10 Cash - Tangguo Tongbao, Seal script

The Southern Tang issued the Tangguo Tongbao in the final years of the kingdom's existence, a period of acute fiscal pressure as Li Yu — the last ruler, better remembered as a poet than a statesman — paid increasingly ruinous tribute to the Song to forestall invasion. The ten-cash denomination represented an attempt to extract greater seigniorage from bronze coinage at a moment when the treasury could not sustain conventional minting ratios.

The seal script variety, catalogued separately from its regular-script counterpart, is the scarcer of the two. The Southern Tang fell to Song forces in 975, cutting the issue window to roughly two years at most.