Title: Cochinchinese Coin Casting and Circulating in Eighteenth-Century Southeast Asia
Abstract: While much has been written about Chinese business networks in modern Southeast Asia, there has been little discussion about the coins used in the various trade ports and their origins.Moreover, when they have been studied, coin casting and circulating have been examined mostly within specific local contexts, with only vague references to China and the Chinese.1 In this essay I explore the links of the coin business between eighteenthcentury Cochinchina and the different ports of Southeast Asia.The new evidence seems to indicate that close connections existed on this important front of Chinese business, particularly between mining in Tongking, copper and zinc importing from Japan and China, coin casting in Cochinchina, and circulation in the neighboring countries of China, Cambodia, and Siam, in the eighteenth-century archipelago. china-TonkinA basic observation on the history of coinage exchange between Vietnam and China, up to the eighteenth century, is that traffic flowed in primarily one direction, from China to Vietnam.This direction reversed in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth.Both Dang Trong (Cochinchina, or southern Vietnam) and Dang Ngoai (Tonkin, or northern Vietnam) cast an enormous number of coins, and both types of coinage made their way to China.Although the coins from Tonkin were mainly of copper, and those of Cochinchina were of copper mixed with zinc, they shared two characteristics: first, coin casting was largely a Chinese affair; and second, in both areas it was a collaborative project between the Chinese and the local rulers and nobles.