Some decades ago, ancient Vietnam coin became an important and interesting subject of researching in Vietnam history. Not only the coin provided a picture of economical and commercial situation in the past, but also it showed the life style of our ancestors and provided essential data about studying the Vietnam history. Recently, collecting the ancient Vietnam coin became an intellectual subject for both the old and particularly the young collectors.

Vietnam history never discussed clearly about what type of money was circulated at its beginning and when the Vietnamese people began to use money in the ancient time. However the world currency history mentioned about the very first type of currency were circulated in the world was the cowry. Whether the Vietnamese used the cowry as money or not, Vietnam history neither confirmed nor rejected this issue. But the cowry was mentionned as a precious gift in the history in the year of 179 B.C when Triệu Ðà (Chao T'o) made a tribute to the Han Emperor with 500 purple cowries (1). The Han people already used money in this period. The round shaped coin with a square hole in the center of the coin was an evolution in the monetary history in China from the cowry in Xia dynasty to the knife money, spade money, ring coin, ant-nosed coin in the Spring-Autumn and the Warring States period, until the Qin dynasty finally unified the six states in one China. Based on the compatibility and incompatility of the theory of Five Element, the First Emperor believed that the Chu (Zhou) refered as "fire element" to be conquered by the Tần (Qin) refered as "water element" and carried out a very strict national policy that the "hundred clan" referred to people was not allowed to criticize the royal Court (2). Tần Thủy Hoàng Ðế (Qin Shih Huang Ti) banned all other types of money used to circulate in the past and cast a new type of Bán Lạng (Pan Liang ) coin with the round shape represented for Heaven and the square hole represented for Earth. This shape of Bán Lạng was used in China for over 2000 years until the Chin dynasty and was copied to cast coin in the neighboring countries Vietnam, Japan, Korea as well.

Before the Han invasion, from the 18 generations of Hùng King to the time that Triệu Ðà, an official of the Qin dynasty, invaded the two districts Giao Chỉ and Cửu Chân, the ancient Viet practiced a form of communal production and communal consumption toward a slave society which its economy was barter. Therefore money was still a vague idea, in fact history books never mentionned about money, even in China at the same time, the Ngũ Thù (Wu Shu) was well circulated. Then when the Tây Hán (Western Han) defeated King Thuật Dương Vương of the Triệu dynasty and occupied Nam Viet in the 2nd century, Vietnam was only considered as districts of not only the Han but also including of the dynasties of Ngô (Wu), Tấn (Jin), Tiền Tống (Early Sung), Tề (Qi), Lương (Liang), Tùy (Sui), Ðường (Tang). And Vietnam used the Chinese coins and did not cast its own coin. Several versions of Ngũ Thù coin were found broadly in Vietnam territory.

Throughout thousand years under the annexation of China, the will of independence was nourished gradually and several insurgents broke out. In the year of 938, King Ngô Quyền defeated the Nam Hán (Southern Han) with the battle of River Bạch Ðằng. Even historians do not consider Ngô as an official dynasty but Ngô was a pioneer in the search of independence in Vietnam. The Ngô was valiant but short. Vietnam had to wait for 30 years more when King Ðinh Tiên Hoàng won the war, proclaimed himself Ðinh Tiên Hoàng Ðế and opened a new era of independence. The Ðinh cast coin the first time in Vietnam history, the Thái Bình Hưng Bảo coin with the character Ðinh on the reverse side (Image 1).

There were several kinds of ancient Vietnam coin: copper coin, zinc coin, lead coin, gold coin, silver coin and even Hồ Qúy Ly's paper currency. Within the limited objective of this article, the author only discusses about the metal coin commonly circulated in Vietnam and does not mention about paper money, gold coin, silver coin and even large copper coin which the Latter Lê and Nguyễn dynasties used to bestow as reward.

