50 Fen - Guangxu Pattern

Hunan was among the more reluctant provinces to embrace the machine-struck coinage reforms sweeping Qing China in the 1890s, and this pattern reflects that hesitation — struck to test feasibility rather than for any approved production run. L&M#379 is known in very small numbers, almost certainly never leaving official hands before the provincial mint abandoned the project. The question of whether Hunan ever formally requested minting authority from the Board of Revenue remains unsettled in the literature.