User:Donald Trung/Contradictory sources surrounding the end of Vietnamese cash coins



Currently the sources surrounding the abolition of Vietnamese cash coins seem contradictory to each other, in this page I will evaluate each possibility for their discontinuation and why I added the content to the articles related to this subject (also Khải Định Thông Bảo (啓定通寶) and Bảo Đại Thông Bảo (保大通寶)) to give an accurate image of which sources are more reliable, and why.

"Introduction of modern currency"


The Cochinchina piastre was introduced in 1878 and was subsequently replaced by the French Indochinese piastre in 1885 which circulated until 1952 (half a decade after the Vietnamese văn was abolished). At varying points during this period the French have attempted at establishing machine-struck Vietnamese cash coins with varying succes, the first of these attempts was a French Cochinchinese 1 cent coin simply with a round hole inside, a hole too small to string together which might be attributed to the fact that many contemporary Europeans were oblivious to the fact that cash coins were strung together for payment (as their value was usually minimal, these strings were referred to ib Vietnamese as "貫"), - Minh Mang Legal Tender Silver & Gold Coins, Howard A. Daniel, III, this coin was superseded by the second sapèque-type (cash-style coin) of the French which accurately did have a square hole and had a nominal value of 2 văn, this coin would be produced for decades well into the French Indo-Chinese period (see image). For this reason simply citing that the piastre replaced the văn would be strongly misleading, this information 🛈 was originally inserted into the Vietnamese cash article by it's original author, Sema from Art-Hanoi.com who wrote the article as a stub and this information seems more about trying to lead the readers into the Cochinchina piastre and French Indochinese piastre articles rather than giving an accurate explanation as to why cash-style coins were discontinued, but as this isn't 100% inaccurate I have left all Sema's content in the current version of the Vietnamese cash article.

The presumption that the piastre was the demise of the Vietnamese cash-style coins leaves out the machine-struck versions of the Khải Định Thông Bảo (啓定通寶) had a mintage of 227,629,000 while the machine-struck Bảo Đại Thông Bảo (保大通寶) had a mintage of 98,000,000 cash-style coins (or sapèques) which was easily higher than some piastre-type coins. Now the reason why the Tonkinese $1/undefined$ cash-style coin had failed was simple, it was made from zinc and had a relatively high nominal value almost placing it on par with copper cash-style coins, zinc cash-style coins were produced well into the Nguyễn Dynasty and as strings of Asian cash coins tended to circulate in strings of mixed coins (making Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Ryūkyūan coins a common find in Vietnamese strings, in fact even coins from thousands of years ago might end up in such strings which is why tiền phố (錢鋪) obsessively looked for them.) and coins of various metals such as lead, zinc, copper (pure), alloys such as brass and bronze all circulated next to each other. As the Cochinchina piastre was originally introduced in French Cochinchina to organise the whole văn (Sapèque), Tiền, and Lạng system, the intent was originally to bring order to te fluctuating chaos as one might not always get 1 Lạng for 600 văn. Also note that both silver tiền as well gold and silver lạng would continue to be produced into the reign of Emperor Bảo Đại. The fact that all these currencies circulated simultaneously shows that it was in fact the metal 🤘🏻 and not the coin that circulated, and to the people of Vietnam the copper content of a brass Bảo Đại Thông Bảo sapèque relative to the amount of zinc in relation to its weight would have been more important than the coin itself, and the cash-style only made it easier to string them together for the aforementioned reasons.

So due to the facts that the first Piastres came into circulation in 1878 and Vietnamese cash-style coins would circulate until 1948 I simply cannot say that the introduction of "modern coinage" (read: European-style coinage) as the main reason, especially not since machine-struck Vietnamese cash-style coins remained subordinate to them for over half a century.

