1 Cash Kaiyuan Tongbao, Clerical script, with crescent

The Southern Tang, ruling a prosperous lower Yangtze kingdom from Nanjing, issued Kaiyuan Tongbao coins well after the original Tang dynasty had collapsed — a deliberate borrowing of a prestigious monetary identity rather than any administrative continuity with the earlier regime. The crescent mark, punched or cast into the reverse, likely denotes a specific furnace or supervisory workshop, a practice documented across Five Dynasties period mints where output tracking was decentralized and often inconsistent.

Li Yu, the last Southern Tang ruler during whose reign these were struck, is better remembered as a lyric poet than an administrator. His kingdom fell to Song forces in 975.