✅ SOLVED Real, fake, modern, ancient? Chinese coin.

[Whynotnow?]

I’ve seen these posted but know nothing about them. This was in a playground that’s about 80 years old where I’ve found other foreign coins.

 

[Red-Coat]

Neat,

It's real enough, but not a real coin. These things fall into the grouping of "numismatic charms"... produced in imitation of cash coins, but with characters you wouldn't find on actual currency. We need Yang Hao or another Chinese-speaker to tell us what it actually says.

Yours has a stylised phoenix and dragon reverse, which you also wouldn't find on a coin of this type. The dragon symbolises man or male and the phoenix symbolises woman of female. Together, they represent a harmonious union, so these charms were often for weddings or just symbolised balance in a feng shui sense.

Difficult to say how old it is, but the styling suggest it's not ancient

 

[Whynotnow?]

Neat,

It's real enough, but not a real coin. These things fall into the grouping of "numismatic charms"... produced in imitation of cash coins, but with characters you wouldn't find on actual currency. We need Yang Hao or another Chinese-speaker to tell us what it actually says.

Yours has a stylised phoenix and dragon reverse, which you also wouldn't find on a coin of this type. The dragon symbolises man or male and the phoenix symbolises woman of female. Together, they represent a harmonious union, so these charms were often for weddings or just symbolised balance in a feng shui sense.

Difficult to say how old it is, but the styling suggest it's not ancient

Thanks for the info!

 

[Yang Hao]

Wonderful and lucky find!

To add to Red Coats message, the chinese characters are 招財進寶 which means to usher in wealth and prosperity (an idiom and traditional chinese greeting around Chinese New Year).

Here is another example of a Qing dynasty coin with the same idiom. Also a wiki link about the saying. It's in Chinese so you will have to google translate the page into english. The saying originated from the Yuan Dynasty times. Happy Hunting!

招財進寶 (成語) - 維基百科，自由的百科全書

zh.wikipedia.org