20 Cash 1st issue, cast brass, warlord issue

This piece dates to the chaotic warlord period following Yuan Shikai's death in 1916, when provincial military commanders across China began issuing their own coinage with little or no authorization from Beijing. The 1919 date places it squarely in the fractured interregnum before the Nationalist consolidation of the 1920s, when local brass casting was often the only practical means of producing emergency small change.

Cast rather than struck, which distinguishes it immediately from contemporaneous machine-made issues and points to a provincial mint operating well outside central oversight.