Remember when I unknowingly sold the 1806 O-129 discovery coin for a song? Check this out.
lordmarcovan
Posts: 43,895 ✭✭✭✭✭
1806 O-129 discovery coin I sold in blissful ignorance, right off my Holey Coin Vest
Does my sad history repeat itself, with something I dug up while detecting?
I found a strange Chinese artifact in a small-town Western North Carolina churchyard a decade ago. The man I sold it to seems to think it is a rare Ming Dynasty artifact, 600 years old, that found its way there... before Columbus!
He's carrying it around on lecture tours, apparently, as far afield as Hong Kong!
Check out the poster for his lecture!! There is the "whatzit" I sold... for twenty bucks.
Actually, while I grit my teeth a little on selling these items, I'm mostly just happy to be a part of the story. In the case of the Chinese medallion, that story is still being written, and is much of a mystery.
Does my sad history repeat itself, with something I dug up while detecting?
I found a strange Chinese artifact in a small-town Western North Carolina churchyard a decade ago. The man I sold it to seems to think it is a rare Ming Dynasty artifact, 600 years old, that found its way there... before Columbus!
He's carrying it around on lecture tours, apparently, as far afield as Hong Kong!
Check out the poster for his lecture!! There is the "whatzit" I sold... for twenty bucks.
Actually, while I grit my teeth a little on selling these items, I'm mostly just happy to be a part of the story. In the case of the Chinese medallion, that story is still being written, and is much of a mystery.
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Comments
It amazes me when scientists stumble across one thing and want to rewrite history. Here's a likely scenario. Sailor goes to China, brings it back to North Carolina. Loses it.
John
Never view my other linked pages. They aren't coin related.
Do you know if he found other evidence in that area? Did you find anything else in that area?
Is he giving you any credit for the find?
John
Never view my other linked pages. They aren't coin related.
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I'm thinking railroad workers. Weren't the railroads built with a huge influx of Chinese workers?
John
Never view my other linked pages. They aren't coin related.
I think Dr. Lee's using it as evidence of some pre-Columbian Chinese exploration and/or trade with Indians is a long stretch, even if it is truly a Ming Dynasty artifact, which I still have trouble getting my head around.
But it is certainly interesting, you have to admit. And an expert on Chinese culture (as Dr. Lee seems to be) would know infinitely more than I, of course.
No matter how it turns out it's very cool and a neat thing to be involved with. I think he should be giving you credit with the find, even in his brochure and definitely in his speeches.
John
Never view my other linked pages. They aren't coin related.
The Chinese took quite a road trip after sailing the wrong way to the wrong coast to the US.
John
Never view my other linked pages. They aren't coin related.
In any event, it's a great story - and to quote the MasterCard commercials, that's priceless.
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From 1405-1433, a man named Zheng He (a eunuch, actually, but we won't get into that here) commanded perhaps the largest Armada the world has ever seen. The larger ships reached 400 feet long (Columbus's flag ship The Santa Maria was 85 feet long). The holds were big enough to transport giraffes safely back to China. Now, evidence suggests that the ships went all over SE Asia and India and Arabia and the part of Africa today known as Somalia, but perhaps they did make it to the New World.
There is very little evidence remaining because the next emporer scuttled all the ships and burned the majority of the written records.
Hope this helps.
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Russ, NCNE
<< <i>Fascinating stuff, and this Dr. Lee is a punk. >>
If he were a coin dealer, I think he'd be the type to rip a widow mercilessly.
<< <i>Also the opium bottles look to be a lot less than 600 years old. >>
JapanJohn, the opium bottles and other stuff you saw in the other thread were found on 19th century sites in California by other members of the MD forum. They were posted merely as comparisons or part of the general discussion, and have nothing to do with the artifact I found in North Carolina.
I still don't entirely believe that the artifact is any older than the 19th century, myself, but I suppose if the Ming Dynasty craftsmen were really advanced and the metallurgical tests Dr. Lee had done bear out an attribution of it being a 600-year-old piece of bronzework, it's possible. And Dr. Lee would be in more of a position to know than I am.
I am fairly certain it is at least 75-100 years old, as I mentioned previously, since it was found deeper than an 1894-O Barber half I found a few feet away. (Of course, that might have been lost as late as the 1940s or '50s, based on the amount of wear on it...)
Looks like he is making a nice living from the coin and details you gave him of where you found it.
Cool story LM.
HMMMMMMM
Jim
Menomonee Falls Wisconsin USA
http://www.pcgs.com/SetRegistr...dset.aspx?s=68269&ac=1">Musky 1861 Mint Set
Please please do me a favor and next time you want to sell anything other than your old clothes...call me first
Russ, NCNE
<< <i>Okay, I'll fess up. He sold me a Masonic token once for only $10. Phew! Glad I got that off my chest. >>
Russ, put it on ebay with NR at 1 cent....it will undoubtly bring a few thousand dollars.
I find it hard to believe that the disk was fabricated perfectly round circa 1421. Given that capability, the characters would be of a much higher quality....highly incongruent, Dr. Lee.
If he's on the level, he should have it subjected to multiple 3rd-party testing.
<< <i>I find it hard to believe that the disk was fabricated perfectly round circa 1421. Given that capability, the characters would be of a much higher quality.... >>
I too thought this. And I still wonder. But Dr. Lee has submitted it for metallurgical and other testing, from what little I have gleaned so far.
I spoke to him on the telephone tonight and he did say that research is ongoing, that a lot is still unknown and he has been unable to verify a lot of the theories about it because so far it is one of a kind- he is waiting for another one, with perhaps the mark of another emperor, to show up, somewhere in the world. One thing is for sure- it has been widely scrutinized in the course of his lectures, by people in Asia who probably know more about such things than some Western critics (certainly more than me, anyway).
Perhaps we will never know. Maybe the whole thing is a hoax (well, not a deliberate hoax but more a case of wishful thinking) by Dr. Lee, but I do find it fascinating. I can of course verify nothing except that I did indeed dig it out of the ground in Western North Carolina, in an area that quite probably had been occupied by Native Americans before Columbus. I don't even know if Dr. Lee is trying to challenge the whole Columbus-was-first mythology- I rather doubt that, as there's pretty good evidence the Vikings were in the Northeast centuries before that, anyway.
He did say that I would get credit for the find. He is writing a book. And he said he'd send me one of the two remaning posters from that lecture in Hong Kong.
Crackpot theory or amazing archaeological discovery? That remains to be seen. Perhaps we will never know. It's kind of interesting, anyway. At least I got some information on that thing. It sat in my "interesting dug junque" drawer for nearly ten years before I decided to dust it off and post it on the Internet to find out more about it.