All Vietnam ancient coins, from the Thái Bình Hưng Bảo cast by King Ðinh Tiên Hoàng to the last Bảo Ðại Thông Bảo coin cast by Emperor Bảo Ðại, had a round shape with a square hole in the middle of the coin. Observe side of most coins had four Chinese characters, the first two characters (1 and 2) indicated the King's reign title and the last two characters (3 and 4) indicated the type of coin. Position of these four characters are either going clockwise way or going diagonal way.

The majority of the last two characters (3 and 4), indicating the coin type, was written as thông bảo (meaning the current money), then as nguyên bảo (meaning the original money). However, there were a great amount of coin which had words indicating a strange coin type (Image 2).

Specially King Cảnh Hưng's coins that we can see coin type as vĩnh bảo (circulating forever money), chí bảo (very high money) , đại bảo (great value money), chính bảo (official money), cự bảo (high-valued money), thuận bảo (commemorative money of defeating Nguyễn Lord's Thuận Hóa province). Some coins were classified as undetermined coin had the type coin such as Trần Tân "công bảo", Thái Bình "thánh bảo" (sacred money), Thái Bình "pháp bảo" .

Although the coin inscription can be read as either in clockwise way or in diagonal way as mentioned above, but in fact collectors still are not sure in which way to read the inscription of some coins properly by the position of the characters. The reason is that, excluding the character Bảo always is read last, the three remaining characters would be paired as either 1 and 2 or 1 and 3 but the pair is unmatched to any Vietnam king's reign title to drive researchers crazy. Therefore, in most cases, researchers tend to choose the pair of words matched an existing reign title and that would not be the intention of whoever cast the coin. For example, the coin Tường Phù Nguyên Bảo can be read as whether Tường Phù Nguyên Bảo or Tường Nguyên Phù Bảo. There were other existing coins with Tường Nguyên or Tường Phù (Sung dynasty) such as Tường Nguyên Thông Bảo and Tường Phù Thông Bảo. Therefore, in this case, nguyên bảo is more "normal" than phù bảo and Tường Phù Nguyên Bảo is preferred than Tường Nguyên Phù Bảo.

The reverse side of most coins was plain, however some Vietnam ancient coins had its back side (Image 3) incribed with characters indicating:

• the name of dynasty such as character Ðinh on the Thái Bình Hưng Bảo coin, or Lê on the Thiên Phúc Trấn Bảo coin, or Trần on the Thiệu Phong Thông Bảo of King Trần Dụ Tông,
• or the year in which the coin issued such as character Nhâm Tuất for 1742 on the Cảnh Hưng Thông Bảo, or the character Tỵ for the year of Qúy Tỵ 1713 on the Vĩnh Thịnh Thông Bảo,
• or the place where the coin cast such as the character Hà Ni or Sơn Tây on the Tự Ðức Thông Bảo, the character Công for Bộ Công (Department of Public work) on the Quang Trung Thông Bảo,
• or the weight of the coin such as Thất Phân on the Gia Long Thông Bảo,
• or the value of the coin as Lục Văn on the Tự Ðức Thông Bảo
• or a mint mark as the 4 concave or convex lines on the Quang Trung Thông Bảo, or a dot representing the sun and a convex line representing the moon put together to represent the character Minh for a remembrance of Ming dynasty on the Thái Bình Thông Bảo cast by Mạc Thiên Tứ whose father was a mandarin of the Ming court.
• or a character which has a good meaning sush as Chính representing " righteous, fair law of the King" on the Quang Trung Thông Bảo

On the observe side. the round rim of the coin and the square rim of the hole often were raised to prevent the inscription from being worn off and to discourage bad people not to rub the coin face with rough object to extract little amount of copper for profit. It was unnecessary to have raised rim on the reverse side all times, therefore a great amount of coin was found its back side plain.

