I recently saw a new kind of fake Lao Kiangnan coin floating around on online auction websites. It can easily be spotted by the little bumps around the rosette at the left of the dragon, and inside its coiled tail, as seen below.

Fake Lao Kiangnan

Aside of the bumps, the coin is well struck and much more convincing than the usual crude forgeries found on these kind of websites. For comparison, here is what a real Lao Kiangnan looks like:

Genuine Lao Kiangnan

Any bumps on a machine struck coin should immediately raise suspicion; they are usually artifacts appearing during the process of casting. In this case, the coin is visibly struck, but most likely using a cast die – the bumps are the imprint of tiny bubbles trapped between the mold and the metal during the casting.

One of such pattern coins is the 1910 imperial silver dollar (Kann 219). It features a menacing dragon flying over the sea, with a mountainous shore in the background. This design earned it the nicknames of 水龙 (shui long: water dragon), or more down-to-earth 宣二 (shorthand for 宣统二年, 2nd year of Xuan Tong) amongst chinese collectors. This beautiful coin is pretty hard to find, so I was quite happy when I found the specimen below:

Fake 1910 imperial dragon dollar

Just looking at the picture, this coin looks nice. But simply comparing this coin to a picture of a genuine one, sold in a reputable auction house, one can easily see it is actually fake:

Genuine 1910 imperial dragon dollar

The genuine one has so much more relief and details, that the forgery completely pales out in comparison, contrary to the previous example of Yuan Shi Kai republican dollar. The poor reproduction of the nose of the dragon, its scales and the landscape is pretty damning…

It is interesting though to compare the fake dollar coin to a genuine half dollar of the same coins set (KM Y-23):

Genuine 1910 Half Dollar

It turns out the fake One Dollar coin pattern is actually a decent copy of the simplified design from the smaller Half Dollar…

Here is the coin:

Fake Yuan Shi Kai Dollar (obverse)

It looks great, but I soon started to have doubts about its authenticity when I got it out of its protective case: the reeded edge felt a bit too rough and shallow. Knowing that this pattern coin is very rare, I also knew the odds I found a forgery were pretty high. I therefore looked closely at the portrait and a picture of a real coin sold in a reputable auction to find if there was some visible differences.

Here is a genuine Yuan Shi Kai commemorative dollar (Kann 642a), can you spot the difference?

Genuine Yuan Shi Kai Dollar

If you look closely at the signature of the engraver “L. Giorgi” on both coins, you will find that it is very well imitated, but slightly off on the fake coin. On the real one, the signature is over the 5th bead on the edge, while on the fake, it is over the 4th bead. See below:

Fake L. Giorgi signature

Aside of this detail, the forgery was very convincing. The portrait did not show any significant difference. After a bit more research, I also found that the engraver’s signature on a contemporary Yuan Shi Kai pattern coin, the so-called 飞龙, is actually over the 4th bead. Could this coin be a mule, or a die variation?

After finding this out, I went to the Madian coin market to seek the advice of a professional coin dealer. At the first sight, he thought the coin was real. When I wanted to sell it, he went to show it to a colleague and then came back, saying it was fake. Interestingly enough, it was not the signature position that raised a red flag to them, but the relief of the coin. The real one is totally flat around the Yuan Shi Kai portrait, while on mine both sides of the portrait are not exactly of the same depth. This can only be seen by slowly inclining the coin in front of a light source.