Chinese Coin in Utah, Help!

[spanishgold1]

I found what appears to be a Chinese token or coin. I found it in a small town in rural Utah earlier this summer. Can anyone help identify what it is? It was in the front yard of an old house down only about 3" in hard compact soil. I was digging every sound at this site so I can't even remember what tone I heard on my CZ-3D.

Thanks

 

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[taz42o]

Bottom of this page where it says machine struck cash.

coins of china, the Ch'ing Dynasty

 

[idahotokens]

I don't know about the midwestern or eastern parts of the USA, but it is not at all unusual for Chinese cash coins to show up in the western states. I don't know whether they were brought from China to be used as money in the Chinese communities, as game counters for gambling, decorations for baskets and the like, or for other purposes, but there have been a lot of them found.
John in the Great 208

 

[kuger]

Yes,they are very common out here.There were brought by the thousands and thousands by immigrants to the gold fields and to build the railroads they were used in gambling and barter between themselves......100 of them were worth a american penny in the 1850's

 

[AnnieF]

Kuger is right. After Emancipation the slaveholders -- being good racists -- decided the shade of pigmentation didn't matter. Black? Eh. Yellow will work too! So they exploited "the yellow man" much in the same way the newly liberated blacks had been. Frederick Douglass did some fascinating writing on it in his later years. Reading it, it was the first time I'd ever thought of racism in this way, as the "other" rather than a color specific thing. And he was right. If you're willing to subjugate people simply by the color of their skin, it stands to reason you wouldn't care what color, as long as it wasn't your own...

 

[sagittarius98]

The spacing of the letters makes it look like a fake, these are faked by the millions for jewelry.