The average dianeter of most ancient coins is about 22 mm to 24 mm. However, there were some coins that had larger diameter to 25 - 26 mm as the Thành Thái Thông Bảo coin and that had smaller diameter like 16 -20 mm as the machine struck Bảo Ðại Thông Bảo coin, particularly the uncertain typed coin cash by commonner as the Thiệu Phong Bình Bảo coin. The average side of the square hole is about 5 mm, but there were some with larger hole up to 7 mm as the Nagasaki trade coin which were circulated in Hi An (Faifo) in the 17th century; because the average diameter of Nagasaki coin was about 25 - 26 cm (3). In case of Mạc Thiên Tứ in Hà Tiên province, Mạc cast Thái Bình coins that had its diameter about 20mm and its size of hole about 7 mm due to the lack of copper in the South of Vietnam. The thickness of ancient coins was about 0.5 mm but there were some exceptions as the Ðoan Khánh Thông Bảo coin of King Lê Uy Mục with 1 mm in thickness.

Diameter and thickness are the two main factors in the weight of the coin. In the 19th century, the author Phan Huy Chú (4) praised the Hồng Ðức Thông Bảo coin, Quang Thuận Thông Bảo coin of King Lê Thánh Tông to have the appropriate weight, not much heavy and not much light to be broken easily. Those had the weight of 3.5 to 4 gram. But also, one can find several type of ancient Vietnam coins which were so light and cast by the commoners to make profit. The two examples were some Trị Bình Thánh Bảo coins which weighted only 1.2 gram, or the Tự Ðức Thông Bảo coin mentioned in Trần Trọng Kim's book (5) as "tiền sềnh" which was the type of very light Tự Ðức coin brought into Vietnam by the Chinese after they bribed the Prime Minister Nguyễn Văn Tường. The coin was so light that could float on the water surface as the Catholic missionaries claimed in their propaganda to shake up people's confidence in the royal Court. However, the Ðoan Khánh Thông Bảo coin of King Lê Uy Mục was an exception that no researcher until now could find the answer why the coin was so heavy up to 6.2 gram.

Without counting gold and silver, there were 4 types of metal (Image 4) used to cast Vietnam ancient coins :

• Copper is the metal used commonly to cast coin in Vietnam. In fact, this was an alloy of copper, tin, nickel, iron, lead ... The percentage of metal in alloy may vary from time to time because metallurgy did not exist in the ancient time.The author Tạ Chí Ðại Trường (6) noted in his book about the metal analysis performed by Mr Diệp Ðình Hoa on the Trị Bình Nguyên Bảo coin resulting 63,6% copper, 21% lead, 0,14% tin and 0,27% iron. Until the Nguyễn dynasty,knowledge of metallurgy came from foreigners helped the royal Court in control of casting coin. Alloy used in the Nguyễn was mostly "brass" which the proportion of copper to zinc was 6/4, 7/3 or 8/2. (7)
• Zinc is the metal used commonly to cast coin next to copper, particularly after the 17th century. As copper, ancient people used an alloy with a high percentage of zinc called "ô diên" (mixed lead) to cast coin. A note from Lacroix Désire in his book extracted from Agenda du Chimiste written by Ad Wurtz said that the composition of this kind of "ô diên" were 55% copper, 23% nickel, 17% zinc, 3% iron and 2% tin (8). As well as copper, the Nguyễn dynasty also bought the pure zinc from foreign countries or refined the mixed alloy to cast their coins.
• Lead is used to mix with other metals to make alloy to cast coin. The lead coin with its high percentage of lead was so soft that the coin would be bent when pressing it between fingers. Recently, more than 400 lead coins (9) have been discovered, however where they came from and who cast them are still an unresolved issue for researchers.
• Iron was mentioned in Vietnam history, at the time King Mạc Ðăng Dung usurped the throne of Latter Lê's King, written by Lê and Nguyễn's dynasties historians that Heaven did not support Mạc therefore he failed to cast copper coin and must cast iron coin to use (10). That was the first time iron was brought up in the monetary history of Vietnam. However, up to now, archaeologists never found any iron coin of Minh Ðức Thông Bảo cast by Mạc in Vietnam, but copper coin Minh Ðức was not very rare in the coin market. Additionaly sometimes one can find an unsual red rusty coin in his collection, particularly the Hồng Ðức Thông Bảo coin and Minh Ðức Thông Bảo coin. Perhaps the alloy with an unsual high percentage of iron facilitated the work to cast coin and the iron Minh Ðức Thông Bảo coin is a myth created by the Lê dysnaty's historian ?

