The Numismatic Chronicle 171 Offprint - Royal Numismatic Society

372
FRANÇOIS THIERRY
CATALOGUE OF COINS
This section lists 55 coins with moral maxims of the Minh Mạng, Thiệu Trị and
Tự Đức eras, where there can be no doubt that these types existed. Bibliographic
references are given in the footnotes. Each coin entry gives the characters in the
inscription, the Vietnamese and Chinese transliterations, an English translation, the
era(s) in which it was issued, and notes relating to the source of the inscription. The
four-character inscriptions are presented fi rst, in chronological order, followed by
the eight-character inscriptions, also in chronological order.
1. The four-character moral maxims on coins of the Minh Mạng era
1. 元亨利貞 Nguyên hanh lợi trinh
Ch. Yuan heng li zhen // The primordial exerts his infl uence, propicious and
virtuous.
Inscription found on coins of the Minh Mạng 26 (Fig. 3) and the Thiệu Trị 27 eras.
Fig. 3: Type 1, Minh Mạng thông bảo, diameter 51.7 mm, 29.65 g.,
Wanxuanzhai 2930 (萬選齋, private collection, Paris)
This is the fi rst sentence in the Book of Changes (Yijing) and is a commentary on the
hexagram qian 乾. The meaning is not clear and there are various interpretations.
Gao Heng, in his version of the text, punctuates the sentence as 元亨。利貞。,
which could then be translated as ‘the primordial exerts his infl uence; propicious
and virtuous’. 28 Philastre and Sung read the sentence as four individual characters,
and translate it as ‘cause, freedom, goodness, perfection’ and ‘that which is great
and originating, penetrating, advantageous, correct and fi rm’. 29 With its six unbroken
(Ch. yang) lines, qian is the most positive hexagram in the Yijing, and the inscription
26 Lacroix, Numismatique annamite, no. 411; Schroeder, Annam. Etudes numismatiques, no. 151;
CMV, no. 1515; Barker, Historical cash coins of Viêt Nam, no. 159.
27 Barker, Historical cash coins of Viêt Nam, no. 178.
28 Yijing, I, p. 53.
29 Philastre, Le Yi-King p. 13; Sung ZD, Qian, p. 1.