20 Fen - Guangxu

Hunan was among the last of the major provincial mints to begin striking machine-made silver coinage, its output arriving well after Guangdong had already established the template that most provinces simply copied. The 1902 date places this piece near the tail end of the provincial minting boom, by which point Beijing was already moving to consolidate coin production under central authority — a reform that would eventually render all these provincial issues obsolete within a decade.

Y#116 is not a rare type, but survivors in problem-free condition are less common than mintage estimates suggest, largely because Hunan's issues circulated hard in a province with active trade routes into the interior.