"Abolition of the monarchy"


The first machine-struck cash-style coins date from 1879 in French Cochinchina, these coins had the inscription "當二 - 大法國之安南" (Ðáng Nhị - Đại Pháp Quốc chi An Nam) on one side and "Cochinchine Française" with the date and European-style mint marks on the other side and were treated as fully subordinate to the Cochinchinese piastre. Note that this coin did not contain the name of any reigning Vietnamese monarch, in fact Eduardo Toda y Güell's Annam and its minor currency came out in 1882 which was after this, but when written when Toda stayed in the independent part of Đại-Nam (Hán tự: 大南, literally "The Great South") and at the time Tự Đức Thông Bảo (嗣德通寶) cash-style coins circulated there, interestingly enough Toda never makes a mention of the French-made 2 Sapèque coin which leads me to believe that he was either unaware of it, didn't consider it a cash coin, or didn't consider Saigon and the rest of Cochinchina to be parts of "Annam". After Annam and Tonkin got annexed by the French into the French Indo-Chinese Federation these machine-struck cash-style coins that didn't bear the reigning monarch's name got extended to the rest of Đại-Nam. Though these cash-style coins were discontinued in 1902, a committee was formed in Hanoi to create new machine-struck cash-style coins which became the Tonkinese zinc "六百分之一 - 通寶" (Lục Bách Phân chi Nhất - Thông Bảo) sapèques, these coins bore the inscription "Protectorat du Tonkin" in French, and although used the characters "通寶" (Thông Bảo), they did not include any reign title despite the Thành Thái Thông Bảo (成泰通寶) cash-style coins circulating at that time. The first machine-struck cash-style coins of Vietnam that bore the reign bane of a monarch were actually the Khải Định Thông Bảo (啓定通寶) which were introduced a decade later.

In private correspondence Howard A. Daniel, III stated the following - Minh Mang Legal Tender Silver & Gold Coins, Howard A. Daniel, III which leads me to believe that to many North-Vietnamese people the name of the monarch was simply irrelevant, in fact ancient coins from previous dynasties and foreign regimes tended to circulate all over the Cash-style coin using Orient so the copper content would've been more important than the coins themselves. On an interesting note (no pun intended) Emperor Bảo Đại appeared on French Indo-Chinese banknotes well into the 1950's, which means that the abolition of the monarchy in 1945 didn't even keep his face off the paper money.

"Japanese commandeering of copper coins during the war"
As the war spread to Northern Việt-Nam, the pressure to give the Japanese French Indo-China's scarce resources began to give in. At this period in time Japan 🗾 was facing a war at multiple fronts dealing with the U.S. Americans in the Philippines, the British in Burma, and the Dutch in the Netherlands East-Indies while fighting a constant war with the Chinese in China, Manchukuo, and Mengjiang. Locally both the Japanese and the Vichy-French were dealing with the Việt-Minh in Tonkin being a constant drain on the local war effort, as Japan needed supplies they began collecting all the copper they could from the French Indo-Chinese people in order to fulfill the resource hungry needs of the war, the Bảo Đại Thông Bảo (保大通寶) would fall victim to the war and it's production was almost immediately stopped during the war as the Japanese confiscated these coins for stockpiling in Haiphong. To me the war seems like a very likely candidate as to why French Indo-Chinese sapèques stopped being produced, but as to why they weren't produced after the war can also be blamed on the fall of the Vietnamese monarchy due to Emperor Bảo Đại officially abdicating in 1945 (which can almost directly be blamed on the Japanese). As this seems to be a combination of factors I can only say that options (2) and (3) are both to blame for the discontinuation of Vietnamese cash coins, modernisation was completely irrelevant in this case, North-Vietnam still recognised the Vietnamese cash coins as valid currency for some time and this might've been because these coins were mostly copper (though zinc, lead, iron, Etc. cash-style coins also circulated) while the early North-Vietnamese xu and hào coins were all made from aluminium. The Việt-Minh wouldn't have been able to rise without the war and the monarchy wouldn't have ended without the Japanese disrupting the balance of power in French Indo-China, whether or not Vietnamese cash-style coins would've continued to be produced into today (17 D. 03 M. 2018 A.) if the Japanese didn't occupy French Indo-China is a different question, but the fact that the Japanese immediately interfered into the production of copper coinage can easily be attributed as the primary reason for the end of the Vietnamese cash-style coins, though the abolition of the monarchy can also be described as the primary reason for the continued discontinuation of Vietnamese cash-style coins.

Notes 📝

 * This page is not original research, it's simply evaluating the credibility and accuracy of various sources I have investigated to assess which ones present a better answer.


 * I've also heard "independence" being cited as a reason for the discontinuation of Vietnamese cash-style coins (or sapèques) but haven't included it here as the simple fact that they officially circulated in North Vietnam due to The Democratic Republic of Viet Nam Decree 51/SL of January 6, 1947 as sufficient reason to through that speculation straight out of hand as the sole factor (but it does being a contributing one).