Most Vietnam folk song's lovers memorized in their heart the song "one quan has six hundred cash, thriftily saved every month for husband to take the examination in the royal Court.." which showed the coin played an important role in the ancient Vietnamese's life and thought. The song indeed provided the information about the unit of money used from King Lê Thánh Tông to the last King Bảo Ðại of the Nguyễn dynasty. During that period, the basic unit of the Vietnam ancient coin was quan, tien and dong. Dong ( cash) was the smallest unit of ancient money in Vietnam. From the Latter Lê dynasty, one quan was 10 tien, and 1 tien was 60 dong, therefore 600 squared hole round coins was 1 quan. Coins were put into a string through its hole and the string tied up at the end so people could carry it on their shoulder (Image 5).

No matter the economy of Vietnam in the ancient time was either weak or prosperous or how reasonably the royal Court's decision was made about money policy, under its absolute monarchy regime, people must obey the ruler. Therefore, from the first coin Thái Bình Hưng Bảo of the Ðinh dynasty to the last coin Bảo Ðại Thông Bảo, it was not necessary that 1 quan was equal to 600 dong. In the Trần dynasty, King Trần Thái Tông ordered that 1 quan was 69 dong when people traded each other, but 1 quan must be 70 dong when people dealt with any thing related to the royal Court. Then when the Yuan dynasty took over China, exchange rate at the border between China and VietNam was 67 dong for 1 tien. Until King Lê Lợi established the Latter Lê dynasty, after 10 years of resistance to the Ming, the King declared 1 tien was 50 dong due to the serious lack of copper coin in his country. (11)

But life never goes smoothly all times, particularly for money matter. Later on, in the North - South dynasties preriod, the Mạc King occupied the capital Thăng Long while the Trịnh Lord and Nguyễn Lord supported the Latter Lê's King controlled the South with the East Capital. The unceased war caused the reduction in weight of the coin resulting the circulation of the smaller coin. The small coin at that time was called "tiền gián", and the large coin of other previous dynasties was called "tiền quý". One quan "tiền quý" was still 600 dong, but one quan of small coin was only 360 dong (12). The unit of money in Vietnam even became more complicated when the zinc coin appeared in the 18th century. At the beginning, the purpose of the zinc coin was to substitude the copper coin due to the lack of copper in the Inner Region. But when the Nguyễn Lord permitted people in his region to cast zinc coin, people took advantage to cast smaller and thinner coin for profit. Finally even one copper coin was suggested to exchange for 3 zinc coins, nobody wanted it. The rich kept everything in stock, famine broke out. The disorder caused by the zinc coin lead to the unstability of the Nguyễn Lord regime and the rebellion of Tây Sơn's brothers. even later, when King Gia Long established the Nguyễn dynasty and ruled the country, the unit of money still could not be as simple as before. The Nguyễn had both copper coin and zinc coin circulated. As the Inner Region in the old time, the value of zinc coins and copper coins were not much different at the beginning, but then laterl on the gap became bigger and bigger. One copper coin was equal to 2 zinc coins, then 3 coins and then 6 coins, until King Thành Thái, his copper coin was equal to 10 zinc coins.

