It all started at 11:30 AM on July 20, 2004 during
construction excavations at the Yufeng Town Center Elementary
School playground expansion project in Anju District of Suining
City in Sichuan
Province. A grab struck something hard in the ground. When the
workers went to investigate they found it had broken a massive
stone jar revealing a huge cache of ancient blue-green coins.
Word spread quickly and many villagers gather round
to pick up the coins. Xiong Feixiang, the director of Yufeng Town
Comprehensive Maintenance Office, and Zhou Junwen, head of the
Yufeng Town Culture Center went immediately to the site and took
the coins off to the offices of the Town government by truck for
safekeeping.
Chen Yunping, Yang Chun, Xie Daxiu and Wang Yong,
from the Cultural Relics Administration and Security Sections of
Suining City Museum, hurried to the site on hearing what had
happened. They decided to recover any remaining coins before
nightfall and helped by staff from the school and the construction
unit they salvaged the coins left on the site. After three hours
they had finished there. Then they could start to take stock of the
discovery and what an amazing find it turned out to be. There were
no fewer than 125,583 ancient coins, each round with a square hole
in the center. They weighed in at 504.5 kilograms.
“Never before have so many coins been unearthed in
Suining City and they span four dynasties,” said He Yingzhong, the
curator at Suining City Museum. “They include Kaiyuan Tongbao coins
dating back to the time of the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907), Yuanfeng
Tongbao and Tiansheng Tongbao coins from the time of the Song (960
- 1279), and many coins dating to the Ming (1368 - 1644) and Qing
(1644 - 1911).What’s more, One coin, Kuanyong Tongbao, is Japanese
not Chinese. Minted in Japan in the reign of Emperor Mizuo, it can
be dated to around 1625. Further research is needed to discover how
it came to be in China. It is very similar to Chinese coins in its
shape, pattern and characters.”
He Yingzhong points out
that China was a major power during the Han and Tang dynasties and
had well-established contacts with foreign countries. Chinese
currency was then in circulation in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and
Burma. It was widely copied when local currencies were minted in
these countries.
Elderly residents
recalled that the ancient Shangchen Temple stood on the site before
the construction of the Yufeng Town Center Elementary School. So
why would a one meter deep stone jar, containing 125,583 ancient
coins strung on cords be buried there? Perhaps this was the
long-forgotten secret treasury of the Shangchen Temple.
(China.org.cn by Chen Lin, August 5, 2004)