Collecting coins- Vancouver Museum's Asian collection

Collecting coins and collecting paper money are not my only interests in numismatics. I have worked for several museums, cataloguing the collections that other people have donated, and I have volunteered to help other museums, especially with identification problems.

The Vancouver Museum was once housed in the Carnegie Library. This building was built and supported with funds from Andrew Carnegie. The museum's Chinese coin collection was housed in several window-sized frames, and displayed over the stair well where no-one could get a good look at them. During the Canadian Centennial of 1967, a new museum was built to house many collections, including the coin and paper money collections of the museum.

The Asian coin collection at the Vancouver Museum is about 1800 coins strong. It contains good examples of spade and knife money, from about 500-650 BC. It contains several examples of early round coins, many of the typical round-coins-with-a-square-hole Chinese (and Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese coins), plus very interesting struck copper and silver coins. It also contains an example of the Ming note (paper money of 1368-1398), several other old pieces of paper money, and a very interesting forgery of a Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank 10 Taels note.

The collection is one of the best East Asian museum coin collections in North America. Of the ones I am familiar with, I would put it tied for second after the ANS Collection in New York, as far as East Asian coins are concerned. It does not have as many pieces as the collection at UBC's Museum of Anthropology, but it has an excellent breadth. Working on the museum’s collection has helped me to gain knowledge about collecting coins.