Q. David Bowers
I would be asked, "What do you want to see? I would be told, "This row of bags is U.S. trade dollars, this row of bags is eight-reales, etc. They would have anything they thought could be sold. What there was no numismatic market for would be melted down and the metal used for jewelry. The price of silver was high at the time.
I don't know how many trade dollars they had totally. It would be impossible to know exactly. They gave me a free run. They would get a worker to bring me a bag of whatever kind of coins I wanted to look at. I was buying different foreign issues. I could have stayed there forever looking through the bags, but I didn't. There were just far" far too many. Most of the bags had coins other than trade dollars in them, mostly eight-reales coins of Spanish America and Mexico, especially portrait or bust-type coins. As far as U.S. trade dollars went, my preoccupation was with interesting chopmarks.
If I had to guess how many U.S. trade dollars were in that one big room, I would say about 12,000. However, most of the bags in the row after row lineup contained eight-reales.
I don't know where the trade dollars that I didn't buy went. I think a major dealer in the Orient bought quite a few to stockpile. There were so many coins coming out in the early 1980s, itwas hectic. At the beginning, they would bring me a bag of bust-type eight-reales and say, "You can have these for six dollars apiece." There were so many that I couldn't have carried them all, so Ijust bought ones I liked. News spread, and marketers took over. Soon, in the United States bust-type eight-reales were selling from about $27 to $32, which made me wish I had bought more. I think most coins in the Orient were eventually melted down after the numismatic stuff was picked out, for the price of silver was still fairly high.
Among the unsorted trade dollars I saw, probably three-quarters of them had chopmarks. Occasionally I would see a brilliant Uncirculated unchopped trade dollar, but this was quite unusual. Most coins were about Very Fine.
Most of the dates were common ones like 1875-S, 1876-S, 1877-S, and 1878-S. I saw a lot more chopmarked 1875-S over CC trade dollars than rarity indications led me to believe I would. In one group of 40 coins I found three of them, for example.
I don't recall ever seeing a genuine 1878-CC, but there may have been one or two. I remember seeing a counterfeit 1878-CC with a Type I reverse. I had read John Willem's book, and knew that such a coin was not genuine.
There was a funny thing about the early dates. In general, the hoards of trade dollars were nearly all of later dates, after 1874. However, sometimes I would get a small group of maybe a dozen coins that would have nothing but trade dollars dated 1873 and 1874, mostly with mintmarks. These wouldn't be in normal groups or from the normal sources, however.
I remember once buying a group of bright, flashy trade dollars with chopmarks, and each one was of a different date or mintmark, as if they came from someone's collection. I also remember buying a large group of EF to AU eight-reales, with all being of different varieties. This, too, looked like it was someone's collection. Probably, someone in China collected them years earlier.
During my purchases from the Orient in the early 1980s I bought about 4,000 to 4,500 trade dollars totally. Nearly all were chopmarked. I was mainly involved in Mexican and Spanish-American material, and trade dollars were only a small part ofmy business. Later, the supply of trade dollars dried up.
I found chopmarks on different types of coins to be interesting, and I put aside ones that were unusual. I decided to prepare a manuscript on Oriental chopmarks. My book is going to be called The Chopmarked Coins of the Cathay Trade, and it will cover all types of coins. Trade dollars will of course be mentioned.
I had a lady who was a graduate of Peking University working with me translating the chops. Once I got all these translations out and started laying them out in comparison with each other there was a real pattern. It became evident that there were a lot of official government chopmarks. Many official chopmarks from the Chinese provinces had Manchu characters. Most official marks were put on trade dollars in the field near Miss Liberty's knee.
Some of the private chopmarks were especially interesting as they were puns. Some Chinese words can be pronounced three or four different ways, or have different meanings. It's the pronunciation that gives it the meaning, and Chinese people are very into wordplay. So, there would be very fascinating chops, which translated, for example, to "second wife." I asked my translator, "Why would they put a chop that said 'second wife' on it? She said, "Well, because, you'd have to be very wealthy to have a second wife." And it's the play on the words, meaning wealth, that this is a valuable coin.
Chopmarks were applied to trade dollars until the Hong Kong government outlawed it, after which they went into ink stamps. Chopping of coins was done for various reasons, including as evidence of authenticity, or to mark them for use as gaming tokens. I am speaking of various coins, not particularly trade dollars. Chopmarks were used throughout that section of the world by many different countries.
I heard a rumor that Hans Schulman obtained some original chopmark punches, including some bank chops that were quite elaborate embossed rectangular things. He restruck these chops for collectors, so you'll find them on all kinds of coins. Usually they're paired; there are usually two of them. And they're always in the placement for official chops which would be in the field. And they usually chopped them twice. 1 have had one that had one Thai and one Chinese chop, but usually they're paired as two Chinese or two Thai chops. That's one of the few well-known ones. It was probably because Hans promoted it, so.
In response to your question as to whether someone going to Hong Kong now in the early 1990s to look for trade dollars would achieve success, I think it would be limited. My feeling is that each of the dealers would have four or five single coins, unless something had just come in. To my knowledge at this moment, trade dollars are not coming in. I'd be buying them if they were, like crazy. But they seemed to have dried up considerably. A lot of the dealers are busy with other stuff coming out of China, and they're getting artifacts and things like that, which they're trying to sell.
I doubt if there are many hoards of United States trade dollars left. I think that the provisional governments in China took advantage of the high price of silver in the early 1980s and sold their old silver coins for a profit. One dealer in the Orient said that he had seen multiple walk-in vaults filled to the rafters. This would have been a mix of old silver coins of many kinds. Some small percentage of these might be trade dollars, based upon percentages of smaller hoards I personally saw.
Did you know that they still chop-that is, mark-things in Hong Kong? In the early '80s they were having a lot of counterfeiting. One incident reported in the Hong Kong press involved a bank in which an insider was believed to be switching genuine United States $100 bills for counterfeits. To stop this, the bank chopped the $100 bills with ink stamps. At one point all of the U.S. $100 bills that you got from banks over there were chopmarked. I remember picking up some cash at one of the banks so I could buy coins, and I received a bunch of crisp $100 bills, each chopmarked with a fox's head.
In closing, let me mention another modern chop mark, this one on coins. I bought a very large lot of chopmarked Spanish-American bust-type eight-reales from a dealer in the Orient, who gave me the right of refusal. After I looked through the coins, I could return any that were not satisfactory. He asked me if he could protect himself by adding his own secret chopmark to those already on the coins, so he could identify any that came back. I gave him permission. So, chops are still being used.