Indian Antiquary Vol 57

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, Krishnaswami Aiyangar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 63

MARCH, 1928]
CURRENCY AND COINAGE AMONG THE BURMESE
45
Mindôn is also credited with a to : copper piece, described below, but this I believe tc have been a genuine issue of Thibaw.
Iron Coins.. The iron coinage of King Mindôn was in circulation for a very short time. The two spe. cimens I procured and gave to the British Museum are the only ones I saw. So far as their conditions permitted me to learn, they seemed to have been struck from the dies used for the peacock copper coins. I was told that they were forced upon the people and passed for one pie, or one-third of the same king's peacock copper pice just described.
Although I do not think that the specimens above noted were, when first procured, more than 22 years old, they had become so corroded by rust as only to be legible even in a small degree by rubbing them gently and so making the embossed surfaces appear red against a black ground. They are in themselves the strongest proof possible of the uselessness of coining iron.
Pyrard de Laval, Hak. Soc. ed., vol. I, p. 235, alludes to an iron coinage of the West Coast of India and of Portuguese Goa in the early seventeeth century A.D., which he says had a purely local currency, being rejected at Cochin, then a Portuguese possession. See also vol. II, p. 68.
Lead Coins. Lead coins at the time of the British occupation of Upper Burma were common enough, but they had disappeared by 1890, and were afterwards only to be found in collectors' cabinets. 47
Mindon's Lead Coins were of three kinds. (1) Obverse: a hare, remains of tazekto and clearly 1231 or A.D. 1869. Reverse : blank, and obviously always so. The specimen figured in fig. 36, Plate II, is the only specimen I have seen of this particular issue out of which anything can be made. But I have possessed other illegible specimens of lead coins from Burma, which were evidently of the same issue from their weight and size. The figures of the date are not perceptible in the plate, but by a careful handling of the original coin they are displayed. The hare as representing the moon and the peacock as representing the sun, are the crests of the Alompra (Alaungp'aya) dynasty, which claimed (a mythical) descent from both the lunar and the solar lines of India. Its value was probably one-fourth of a pice.
(2) Obverse : a hare and yon tazēktò 1231 (royal stamp of the hare, 1869 A.D.). Reverse : Kyê ni: dinga: 1 4 bôn tabón (4th part of a copper coin). The words are inside a wreath. See fig. 37, Plate II.
(3) Obverse : the same as the preceding. Reverse : Kyê: ni: dinga : 1 8 bôn tabón (8th part of a copper coin). See fig. 38, Plate II.
The "copper coin”in the above cases is evidently the peacock” pice above mentioned.
In letters to the Academy in 1890, I said (p. 346) that Thibaw had imitated this coinage, because it bore date B.E. 1241 -1879 A.D., but Dr. E. Nicholson in a letter, dated 20th October, 1890, pointed out (p. 371) that he had in 1870 a large quantity sent him of these coins dated B.E. 1231=1869 A.D. Plate II will show that Dr. Nicholson was right and that by some error I had read the Burmese 2 (3) for the symbol s (4), and so read 1879 for 1869.
Scott (Shway Yoe) in The Burman, his Life and Notions, p. 299, makes a curious mistake as to these coins, when he says: "The least coins are simply blobs of metal like & spherical bullet squeezed out of shape. I have examined thousands of them, but seen never a hare." This statement that the hare is not to be seen on these coins is a decided error, for as a matter of fact it is there as often as not, and the statement reads like a mistake being made between some local Shân or Siamese issue for Burmese.48
(To be continued.) 47 At the Bangkok Exhibition in 1882, "a large collection of very old and curious lead (Siamese) coins " were shown. JASB. Proc., 1887, p. 148.
48 Lead coins were current in Java in 1618 A.D. Indo-China, and Ser., vol. I, p. 182: in Banjermessin in 1368-1643 4.D.; op. cit., p. 229,