Mid-century Bolivian 8 Sol
OriginalDan
Posts: 3,723 ✭✭✭✭✭
I'm a big fan of these 8 sol coins. As a chopmark collector, I'm surprised they were used for China trade as much as they were, with how crude they can appear. Trust was such a big factor in accepting coins for trade, and these can appear not-round, softly struck and probably varied in weight and purity. It's likely they traded at a discount, so maybe the bankers of the day were happy to accept them, then turn profit after melting?
Anyway, I've found them to come in some pretty neat colors, which makes me think the refining process was maybe not as advanced as say, Mexico. The strike often comes quite weak as well. The reverse design is neat, with the llamas and tree. You can see below that the tree design changed at some point.
If you have an example of this design, please post below!
Here are a couple from my collection:
tagging @ChopmarkedTrades so that he'll post his, which is really nice.
Comments
Never seen a chop marked piece of this type
Latin American Collection
@OriginalDan was talking about color on these, the following certainly supports the trend. Many thanks for the trade!
Pinks, purples, reds and blues. Something in that Bolivian silver.
Not much of a looker, but here is my example:
DPOTD
What a cool collecting niche! Must resist. Must resist. Must resist.
How does one get a hater to stop hating?
I can be reached at evillageprowler@gmail.com
I picked this up on a trip to Scotland in a random coin shop. The guy had a whole plastic tub of early south/central American coins and I picked this one out, not knowing anything about South/central American crowns at the time. I got it for the pound equivalent of $65 USD, which is what he wanted for all of them each. Looking back I should have bought them all, I kick myself thinking of what all was there. This one graded MS61 at NGC.
https://www.ngccoin.com/certlookup/2832364-001/61/
Wow, that’s incredibly well struck for the issue. Nice buy!