[afraidfortherepublic]

I had a round, brass Chinese coin with a square hole when I was a child. I have no idea where it is now, but it could be one of my knick knack boxes. I also have no idea where my parents, or grandparents, got it. It was just lying around the house when I was a kid, and they let me have it.

[muawiyah]

In my quite extensive research into the old square coins I discovered that it was common for buttons to be imported from China ~ AFTER they'd been carefully covered with padding and/or cloth. Larger coat buttons frequently had a Chinese copper or bronze coin in the middle. They'd push a loop through the opening so the button could be sewn to the coat.

More recently Chinese families contributed old family crest rings to the national treasury to help defeat the Japanese invaders.

Along the way many crates of these things ended up in the United States in the hands of a company called BEST (not Best Buy, but BEST).

They sold these rings as guaranteed old Chinese silver rings. I checked out several hundred of them and determined that the greater number were actually Japanese family MON rings. (A mon is usually thought of as a family crest ~ used as a large design pattern on kimono or hapi coats, or anything you want)