User:Donald Trung/Explaining why I created the Bảo Đại Thông Bảo (保大通寶) and Khải Định Thông Bảo (啓定通寶) articles



I created the articles Bảo Đại Thông Bảo (保大通寶) and Khải Định Thông Bảo (啓定通寶) for a variety of reasons, but the first and foremost reason was to clear up the confusion I had surrounding the usage of Vietnamese cash coins.

My first interaction with Oriental/Asian cash coins actually came when I ordered the “old monarchies of the world” subscription from Sir Rolland Hill, B.V. and my first cash coin was a Qián Lóng Tōng Bǎo (乾隆通寶) with a certificate of authenticity, and nothing really more to it, so I started reading the history behind it and I was already amazed by the Qing Dynasty simply because they had a beautiful flag. Then I started reading more and more about cash coins mostly through Wikipedia but at that time the information on cash coins on Wikipedia was really scarce and only contained mostly stub articles with little to no information. Now for around a period of 10 (ten) years I would read these articles but as the only edits that would ever happen to them could simply be summed up as “bot-maintenance”, eventually I moved on from depending on Wikipedia to get my information on Oriental cash coins and found sources such as Dr. Luke Roberts’ website on Japanese cash coins from the University of California at Santa Barbara, Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek/Primal Trek, Vladimir Belyaev’s Charm.ru, Etc. as time moved on I eventually decided to plan to create an article on Luke Roberts’ work which became the Ryukyuan mon article which inspired a wave of article expansions and creations. While researching the Vietnamese cash article I was mostly dependent on the works of Eduardo Toda y Güell in Annam and its minor currency, which was published in 1882. As I eventually became dependent on the Vietnamese Wikipedia to translate things to complete the list based on the works of Dr. R. Allan Barker and Eduardo Toda y Güell, as I eventually started importing the images from Sema’s Art-Hanoi to completely replace his (Toda-based- online identifier for Vietnamese cash coins by integrating them into the list I started contacting Howard A. Daniel, III as I was in Hanoi researching Vietnamese cash coins and found out about VietNam Numismatics through Art-Hanoi.com’s portal. As I was conversing with Howard A. Daniel, III I realised how difficult it was to truly determine the root-cause of the discontinuation of the Vietnamese cash, so I requested more information from Howard A. Daniel, III. He had then provided me with pages from his new book with the relevant information on the Bảo Đại Thông Bảo so I decided to write an article on the subject clearing up the confusion, while researching Vietnamese cash-style coins in the past I could never find any accurate description of how Vietnamese cash coins circulated besides the French Indochinese piastre and where they circulated (mostly in the rural villages, apparently). As I was busy writing the Bảo Đại Thông Bảo article I realised (or at least I thought at the time) that I already had more information on the Khải Định Thông Bảo cash-style coins, although I later turned out to be wrong I had already drafted (half-) an article and had invested too much time not to launch it, as information on Vietnamese Wikipedia on these two cash coins was (or is) scarce and I was basically writing these articles “to impress Howard A. Daniel, III” over my original intent of clearing up why the Vietnamese cash was abolished I ended up launching these articles anyhow, the fact that the Bảo Đại Thông Bảo is the last (cast) cash-style produced in the world, and that the Khải Định Thông Bảo is French Indo-China’s first cash-style coin produced with the reigning monarch’s name I still thought that these articles deserved to be created rather than integrating them into the Vietnamese cash article, interestingly enough these are the only two articles completely subordinate to the Vietnamese cash article. As the creation of machine-struck cash-style coins in French Indo-China and the discontinuation of the Vietnamese cash were only vaguely covered I mostly hope that these two articles clear the confusion up, though I will mostly be looking to expand them with time rather than leave them in the state they were in at launch.

Original publication

 * --Donald Trung (talk) 18:41, 18 March 2018 (UTC)