The written language on the ancient Vietnamese coins were Chinese. It does make sense because the current national Vietnamese written language had been used only from the 19th century. Although the French tried hard to popularize the romanized Vietnamese written language but the last Nguyễn's emperors, from Thành Thái to Bảo Ðại, still used the Chinese character on their cash coin. However, coin collectors do not need to master the Chinese language but do need to remember about 200 words to facilitate their collecting task.There are many ways to write a Chinese character. If excluding the ancient characters such as Kim Văn before the 12th century B.C and Giáp Cốt Văn at the beginning of the Shang dynasty, then the next type of character was Ðại Triện (large seal script) . This kind of character used as official language by the Chu dysnaty to communicate with its vassalls in the 8th century B.C. However, the large seal script was very inconvenient due to lack of unification. Until the year of 221 B.C, when Tần Thủy Hoàng unified China under one central government and ordered Lý Tư (Li Si), his Prime Minister, to simplify the large seal script to make the Tiểu Triện (small seal script) in order to unify the written language in the whole China. Characteristics of these two kind of seal script, large and small, are the thin and curly stroke. Until the 2nd century A.D, the Han dynasty modified the curly stroke into the straight or angle stroke to make a new kind of character called Lệ thư (Li shu, clerical script) and saved lot of time to write curly stroke of seal script character. Then the soft feathered brush was discovered, the Chinese used the 8 basic strokes such as vertical stroke, horizontal stroke, dot .. for the current written language called Khải thư (Kai shu, Regular script). After that, there are Hành thư (Xing shu, Running-hand style) and Thảo thư (Cao shu, Grass style) presented to help the writer speed up as much as he can.

Ancient Vietnam coins were written in seal script, regular script, running-hand style or grass style. Sometimes a mixture of regular scipt and seal script or regular script and grass style were used on a coin. (Image 6)

Collectors and researchers often categorize the Vietnam ancient coins into groups to help in memorizing or to facilitate their reasearch. Based on the following different options, one can classify the coins into different groups.

Metal - based on its metal, Vietnam coins had copper coin, zinc coin, lead coin, silver coin and gold coin. Tin coin and iron coin were mentioned in Vietnam history, but none was found in any archaelogical research. The copper coin had two sizes, large and small one; the large copper coin was given by the King as a reward.

Orthodoxy - Coins cast by the royal Court were considered as orhodox coin such as Quang Trung Thông Bảo coin, Minh Mạng Thông Bảo coin.. Other coins were considered as non-official depending on the role of the owner who cast them in history. For example, coin cast by Mạc Thiên Tứ in the province of Hà Tiên in the 18th century like the Thái Bình Thông Bảo coin. Coins cast by rebels to fight againts the royal Court like Thiên Ứng Thông Bảo coin and Tuyên Hòa Hựu Bảo coin from Trần Cảo and his son in the Latter Lê period. Coins cast by commoners and were acknowledged by historians like Thiên Minh Thông Bảo coin (13). Coins, with unknown origination, had the name as Chinese coin's name or as an orthodox coin's name or a strange name which never existed before, were all classified in the group of undetermined or unidentified coins.

Calligraphy - Miura Gosen, the Japanese researcher and collector of Vietnamese ancient coin, classified the Vietnam unidentified coins into 40 groups based on the calligraphy of the inscription in his volume 2 of Thủ Loại Tiền B of the book An Nam Tuyền Phổ (14).

Additionally there were some coins, under special circumtances, should be kept in the collection of Vietnamese ancient coin such as the trade Nagasaki coin brought into Vietnam by the Japanese traders in the 17th and 18th century. Or the poor quality coins brought in Vietnam by the Chinese in the Ching dynasty in order to make profit. Or the Càn Long Thông Bảo coin with the character AnNam on the reverse side cast in the period of Chin - Vietnam war in Tây Sơn dynasty.

When two coins have the same inscription, it does not mean that they are the same. Collectors will examine them carefully to determine the version. The reason is that their originations might be totally different, or the time they were made might be different in centuries, or even the ojective that they were made. Coin with different version might have different value in the coin market and would be useful to determine the origination of other coin as well. Determining the coin version was required a great of experiences and skill from the collector.

