User:Donald Trung/Letters to Stephen Tai

An illustration of Chinese silver 🥈 sycees.

Stephen Tai is the owner of Sycee-on-line, a website specialised in Chinese sycees. Sycees are (usually) boat-shaped precious metal ingots used in Imperial China for large scale transactions, while Chinese cash coins were the currency for the poor, wealthy merchants, the nobility and the Mandarins traded in these sycees made from precious metals like silver 🥈 and gold 🥇. Sycees are severely underrepresented on Wikimedia projects, personally I’ve focused heavily on Chinese cash coins, Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans importing all information from every website on them active while writing ✍🏻 them. Sycees to me have fallen in the backdrop simply because I don’t collect them, they’re extremely expensive while cash coins over 2000 (two-thousand) years old can still be sold for around € 1,- which means that I can touch a piece of Chinese history which has been in the lives of more people for less money, although those holding the sycees were arguably more influential.

As I wish 🌠 to lay the groundwork for someone to use Wikimedia Commons to write ✍🏻 “the most awesome piece on Chinese numismatics and culture ever written” sycees really can’t be excluded from this, so I’ve decided to contact Stephen Tai, “the internet’s #1 (number one) authority on sycees” (as far as I know) to ask him to donate him images to Wikimedia Commons.

Sycees on Wikipedia (18 D. 11 M. 2018 A.)

"Dear Stephen Tai,

I am a voluntary contributor to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, I specialise in the monetary history of China, Japan, Korea, the Ryukyu islands, and Vietnam and have written extensively about their cash coins and charms. Unfortunately however information on and even images of sycees are hard to come by online and your wonderful website is the only website I know that covers them in great detail. Currently there aren’t that many images of sycees on Wikimedia Commons to use for Wikipedia and I was wondering if you would be interested in having your images appear on Wikipedia?

Yours faithfully,
Trung Quoc Don

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.

P.S. (Post-Script)

I do not object to being listed at your guestbook, however I request that you would obscure my e-mail address for privacy reasons."

• --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 09:20, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

Consulted method of communication 📡

• hwtai@ms9.hinet.net

Original publication 📤

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 09:17, 18 November 2018 (UTC)