Who has the latest Chinese chop marked silver coin?

WillieBoyd2

Supposedly the last year that Chinese merchants chop marked coins was 1935 when China abandoned the silver standard.

This is my latest, from early in the 20th century:

United States Philippines peso 1903-S with chop marks

Who has the Chinese chop marked silver coin with the latest date?

LanceNewmanOCC

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neat-o!
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oih82w8

This may be an interesting thread.

ricko

Mine are from the 19th century... so no contest for me... Cheers, RickO

Weiss

Ok, @WillieBoyd2 , just arrived...

oih82w8

I just checked the back room...they are still "working" on it (1935 Peace Dollar).

BillDugan1959

You will not get a good answer because many silver dollar sized coins (including earlier dated restrikes) were being produced for use in China at least as late as 1949. The old story is that the Chinese Communists paid their soldiers 4 silver dollars a month whenever possible to ensure their loyalty, and sometimes paid the Nationalist soldiers off in silver too, to ensure that they did not fight enthusiastically. The Nationalist government paid their soldiers in rapidly depreciating paper money, while the Nationalist leaders hid vast treasure in Taiwan and overseas.

i believe that the memoirs of the foreign press correspondents for publications like TIME and LIFE magazines make such statements, and perhaps writer Donald J. Hoppe did too, although I might be hard pressed to cite a specific source.

The 1935 end date for chop marks is a bunch of hooey. Just because the Chinese central bank attempted to void Silver doesn't mean that everyday people stopped using it. Silver was a major factor in winning the Civil War that ended with the Communist victory in 1949.

BillDugan1959

And yes, there are many plausible but not real chops applied by western coin dealers from much later on.

Crypto

@Weiss said:
Ok, @WillieBoyd2 , just arrived...

Not sure that is a chop but maybe. That is very late and visually obscure. Mine is 1914

Crypto

@BillDugan1959 said:
And yes, there are many plausible but not real chops applied by western coin dealers from much later on.

there was one well known dealer that added some but his chops are known now. I can't think of many? Up until recently and even now for most coins they would be throwing their money away as chops bring less 99/100 times

TLeverage

@Crypto said:

@BillDugan1959 said:
And yes, there are many plausible but not real chops applied by western coin dealers from much later on.

there was one well known dealer that added some but his chops are known now. I can't think of many? Up until recently and even now for most coins they would be throwing their money away as chops bring less 99/100 times

Hans Schulman. Fortunately only used a pair of chops from the same dealer (apparently genuine tools, whereabouts now unknown), and used a very consistent style of application (oriented vertically, to either side of an obverse portrait), and typically on esoteric coins that were unlikely to have been genuinely chopped. I've been on the lookout for a nice Peace Dollar that bears both marks.

CaptHenway

Ah, good ol' Hans the M.F. Schulman! Quite the raconteur in his day!

OriginalDan

I estimate it's somewhere around 1920 just based on my observations. I've read in a few places that shortly after the turn of the century, the practice of chop marking coins was outlawed by the Hong Kong government. Two things supposedly resulted, first the size of the chopmarks shrunk considerably in an effort to hide them. Second, the merchants and/or bankers turned to ink chops as an alternative.

I'm not sure I buy the first theory because it defeats the purpose of chopping as a means of authenticating the coin. If that was the purpose, you'd want to broadcast that it was good, not hide the fact. My thinking is that the size of the chopmarks was more of a product of locale, with some regions preferring the larger chops and others preferring smaller chops. It does seem apparent that around the turn of the century, smaller sized chops became more popular.

Here are a few later examples from my collection, one showing a normal chop and one an ink chop. The first coin is dated 1920, the second is 1914 so obviously there was some overlap between the two practices.

It's possible the 1933 coin shown above is a chopmark, but who knows really. These little marks are seen often enough on this type of coin that it's certainly possible they were placed as chopmarks, but I'm not sold on that theory myself.