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The ancient city wall of Nanjing is now decorated with the Olympic rings. This was added in 2014 when the city hosted the World Youth Olympic Games. A China 2014 five-ounce silver coin commemorates the occasion. Courtesy of Peter Anthony. Click image to enlarge.
The former coin designer and current ancient philosophy scholar’s black two-seater scoots down the leaf-strewn road. Brown leaves flutter in its wake like torn paperback pages. Winter in Nanjing has not quite arrived… Yet. To our left, the semi-frozen parklands that border the Qinhuai River are deserted. To our right, graceful Qing Dynasty, or maybe Republic-era, multistory buildings line the street. Nanjing, a city that has so far escaped hyper-development, has many neighborhoods like this. The quiet streets and old buildings remind me of a college campus (and Nanjing prides itself on its great university).
This has always been one of my favorite places in China. The atmosphere of Nanjing seems to exhale hints that history was made here. Centuries as a capital city have endowed it with endless sources of mystique and intrigue. The massive Ming Dynasty city walls never fail to impress. They even appear on a modern piece of money: the beautiful 50 yuan, five-ounce silver coin of 2014 that was designed by Miss Zhang Chen Chen. To commemorate the Olympic Youth Games held in Nanjing that year, 2,000 were minted.
Speaking of Nanjing subjects, there is also a 2016 coin that shows the former presidential offices of Sun Yat-sen. It honors the vital role the city played in China’s break from imperial rule. To celebrate the 130th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen’s birth, the country struck 20,000 of the 30-gram silver coins.
Among the exhibits at the Yong Yin Numismatic Museum is a kaleidoscopic display of paper money designs. Courtesy of Peter Anthony. Click image to enlarge.
My thoughts are jolted back to the here and now as the car rounds a curve, and a steel-and-glass building pops into view. Yeah, this city is also a 21st-century incubator and innovator in a wide range of fields, including numismatics. Nanjing is home to a very special coin institution: the Yong Yin Museum. Unlike many coin museums that specialize in ancient coins, Yong Yin focuses on modern China.
The museum is located inside a converted Qing Dynasty building in a peaceful, verdant area near the river. It is a privately owned and operated institution, but one that is very much open to the public and devoted to education. Classes and groups of children often tour the museum. The many interactive exhibits seem to be expressly designed to engage young people in the roles that coins and paper money played in their nation’s development. It makes coins cool.
The very first room details how the People’s Republic of China pieced together a network of independent regional banks into a unified, national system. This is a far more complicated story than I ever imagined. Many rare examples of paper money issued by these banks illustrate the narrative and are a collector’s delight.
Nearby, a large timeline follows the development of money in China from ancient to modern times. Large is the operative word and the museum repeatedly uses scale to immerse the visitor in the experience. For example, you can step into a kaleidoscopic chamber of brightly colored paper money designs. No virtual reality headset required!
Of course, anything that concerns coins must focus on the little as well as the big. The parent company of the museum is involved with the distribution of Panda coins in China, so it is no surprise that Panda coins have a prominent place here. There is not only an exhibit of every Mint State gold coin in the series, but also a rarely seen complete set of five-ounce gold Pandas. For anyone interested in modern Chinese coins, the Yong Yin Museum is a destination worth a visit and a revisit.
Some of the rarest coins in the Panda series are in the five-ounce gold coins. A complete set can be examined at the Yong Yin Numismatic Museum in Nanjing. Courtesy of Peter Anthony. Click image to enlarge.
Another day, another museum: the next day my friend in the little black two-seater very kindly picks me up again. It is quite a practical mode of movement through a city filled with narrow streets originally designed for horse carts. I get dropped off in the central part of Nanjing.
“People always talk about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.” That old bit of wit comes to mind as a sudden downpour catches me out in the open. I quickly duck under the jade-colored overhang outside the Oriental Metropolitan Museum, also known as the Museum of the Six Dynasties. Inside, past the ticket booth, the first exhibition space I enter is a very large, marble-floored (and surprisingly empty) hall. My eyes immediately fall on a tall, stylized sculpture of a black horse with a gray mane. It is big enough to remind me of another famous horse; you could hide a few people inside this one.
Across the room from the horse is a line of panels that describe the Six Dynasties period. This includes a timeline that compares major events in ancient Rome and China from 166 AD to 589 A.D. The year 166 AD is significant because it is when merchants from ancient Rome first entered China. The year 220 AD is when the Han Dynasty was overthrown, and national rule in China ceased. Then, 589 AD stands out as the year that China was reunited under the short-lived Sui Dynasty. The centuries between 220 AD and 589 AD are now called the Six Dynasties, when China was split into independent regions. One was an area around the Yangtze River, for which Nanjing was the capital.
There are numerous interactive displays that help museum visitors understand the objects they see in the Yong Yin Numismatic Museum. Courtesy of Peter Anthony. Click image to enlarge.
Aside from the panels and the horse, the hall’s only other exhibit is tucked away in one corner. It’s a wooden cart topped by what looks like the spokes of an umbrella. Below the umbrella is a drum and a pair of small seated wooden figures. A sign in Chinese and English explains that this is a mileage recording chariot. Like a clock that strikes a note each hour, it contains gears that cause the figures to beat the drum each time the chariot travels one Chinese mile.
