User:Donald Trung/Explaining the organisation of the “List of Chinese cash coins by inscription article”

This was originally going to be my reply at w:en:Talk:List of Chinese cash coins by inscription but as to not clutter it published it here, but will link to it there.

Long answer

Hi @Baomi:, good thing that you mentioned this because I wanted to write the motivation behind the organisation of the list here but didn’t find the time to do so but will now, now you mentioned that the Northern and Southern Dynasties period is the exception but only the Xiao Jian Si Zhu (孝建 - 四銖) cash coin in that period has an obverse and reverse inscription. Now the reason why I deliberately chose to add reverse inscriptions for cash coins on this page but not for others has to do with four factors:

(1) this page itself exists as a general overview of all Chinese cash coins and also has a secondary purpose to “bridge” all cash coins which weren't listed anywhere else before its launch on the English Wikipedia and realistically won't be included in any separate Wikipedia article in the near future, for this reason while lists like the official Manchu Qing Dynasty casts seem rather minimalistic others like the rebels of the Small Swords Society, Heaven and Earth Society, Triad Society, Etc. are quite elaborated on, this is because there already is a “Qing dynasty coinage” article while there is no “Tiandihui coinage” article.

(2) Where ambiguity exists I added obverse and reverse inscriptions as to not confuse the readers, this is especially important where an inscription is repeated such as the oh so common Taiping Tongbao (太平通寶) for example.

(3) This list is also kind of more introductory for the other articles, the articles “Zhou dynasty coinage” (which currently has an incorrect name as if its coinage was issued by one central government, even though it was correctly named at first but everyone keeps changing it to an actually worse name) and “Ming dynasty coinage” which were both created by a student of the Nanjing Normal University as a school project and are very insufficiently researched and clearly written by someone using a translation machine, the entries for these weren’t based on the Wikipedia articles they link to due to their less than optimal quality and I had to add a lot of information to this page or those pages to give the readers a general understanding of Chinese currency at the time, comparatively David Hartill donated the first half of his book “Cast Chinese Coins” to the English Wikipedia in 2013, and this article is very much complete, hence a simple link like “Ancient Chinese coinage#Wang Mang” is enough as the information is already elaborated on somewhere at the English Wikipedia. Hartill only didn’t list the 3 Zhu and 4 Zhu coins in that article and didn’t list all the variants of the round coins of the Warring states period in that article but he did list all of Spade and Knife money variants there. Now the availability of information in other English Wikipedia as the “Huichang Kaiyuan Tongbao cash coins” and other variants of the Kaiyuan Tongbao cash coins are actually listed at the “Kaiyuan Tongbao” page, comparatively the only pre-Qing Dynasty cash coins with Chinese character mint marks are the Kaiyuan Tongbao, Dazhong Tongbao, and Hongwu Tongbao and all of their mint marks are already noted elsewhere, and as for the cash coins issued under the Manchu Qing Dynasty all of the Chinese, Manchu, and Arabic mint marks that appear on their reverses are already on the English Wikipedia, while the reverse inscriptions of the Arabic cash coins issued by Rashidin Khan Khoja aren’t mentioned anywhere, nor the differences in their calligraphy. In some cases like with the coinage of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom only documenting the obverse inscriptions would be extremely misleading. “the next step” after this list and since all major periods in Chinese history already have articles on the English Wikipedia and since I wrote the articles “Shengbao (currency)” (rebel coinages should have no place in articles about the ruling dynasty’s coinage as its central government didn't issue them) and “Wu Zhu” as expansions of this list further to help clarify things to the readers the next step would be to write articles about individual Chinese cash coin inscriptions like “Yongle Tongbao” where the readers will be given a more complete overview of the coinage and one can list variants.

Somewhat criticism about the “Qing Dynasty coinage” article could be that it doesn't list the mint marks per inscription, but I am actually planning on writing the Kangxi Tongbao (康熙通寶) and Qianlong Tongbao (乾隆通寶) articles to address this and only list the mint marks that were used with that inscription. As I can’t seem to find much information about other inscriptions like Guangxu Tongbao (光緒通寶) and Xuantong Tongbao (宣統通寶) in the English language those two articles are actually the last two (2) articles I had planned to write here on the English Wikipedia before (semi-)retiring to focus more on Wikimedia Commons as there is SO MUCH WORK to do there, and I’ve basically used every reference work I have to the point that “the English Wikipedia has become a mirror for them” and since most information not in them and thus required to write articles like Tianming Tongbao (w:zh:天命通寶) or others like w:zh:興朝通寶 and w:zh:永昌通寶 are all in Mandarin Chinese I will let “the next generation of (Chinese) cash coin writers” write those articles on the English Wikipedia, I’m pretty sure that 9/10 cash coin inscriptions have enough information written about them in Mandarin Chinese to warrant their own Wikipedia articles… I just don’t have access to those works as they’re mostly in print (so not online) and can only be purchased in China (Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau). But yeah, despite this planned retirement I just found a treasure trove of information about the Paper money of the Qing dynasty so maybe I’ll write one more article after those two Manchu cash coins before retiring…

(4) Even in cases where ambiguity is minimal such as with the Tiandihui issues the number of variants are so minimal that omitting the information would simply be a disservice to the readers, as uniform as I would like to make this list, in reality the issues should be treated very different from each other, with the list of Vietnamese cash coins by inscription I could largely add all official issues into style, however not all information is known about every Chinese cash coin so adding obverse and reverse inscription where it is a differentiating feature of the cash coin would make sense. --Donald Trung (talk) 10:17, 15 September 2018 (UTC)