Welcome fellow coin aficionados! Coin mottoes are short and sweet sayings on coins that capture a country’s sentiment during a specific time. Today, we travel to ancient China for a “New Beginning” motto.
The Emperor’s Motto
The first money in Ancient China was the cowrie shell carried on a string. Then, bronze cowrie shells, spades, knives, and eventually bronze rounds with square holes.
During the Han dynasty, words appeared on these ancient coins but not mottoes. The Han coins displayed the coins’ weight, which determined the coins’ value.
Wuzhu coins serve as examples. Wu means 5, and Zhu is the weight of 20 millet grains. The first Wuzhu coins were worth 100 millet grains, or about 4 grams. Over time, the accepted equivalencies changed with inflation. Wuzhu coins had the longest coin run in history, produced for 700 years, from 118 BCE to 618 CE.
The coins changed and gained the Emperor’s motto during the Tang dynasty. One of the mottoes was, “Kai Yuan” meaning, “New Beginning.” A Song dynasty motto was, “Shaoding” meaning something like rebuilding, and spoke to the reunification of the area. From the Ming dynasty, we have the motto “Hongwu” which translates directly as red five, but colloquially translates to, “very powerful in battle.”
Each motto speaks to the zeitgeist of the era, just like today’s mottoes speak to us in the same way.
Thank you for joining us for the second installation of Coin Mottoes on Pendant and Ring.
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Read Part One: Mind Your Business
Read Part Three: May This Please The People
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Notes: “The History of Coins in China” published by the Money Museum in Zurich, Switzerland.
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