Pocket Change East Asian
While walking around the streets of New York City, I find myself constantly scouring the ground for lost change in order to buy my favorite budget lunch, dollar pizza! I rarely find much, but it slowly adds up. When I visited Indonesia for the first time in 2022, I attempted to continue my habit of picking money off the ground. I immediately stopped after being met with the horrified look on my girlfriend’s face. Seeing that I had no idea what the problem was, she explained to me that in Indonesia, the money on the ground could be cursed! She…
The coinage of western Eurasia and its colonial explants had, from the Archaic Aegean to the twentieth century, a tension…
Figure 1. Chinese spade money, c. 770–475 BC (ANS 1937.179.14763).
The American Numismatic Society cabinet contains a remarkable collection of Chinese…
by Vivek Gupta
Age of Empires: Chinese Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties (221 B.C.–A.D. 220) on view at the…
Homemade birthday card from John Reilly’s daughter
A while back I stumbled onto this great homemade card in the John Reilly,…
By Xiaoyan Qi
Samarqand, named Kang (康) in Chinese sources, formed a tributary relationship with the Tang Dynasty (AD 618–907). According to…
In a previous installment we looked at the under-appreciated and underutilized leaden riches of the ANS cabinet. In truth, however,…
John Reilly’s membership certificate for the Yokohama Numismatic Society, signed by Ramsden
There are certain numismatic personalities I expect to encounter over and…
Recently on Pocket Change I wrote about Chinese Ming paper notes. Afterward, I was pleased to hear from an expert…
In 1923, Dr. Richard Ehrenfeld of Vienna wrote to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to announce that he had in…