This conveyance immediately reminds me of the wonderful series of Scientific Inventions & Discoveries of Ancient China coins that was the brainchild of my late friend Martin Weiss. It celebrated the many inventions that originated in China and changed the world. But while the IDOC series (pronounced Eye-Dock, short for Inventions & Discoveries of China) includes Chinese inventions like the umbrella, the horse stirrup, and the astronomical clock, there is no mileage recording chariot. I guess this ingenious device did not change the world.
A flight of stairs at the far end of the entrance hall leads to an exhibit about the Six Dynasties period. The Six Dynasties was a time of insecurity that unleashed powerful cultural and scientific creative forces. The best and worst of times, you might say. One of these innovations is part of the Inventions & Discoveries series: Celadon porcelain pottery. While pottery was independently invented all over the world, porcelain is a distinctly Chinese development, and Celadon is one of the most famous glazes used to decorate it.
Celadon (or greenish-glazed) porcelain began during the Han Dynasty. Its color was associated with the natural world, and it was highly prized. During the Six Dynasties, ceramicists experimented with the color and texture of Celadon and produced numerous versions. For instance, one group of color and texture variations became known as “The Color of Spring,” “The Color of Summer,” “The Color of Autumn,” and “The Color of Winter.” By the arrival of Tang Dynasty rule in 618 AD a jade green version of Celadon had been found.
The discovery and development of porcelain in China is the subject of two 1995 Inventions & Discoveries coins, one gold and the other silver. This series began in 1992 and lasted through 1996. Each year five-coin sets in gold, silver, and occasionally platinum were minted (and sometimes a few others, too). The 1995 “Invention of Porcelain” coins were designed and minted at the Shenyang Mint in northeast China. The 50 yuan example is 27 millimeters in diameter and contains a half ounce of .999-fine gold. The mintage plan was for 1,200 pieces, but only 380 were struck. The silver version is 36 millimeters round and contains 22 grams of .900-pure silver. Its planned mintage was 15,000, but its actual mintage is 6,604.
Why the shortfall? A major reason was the sheer quantity of precious metal coins that China released in 1995: 166 different types for the year. Decades later, Martin Weiss recalled how in 1995 Panda America would send in reorders to the mints but would never receive them. The factories were overloaded, so the actual mintages were often far smaller than the intended quantity. Any collector who is curious about why the Panda coins of 1995 are so expensive should think about this.
Another area of Chinese culture that the exhibit explores is calligraphy, or shufa. The Six Dynasties period saw shufa, which literally means “beautiful writing,” blossom as an art form. From ancient times it was esteemed in China as the highest kind of visual expression, superior to painting and sculpture. The belief that calligraphy best expresses and captures individual character helps account for its exalted position in Chinese thought.
The groundbreaking calligraphic style of Wang Xizhi is featured on this 2022 five-ounce silver coin. Courtesy of Peter Anthony. Click image to enlarge.
During the Six Dynasties, calligraphy evolved from stiff official script into more elegant forms like Running Script. In Running Script, the characters may be joined to one another by strokes or stylized in ways that omit or condense strokes. Similar to cursive in English, it offers a fluid form of writing that is also legible, and it remains in use today. The creator of Running Script and the most famous calligrapher of his day was a politician named Wang Xizhi (303–361). He wrote the preface to – and was the calligrapher for – a famous collection of poetry called Orchid Pavillion, or Lanting Xu. Wang’s shufa is featured on a 2022 50 yuan silver coin that weighs 150 grams and has a mintage of 5,000. It is part of a magnificent series of Chinese calligraphy coins that up to the present have been issued in five years; 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
The calligraphy section of the Oriental Metropolitan exhibit is crowded. School-age children examine and discuss the precisely inscribed stone tablets with their parents. Why this fascination? The Chinese language has several thousand characters that all require a fixed sequence of brushstrokes to form them. The order never changes. The manner in which this task is accomplished, deliberately or quickly, lightly or with force, preserves the spirit of the writer forever. One story has it that an early emperor, upon hearing that a cousin was dying, dispatched a messenger to get a sample of his calligraphy. The emperor wished to always keep close a part of his relative’s soul.
The sight of multiple generations sharing insights into this art form reminds me that I have several friends in China who continue to practice shufa as adults. They fill notebooks with beautiful script, never planning to show it to anyone. More than a pastime, they find a kind of Zen in this activity that connects them to a timeless tradition.
By its nature, paper is fragile. The paper in use at that time was made from tree bark, rags, fishnets, and hemp byproducts. This formula is not that different than the materials used today for fine paper: wood pulp and cotton. Two-thousand years is a long time, though; the oldest surviving book in the world is only 1,000 years old. The reason we know what Wang Xizhi’s calligraphy looked like is that a later emperor ordered his scribes to make exact copies of all Wang’s works. The original examples of Six Dynasties calligraphy that remain are carved in stone and even those were hidden away and sheltered in tombs. Not a single Six Dynasties building in Nanjing exists today.
I consider this and stare out a museum window. Under a gray sky, pale autumn leaves fly through the air like pages ripped from a paperback novel. Yet, they fly through the air of a beautiful, vibrant city that is larger than ever, and next spring the trees of Nanjing will sprout green leaves again.
By Peter Anthony - June 6, 2024
Original link: https://www.pcgs.com/news/the-best-and-worst-of-times |
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发表于 2024-6-7 13:55:46
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