Collecting coins- UBC's Museum of Anthropology Asian Coin Collection

Collecting coins was made much more interesting when I started to work cataloguing the collection of UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. Their Asian coin collection is about 3,000 pieces, which are Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean. The collection was formed before 1912. It was shipped back and forth across the province, before it finally was settled at UBC.

Advice about the collection was received from a famous institution, and a famous authority. Unfortunately, he was not in his field of authority, and his advice was wrong. Fortunately, UBC disregarded his advice, and they have a very fine, detailed, (stroke variety) Asian coin collection. It does not have the early non-coinlike pieces, struck coins, (except for the Kwangtung Provincial brass pieces), or paper money.

It has an astonishing variety of different ways of writing coins. (If you didn’t know, Chinese coins can be separated by year, mint, and submint by the way the characters are written. This collection was obviously collected by stroke variety). I would put it as tied for number 2 Museum East Asian Coin Collection with the Vancouver Museum’s collection- I feel its depth makes up for the lack in earlier and later coins). I had translated a book on Sung Dynasty coin stroke variations, and it was interesting finding so many of the pieces that I had translated being obvious in this collection. Coin collecting brings one into very interesting areas.