When two coins had the same inscription, size, calligraphy and metal, the collector can determine that they had the same origination and perhaps they came from the same coin factory. However, coins might have different calligraphy such as seal script, grass style and regular script, and the rare version must have a higher value. For instance, the Ðại Trị Thông Bảo coin of King Trần Dụ Tông (Image 7) , the version written in seal script was found rare, had a higher value than the version wrìtten in grass style and had a much higher value than the common one in regular script written style. In some particular cases, two coins had the same inscription and calligraphy but they still had some tiny different points, and again the rare version will have the higher value. For example, the Diên Ninh Thông Bảo coin (Image 8), the character Ninh at 6 o'clock position had an additional long horizontal stroke was a rare coin. Also in some cases, the reverse side of the ali coins had different character mint mark or different position of character mint mark as the Thái Bình Hưng Bảo of the Ðinh dynasty. On the back of the Ðinh's coin, most often had the character Ðinh at the 12 o'clock position, but the one with the position at 6 o'clock is rare and the one without the character Ðinh was the rarest one. (Image 1)

It is usual to see two Vietnam coins had the same inscription but their shape, size, metal or calligraphy were totally different, one can figure out clearly that two coins had a totally different origination, even the year they were cast were far away perhaps in centuries. This idea is easily acceptable but to determine their versions and the period they were cast is still required a broad and deep knowledge of Vietnam coinage. In the ancient time, China and Vietnam did not require to use the coin cast by each country. In fact the Chinese coin was circulated broadly in Vietnam and the Vietnam coin was used in trading in the districts along the border between two countries as well, therefore Chinese coins had been found a lot in Vietnam territory. When two coins with the same inscription were found, there are several way to explain this situation. Perhaps the two countries had the same reign title sometimes in their history like Thái Bình (Tai Ping). Or the commoner sneakly copied a coin with the reign title of an existing coin. For example, the following versions of Trị Bình coins (Image 9) had different stories from each other.

Image 9

Some ancient Vietnam coins are high-priced due to its rarety, but some common coins such as Nguyễn dynasty coin Minh Mạng Thông Bảo or Tự Ðức Thông Bảo are very cheap. Therefore a valuable collection is justified by the rare coins; and collectors should not be considered as a serious one by the amount of coins he owns. However, the value of a coin is not based on the year it was cast. For instance, the Hồng Ðức Thông Bảo coin cast by the King Lê Thánh Tông in 1460-1497 is not valuable than the Hàm Nghi Thông Bảo coin cast by the King Hàm Nghi in 1895. The reason is that the Hàm Nghi coin had not been issued while he was on the throne only 6 months, after that he left the capital to lead the resistance against the French. The Hàm Nghi coin is rare than the Hồng Ðức coin in the market.

It is quite hard to determine the price of an ancient coin. When one needs a coin eagerly, its high price could be acceptable by him. Therefore the value of an ancient coin depends on its need in the coin market. And the high and low of the price based on the need is a large difference. However, there are some coin books to provide the estimated price at the time the book published. As mentioned above about the need, the price in the book may not be a standard one but would be very helpful for collectors in case of coin trading. Three coin books written by Japanese collectors, the Cổ Tiền Giá Cách Họa Phổ by Ogawa Hiroshi, the Ðông Á Tiền Chí by Orudaira Masashiro and the An Nam Tuyền Phổ by Miura Gosen, provided the the level of rarety of the coin, leveled from 10 to 1 (rare) then very rare.

In this article, the author does not intend to provide a full book list of Vietnamese ancient coin, but only introduce some valuable book which has reliable information. In the past or in this present time, some books have some erronous information if the author of these books do not research thoroughly. Information about ancient coin also is sensitive about its accuracy, because a new archaeological discovery may turn a reliable concept in the past upside down.

The following list presents the books that the author used frequently as reference.

• An Nam Tuyền Phổ by Miura Gosen. The book has three volumes,the first volume, Thủ Loại Tiền Bộ or Rekidaisen nobu, is specialized in the unidentified coins. The second volume, Lịch Ðại Tiền B or Teruisen nobu, is specialized in the royal coins. The third volume, Ðại Tiền Ngân Tiền B or Daisen ginsen nobu, is specialized in large copper coin and precious metal coin, including round coin and bar,
• Ðông Á Tiền Chí by Orudaira Masashiro
• Annam etudes numismatiques by Albert Schroeder,
• Cổ Tiền Ðại Tự Ðiển by Ting Fu Pao,
• Tiền Cổ Việt Nam by Ðỗ văn Ninh.
• Catalogue des monnaies Vietnamiennes by Francois Thierry