Hey everyone! This is George, one of Dr. Ng’s assistants here in the lab. It’s a privilege to be able to work on this project. I am very interested in transnational cultural identities and the relationship between power and the movement of people. A great part of this research has been all the fascinating artifacts we’ve been able to look at that connect the site to other places and lifetimes.
For example, we recently cataloged a very old Chinese coin that dates to the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (1736-1795) during the Qing Dynasty (Akin & Akin 1987). Asian coin experts Marjorie H. Akin, James C. Bard, and Kevin Akin (2016) write that these coins are called 文 màhn (wén in Mandarin pinyin) and were produced in the billions so they aren’t valuable. Their unique characteristics include the fact that they are that are made of copper or brass and have a central square hole, the obverse side has four Chinese characters indicating the reign of the emperor when it was produced, and the reverse side has the mint name in Manchu characters.
In the U.S. and other Chinese diasporic sites, màhn were used in a number of ways by Chinese immigrants, including as lucky tokens to bring longevity, talismans (sometimes they were strung together with red string in the shape of a sword), game markers, medicine (rubbing skin with the coin, sometimes with oil), and funerary offerings. For non-Chinese people, these and other Asian coins were used as decoration on Chinese sewing baskets or added to Native American regalia as in the case of Wishram women. As Akin et al. (2016) note, Chinese màhn and similar coins could have been purchased or obtained via trade so they do not necessarily indicate direct contact with Chinese migrants.
References
Akin, Margie, and Kevin Akin. 1987. “Asian and American Coins from Riverside’s Chinatown.” In Wong Ho Leun: An American Chinatown, 2, Archaeology:415–32. San Diego, CA: Great Basin Foundation.
Akin, Marjorie H., James C. Bard, Kevin Akin. 2016. “Asian Coins in North America.” In Numismatic Archaeology of North America. Routledge.
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