1 Cash Shuiguan Tongbao

The Shuiguan Tongbao is among the most obscure coinages produced on the southwestern periphery of Ming China, struck not by the imperial mint system but by semi-autonomous tribal authorities in the Yunnan-Guizhou borderlands. These groups operated under a loose tusi framework — the Ming policy of governing remote ethnic territories through hereditary local chieftains — which extended to the right of local coin production in some cases. The issues are poorly documented in Chinese numismatic records precisely because they fell outside the central bureaucratic apparatus that generated those records.

Hartill's attribution to 1488–1505 aligns with the Hongzhi reign period.