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5 Mun Sim Won
| Issuer | Kanghwa Township Military Office (江華管理營) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1883 |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
| Weight | 12.0 g |
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| Obverse description | Log in to see details |
|---|---|
| Obverse script | Chinese (traditional, regular script) |
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| Reverse description | Round cast bronze reverse featuring a central square perforation surrounded by four Chinese characters in regular script arranged in the traditional cross-reading pattern: 沁 (top), indicating the mint location of Simdo (Ganghwa Island); 五 (right), meaning five; 當 (bottom), meaning equivalent to; and 元 (left), meaning one mun — together reading 沁五當元, denoting a denomination of five mun struck at the Ganghwa mint. The raised legends are framed by a plain inner rim around the square hole and a plain outer rim, consistent with standard Joseon cash coin typology. The field displays the pitted, granular surface texture inherent to sand-cast production. |
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| Additional information |
The Sim Won ("heart circle") series was produced by the Kanghwa Township Military Office during a period when the Joseon court was scrambling to consolidate minting authority after decades of chaotic multi-issuer cash coinage had badly eroded public confidence in copper currency. Kanghwa Island itself held particular strategic weight — it was there that Korea had signed the Treaty of Ganghwa with Japan in 1876, the first of the unequal treaties that cracked open the peninsula to foreign commerce.
Military office coinages of this type saw relatively brief production windows before centralized minting reasserted control in the mid-1880s.