Just one coin, but....

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"It is not much to look at - a small pitted brass coin with a square hole in the centre - but this relatively innocuous piece of metal is revolutionising our understanding of early East African history, and recasting China's more contemporary role in the region" says BBC's correspondent in Africa, Peter Greste ('Could a rusty coin re-write Chinese-African history? BBC News, 17th October 2010). The excavations by a joint team of Kenyan and Chinese archaeologists led by Professor Qin Dashu of Peking University found the 15th Century Chinese coin in Mambrui - a tiny, nondescript village just north of Malindi on Kenya's north coast. The coin is of Yong Le (the emperor Chengzu) who reigned 1403-1425 in the Ming dynasty. The coin had arrived here, almost 100 years before the first Europeans reached the region, in some event connected with contacts between China and the outside world. Whether or not this is proof of the western voyages of Zheng He (see Gavin Menzies books) is a moot point. Read the rest here.

What is more interesting is that this coin is one of the more common of the whole dynasty, commanding a few dollars on the market at the most. What makes it special is its context, it has not just "surfaced" on the market, it has not just "surfaced" in east Africa, but is documented as having come from a specific site in association with other material evidence which shows it was not simply a modern loss. This coin decontextualised has no evidential value of anything other than the Chinese cast coins (big deal - we know that). Finding it in context at this Mambrui site not only raises a whole series of questions, but recording and interpreting the associated evidence will enable us to attempt to answer them. It could not have done that if some bloke with a metal detector had dug it up and the sold it with other stuff to a bloke who sold it on ebay to a collector in Alaska.

By the way, Ming dynasty coins are not covered by the US MOU with China.



Photo: Yongle tong bao coin from Mambrui.[Hmm, the fuzzy photo seems to show an IRON coin, if the lumps and bumps we can see are the inscription, it looks as if the Prof is displaying it upside down, and what can be made out of this legend does not suggest it looks like the one on other coins attributed to this reign, but that may be just poor photography - or perhaps this is a stock photo of another coin].