Bao Hsin Gong Bank, Remittance Bank’s Fine Silver
Checked by Public Assayer in Tong Hai (County)
Additional chop: Tong Hai Weight: 200g
In the initial stage saddle sycee were cast by silver shops located in
around the Kunmin city, since the 10th year of Kuang
Hsu (1884, 1875-1908).
A few years later, saddle sycee become very popular in most of the areas in
Yunnan. Silver shops in other places of the province started to make saddle
sycee for their own regional use.
Almost all the saddle sycee we may found today lack of inscriptions
regarding name of place. Therefore, we can hardly evidence that which area
in Yunnan had cast saddle sycee, or even prove that there is a place other
than Kunmin did so.
The shown saddle sycee, the only one, I found identifying with name
of place Tong Hai'¾, a city down south to Kunmin for hundreds of miles, can
be taken as an important supporting evidence for answering to the questions.
Looking into its inscriptions, if not being inscribed with name of
the place, such saddle sycee would be identical to the average ones cast by
silver shops outside of Kunmin city. The two were both
using the kind of assayer’s chop without identifying assayer’s name.
Apart from the shown saddle sycee, it is quite obviously that there
should be more places in Yunnan casting saddle sycee, when it became a
regional standard currency. However, we can not prove it from the existing
saddle sycee because those places did not inscribed names of places on their
saddle sycee, as Tong Hai county did.
