File:Shimasen - Dr. Luke Roberts 02.jpg

The coins on this page all were probably made in Indonesia in the recent couple of centuries. This type is known in Japanese as shimasen or "Island coins." They are characterized by having the Chinese written in a naive style without regard to conventions of character simplification and shape, and look as if they were created by someone who could not read Chinese. 　 These six examples all came from one lot of 29 coins I purchased on ebay. Most all of them were covered in soot of the same color and they included 3 Indonesian Coins from 1943-44. They may have been cast in a fire at a ceremony, left there, and later dug up by someone else. The fact that there are two pairs of shimasen which each come from the same mother coin suggests that they were made not long before they ended up as a sooty group, which I will guess was at a burial ceremony. If this is the case, then these shimasen could not have been made long before the 1940's and are perhaps more recent yet. This Kai Yuan Tong Bao has a fairly orthodox version of the first three characters, but the Bao character is very different from the norm. It is based on the famous 7th century Tang Dynasty coin. 24mm x 1.5 mm