Tampang Tin Hat - Jiu Li

Pahang's tin hat money occupies a genuinely strange corner of monetary history. These cast pieces functioned as fractional currency in a sultanate whose economy ran almost entirely on tin mining — meaning the raw material and the money were, quite literally, the same commodity. The jiu li denomination designation reflects Chinese influence on the weights system, a consequence of the substantial Hakka mining labor population in the Pahang interior during the early nineteenth century.

Casting quality varies dramatically across surviving examples, as production was never centralized in any meaningful way.