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)