally blacklisted too, in fact he even stated that he was afraid that the British Museum 🎨 Wikipedia article would get deleted because of their association with me, I told him sincerely that that is in fact a risk of donating but if they were lucky 🍀 they would run into people who didn’t have a phobia for knowledge and verifiability.
  12. ↑ Here is the major difference between the two, John Ferguson's Sportstune.com actually has a larger number of images of several categories Chinese coin charms, Chinese coin amulets, and Chinese coin talismans, however they’re not always the best quality and I would say that the website as a whole picked the “quantity over quality” approach, at least that’s what I did with Chinese numismatic charms... 😓 but at least that approach allows up to represent a lot of subjects that we couldn’t have without John Ferguson's Sportstune.com.
  13. ↑ Statistics as of July 25th, 2018.
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