page_title: Vietnamese cash
section_title: Recovery of cash coins in modern Vietnam
hierarchical_section_title: Vietnamese cash / Recovery of cash coins in modern Vietnam
caption_attribution_description: English: A basin of Oriental cash coins inside of the National Museum of Vietnamese History in Hanoi city.
context_page_description: Vietnamese cash is a cast round coin with a square hole that was an official currency of Vietnam from the Đinh dynasty in 970 until the Nguyễn dynasty in 1945, and remained in circulation in North Vietnam until 1948. The same type of currency circulated in China, Japan, Korea, and Ryūkyū for centuries. Though the majority of Vietnamese cash coins throughout history were copper coins, lead, iron and zinc coins also circulated alongside them often at fluctuating rates. The reason why coins made from metals of lower intrinsic value were introduced was because of various superstitions involving Vietnamese people burying cash coins, as the problem of people burying cash coins became too much for the government as almost all coins issued by government mints tended to be buried mere months after they had entered circulation, the Vietnamese government began issuing coins made from an alloy of zinc, lead, and tin. As these cash coins tended to be very fragile they would decompose faster if buried which caused the Vietnamese people to stop burying their coins.
context_section_description: In modern Vietnam the supply of undiscovered cash coins is rapidly declining as large amounts of Vietnamese cash coins were excavated during the 1980s and 1990s, in Vietnam the excavation of antiques such as cash coins is an industry in itself and the cash coins are mostly being dug up by farmers. After the Vietnam War ended in 1975 a large number of metal detectors numbering in the many thousands were left behind in the former area of South Vietnam which helped fuel the rise of this industry. The antique bronze industry is mostly concentrated in small rural villages where farmers rent metal detectors to search their own lands for bronze antiques to then either sell as scrap or to dealers, these buyers purchase lumps of cash coins by either kilogramme or ton to then hire skilled people to search through these lumps of cash coins for sellable specimens, these coins are then sold to other dealers in Vietnam, China, and Japan. During the zenith of the coin recovery business in Vietnam the number of bulk coins found on a monthly basis was fifteen tons but only roughly fifteen kilogrammes of those coins were sellable and the rest of the coins would melted down as scrap metal. As better metal detectors that could search deeper more Vietnamese cash coins were discovered but in modern times the supply of previously undiscovered Vietnamese cash coins is quickly diminishing.
  In modern times many Vietnamese cash coins are found in sunken shipwrecks which are mandated by Vietnamese law to be the property of the Vietnamese government as salvaged ships of which the owner was unknown belong to the state.
  Notable recent large finds of cash coins in Vietnam include 100 kilogrammes of Chinese cash coins and 35 kilogrammes of Vietnamese cash coins being unearthed in the province of Quảng Trị in 2007, 52.9 kilogrammes of Chinese and Vietnamese cash coins being unearthed in a cemetery in Haiphong in 2008, 50 kilogrammes of cash coins in the province of Hà Nam in 2015, and some Nagasaki trade coins in the province of Hà Tĩnh in 2018.
caption: A lump of ancient Vietnamese cash coins in the National Museum of Vietnamese History, Hanoi.
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