10 Fen - Guangxu

The Manchurian Provincial coinage of 1907 emerged from a deliberate push by Qing authorities to regularize currency in the northeast, where Russian and Japanese commercial interests had flooded the region with foreign silver following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. Control over coinage was, in that environment, inseparable from questions of territorial sovereignty — the Qing court understood that whoever's money circulated in Manchuria held practical authority there.

Y#209 is the 10 fen denomination struck at the Fengtian mint. Survivors in problem-free condition are genuinely scarce; the region's turbulent twentieth century was not kind to stored silver.