Talk:Western Xia coinage

Why this article is the way it is
Concerning the articles: Southern Song dynasty coinage, Liao dynasty coinage, Western Xia coinage, and Jin dynasty coinage (1115–1234).

WP:TOOLONG version: Before nominating this article for deletion, think about merging it with Ancient Chinese coinage as the only real reason I made this is because that article stops as “the Northern Song Dynasty” and I wanted to fill the gap between that and the Yuan dynasty coinage article I created so others would be inspired to make a “Qing dynasty coinage” article.

Dear reader(s),

I’ll copy-and-paste this exact message to the talk page of all of the aforementioned articles for a clear reason, in draft they were all supposed to be a single article called “Southern Song era coinage”, now let me explain my reasons as to why things have become the way they have, and why I ultimately decided to split them in 4 smaller articles than keep a single article covering coinage from the same era (pre-Mongol era bridging it to the Yuan dynasty coinage article). In brief it came down to the fact that I would think that a single article would do the readers (read: you, yes, you) a huge disservice, if I’d make it mostly about the Southern Song I’d be doing the Khitans, Tanguts, and Jurchens another disservice, the article would look oddly pasted talking about the different histories of both different people and different countries as if they were extended versions of the Song, this is simply untrue and would make the “Southern Song era coinage” article look extremely sloppy.

My reasons for making these articles is this massive list naming many Southern Song era coins that would otherwise not be on Wikipedia, since the Ancient Chinese coinage article stops at the Northern Song Dynasty I had to go there.

One thing these articles have in common is that they combine the Great work done by the honourable from his book “Cast Chinese Coins”, with this link from Primaltrek, obviously having only 2 references (or 1 reference + 1 source) wouldn't make the notability guidelines so I did put in a little more research with each/every article, to follow what I call “the 7 reference rule” where any new article I publish must have at least 7 unrelated secondary and/or tertiary sources/references.

I started to make these articles fashioned after what I would describe as “the sloppily edited” Ming dynasty coinage article. I honestly just wanted to make a very detailed “Qing dynasty coinage” article but the opposite counts for that as for these articles, with the Qing there’s an overabundance (plethora) of sources, while with these sources that meet Wikipedia’s standards are rare to find (which is why I hope that like with TV Tropes 📺 that another user will simply “adopt” these articles and improve them as I’ve noticed that Wikipedia is similar with the whole “withering” thing(, like which had happened after others greatly improved my Bad English at the page I created at “Victimized Bystander”(, also “Disrespectoid’ed Bystander.).).). So far Hartill and Primaltrek are the only detailed sources I could really find. Yeah, it’s my “dream” to start a “Qing dynasty coinage” article which is THE STUPID REASON why I made these, and as I first started collecting Far Eastern cash coins with a Qianlong Tongbao (as my first “cash”) I got Qing coins will always have a special place in my heart, but with these articles the main focus was “indexing” what I would call basically “Wikipedia's missing cash coins”, I prefer for Wikipedia to be a comprehensive list of every cash-style coin ever made, but that requires a lot of work and I don’t simply just want to make “list of...” articles, so here’s my take on what needed to be done, and these 4 articles single-handedly “double” the amount of “[X] dynasty coinage” articles so yeah, Wikipedia now covers every coin EXCEPT for the Qing, but that’s (unfortunately) not on my to-do list, but I digress. These articles are all similar in style because they are all basically “the same article” but then split into 4 early in the drafting (I write e-mails to myself in Outlook Mail and then “mail them to myself” as I can’t sandbox on my Windows Phone without Microsoft Edge constantly renewing and deleting all my progress) so I have to largely base them on the aforementioned 2 sources. The reason I use Wikitables as opposed to the style from Ancient Chinese coinage is because tables are easier for the readers to understand, and easier to uniformly organise. A final suggestion to merging the style would be creating a “Medieval Chinese coinage” article, but the term “Medieval” shouldn't refer to non-European history which is another reason why I eventually decided on splitting these 4 (four) articles early in the draft.

Personally I would have that all of these 4 articles would use Traditional Chinese, but it would be better for the milliard potential readers that I would also add Simplified Chinese so I did, what’s still missing though are the instances of Jurchen script, Khitan script, and Tangut script, but as my cell.-phone 📞 doesn’t support those I can’t add them so I hope that someone who can would please add these scripts, also for a lot of these coins more images for illustration would also more beneficial for novice readers. As these Wikitables are all derivative from the same “standard issue model wikitable-template” I created they all look quite similar, more similar than they should as separate information isn't quite accurately displayed in this “Southern Song-centric wikitable”, in the near future I would add more content to the individual pages, but as of publishing they’re basically just “4 instances of the same article, slightly modified”. Specific to the Western Xia, the “Tangut script” I found may just as well be displayed as “❓❔❓❔❓❔❓❔❓❔❓❔❓❔ ” to everyone, someone with that font should really check it out.

But all of these articles are “just a work in progress anyhow”, so I hope that you/y’all won’t immediately dismiss them on their similarities. As currently my only resource on finding information is Bing News (as Live Search Books 📚 got discontinued years go), so I can’t find much academic sources to fill in more “missing information 🛈”.

What could still be improved:

More sources could be added, as I don’t have the money to buy every book on Amazon about Chinese coins I can’t simply add those, if someone with those books would please add more content that would greatly improve this article.

My grammar, as my English isn't that great, all of these articles could use some grammar clean up by someone more versed in English grammar.

Possible missing coins, as far as I know David Hartill & Primaltrek provide the most complete lists, as I own the “Cast Chinese coins” book 📚, and read Primaltrek a lot I’d get that impression,,but if I missed any coins then please add them.

More economic background could be added.

Maybe add some Chinese (Mandarin, Hokkien/Southern-Min, Hakka, Cantonese, Etc.) sources as those are more detailed.

A section about mint marks as I often gloss over those.

Detail the specifications (weight, diameter, metal alloy, Etc.) of each coin.

Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.

Yours faithfully, Donald Trung --Donald Trung (talk) 14:32, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

Tangut script coins wikitable.
Originally the Tangut script Wikitable looked like this:

Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.

These transliterations are Anglicised in Hartill’s book, personally I preferred the other version, but I’ll post 📮 ”the old version” here just in case for archiving purposes, if someone wants to put “the old” transliterations back into the article they’re free to do so.

--Donald Trung (talk) 14:34, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

Tangut script display. 🤳🏻
Tangut script may not display on every device, maybe do something similar as with Khitan script where small images accompany the text. --42.112.159.184 (talk) 05:10, 19 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Display of rare (or sometimes even not so rare) Unicode characters is always a problem, especially on mobile devices, but using Unicode characters makes it easy to edit text and to find Tangut text using a search engine. Therefore, if someone wants to add images of Tangut characters (see Category:Unicode 17000-187FF Tangut on Wikimedia Commons) the corresponding Unicode characters should be kept as well. BabelStone (talk) 09:26, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

finding sources on this subject (online) is hard.
The reason I made this article, the Liao, and Jin before the Qing because sources on the latter are so overabundant that you can't avoid them, even if you try but on the former are hard to find, on the Liao and Jin I found enough to make informative introductions on the subject but for the Tanguts I really, really can't basically anything, just a few nods at occasional barter and rare coinage. If anyone owns a book on coins by Tangutologists please add that information. Thank you in advance. 😉 --Donald Trung (talk) 00:03, 7 July 2017 (UTC) Donald Trung (talk) 00:03, 7 July 2017 (UTC)