1/2 Fuang - Rama IV Thick copper

Rama IV — Mongkut — established the Royal Siamese Mint in the early 1860s partly to satisfy treaty obligations with Britain following the Bowring Treaty of 1855, which had forced Siam to open its economy to foreign trade. Western merchants demanded predictable, machine-struck coinage rather than the bullet-money pods that had circulated for centuries. This thick copper issue was among the earliest products of that modernization effort, struck on imported presses before Siam's minting infrastructure had fully stabilized — accounting for the considerable variation in planchet thickness collectors encounter across surviving examples.