1 Jiao - Guangxu

The 1 Jiao issues of 1908 belong to a short-lived attempt by the Qing court to impose currency standardization across provinces that had spent decades minting their own incompatible coinage. The central Board of Revenue mint in Beijing drove this effort, but provincial resistance was substantial and the reform never achieved the uniformity intended. Guangxu died that same year — one day after the Empress Dowager Cixi — under circumstances suspicious enough that modern forensic analysis in 2008 confirmed arsenic poisoning.