1 Jiao - Guangxu

Fengtien (Fengtian) Province — modern Liaoning — operated its own mint at Mukden beginning in the mid-1890s, one of several provincial mints established as the Qing central government lost its grip on coinage standardization. This 1 Jiao was struck during the period when Fengtien was also producing machine-struck cash coins, an awkward transitional moment where two monetary systems ran simultaneously out of the same facility. The province sat at the center of competing Russian and Japanese imperial ambitions in Manchuria, and locally minted silver like this circulated in an economy already half-controlled by foreign commercial interests.