5 Cash - Shengsong Zhongbao, Li, iron

The Shengsong Zhongbao was issued under Emperor Ningzong during a period when Southern Song monetary policy was under severe strain — decades of war with the Jin dynasty had forced the court into increasingly desperate monetary experiments, including the mass production of iron coinage to conserve bronze for military hardware and to satisfy demand in regions where copper cash had simply stopped circulating. Iron issues from this reign are frequently found corroded or fragmentary precisely because iron cash were treated as low-status emergency money and rarely curated.

The Li script designation distinguishes this from concurrent Zhuan script issues of the same type, a distinction that mattered to contemporaries as a marker of workshop origin.