Talk:Ancient Chinese coinage

Bridge money
I archived the older discussions so this wouldn't get "buried" underneath them, but according to various Chinese sources during the Zhou dynasty some kingdoms issued something called "Bridge money", should I make this into a separate article or integrate it here or in the Zhou dynasty coinage article? --Donald Trung (talk) 15:31, 14 August 2018 (UTC)


 * I would put it here. It is the general topic page. The Zhou page is more niche. 195.89.72.19 (talk) 09:44, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Please also see Commons:Category:Bridge money for the ancient Chinese currency I'm referring to. --Donald Trung (talk) 15:32, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

In case this could best get a separate article, should I reference it here with a minor entry? --Donald Trung (talk) 15:37, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Final dynasties
As already discussed here, no, there was no good reason to cut off the article in the middle of the Song dynasty. The original editors just got bored at that point. The correct application of the English word "ancient" would mean this should only cover pre-Qin currency, and everything else from Qin to Qing should be shunted to an Imperial Chinese coinage article. Imperial's favored since it extends both earlier and later than medieval + everyone feels awkward applying temporal divisions based on European history onto China's completely different system.

The problem is that the people most interested in the topic are obviously English-speaking Chinese and they tend to calque over 古, which is China's word for ancient but gets used for everything all the way up until 1912.

Either version is fine: (a) Refocus this article only on the preimperial coinage + shunt everything else together at Imperial Chinese coinage or (b) just use this article to cover everything up to the fall of the Qing. The thing it was previously doing ending in the mid-Song was just an accident of lazy editing and shouldn't be maintained in any way for any reason. (Of course, the Yuan, Ming, and Qing have their own fleshed out articles. Whatever goes here should just be an overview linking to those. That also applies to most of the other dynasties of course.) — Llywelyn II

Formatting
No, we don't need to gloss (Chinese: ...) in front of the Chinese text the entire way down that page; we never need (pinyin: ...) ever since it's our default romanization and goes without saying; and pinyin isn't a separate language and should be separated by a comma instead of a semicolon from the characters. The detailed Chinese forms of the main topics should use infobox chinese templates on the right. The very first Chinese gloss can use zh if necessary, but everything else down the rest of the page should be using  so people can see what the Chinese is, click through to Wiktionary for more details, and quickly get the pinyin if needed.

Similarly, no, you don't ever need to write pinyin (, pīnyīn). If you've italicized that first term, it's already foreign text and that's already where the tone marks should go: pīnyīn. You generally keep the Chinese characters out of the running text but it's different if you're talking about the exact inscriptions: ...the coins are inscribed (pīnyīn)... It's only if you have some conventional English alternative that you need to provide a romanization and then run through the rest: ... the Chuyi dynasty minted PY coins (, pīnyīn)... — Llywelyn II   05:19, 29 December 2022 (UTC)