100 Cash

Honan (Henan) Province operated its own mint intermittently through the warlord period and into the Nationalist era, issuing copper cash in defiance of central government efforts to standardize Chinese coinage. By 1931, the Nationalist government in Nanjing had been pushing hard for provincial mints to cease independent production, yet Honan continued — a reflection of how incompletely central authority had been reasserted even a decade after the Republic's founding.

Y#398 is among the later provincial copper issues and circulated in a region that had suffered catastrophic flooding in 1931, one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history, which severely disrupted local commerce and likely accelerated this coinage's wear in the hands of relief trade.