5 Mithqual - Guangxu Ration coinage, with Arabic on obverse, flower at centre

Sinkiang's ration coinage of the early twentieth century was produced to pay Muslim troops garrisoned in Xinjiang, where Chinese-script coinage was poorly received and Arabic inscriptions carried practical legitimacy. The 5 mithqal denomination — mithqal being the local weight standard derived from Islamic monetary tradition — circulated alongside Chinese provincial issues but served an explicitly different population.

The Tihwa mint responsible for these pieces operated under chronic resource constraints, and the flower-center varieties catalogued as Y#6.5 and Y#6.6 reflect die substitutions rather than deliberate design revision.