The Scientific Approach to Collecting: Private Coin Collections in Qing Dynasty China - HAL-SHS - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société
Book Sections Year : 2023

The Scientific Approach to Collecting: Private Coin Collections in Qing Dynasty China

Abstract

The 19th century was an interesting period for numismatics in China: one hundred scholars actively collected coins at that time, major collectors engaged in research, and in consequence fifty books or essays were published on coinage. The most important of those was the Guquanhui (Catalogue of ancient coins), an encyclopaedic catalogue of East Asian coins published by Li Zuoxian (1807-1876) in 1864 and presenting Chinese coinage from its origin (7th c. BC) to the beginning of the last imperial dynasty (1644). Other publications included not only monographs on ancient, modern, or large coinage but also essays on minting or dating, and even poetry. From reading these sources, it is evident that as well as diversifying the ways to approach coinage the numismatists of that time developed a scientific approach to a scholar’s hobby, the coin collection. Their work was greatly influenced by the kaozhengxue movement. Kaozheng ('search for evidence'), also called kaoju xue ('evidential scholarship') was a textual criticism approach developed in China in the second half of the 17th century. Ancient texts were no longer considered a source of truth: the authenticity of any text had to be checked by dating it and tracking any change or later addition. This search for evidence spread to philology, historiography and epigraphy in the second half of the 18th century. Objects became the real primary sources for understanding the past. The present article explores the influence of kaozhengxue on numismatic studies. It demonstrates how rubbings of coins exchanged between collectors enabled the development of connoisseurship in the absence of public collections. It also argues that the technical numismatic criteria and the specialized vocabulary used today in Chinese numismatics were invented in the 19th century.
No file

Dates and versions

halshs-04223813 , version 1 (30-09-2023)

Identifiers

Cite

Lyce Jankowski. The Scientific Approach to Collecting: Private Coin Collections in Qing Dynasty China. Christina M. Anderson; Peter Stewart. Connoisseurship, Oxford University Press, pp.41-62, 2023, 978-0-092358-7. ⟨10.1093/oso/9780190923587.001.0001⟩. ⟨halshs-04223813⟩
28 View
0 Download

Altmetric

Share

More