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)
I don’t know where this coin originated, or how it was connected to our family. It was just lying around in a drawer and was given to me as a child for my MEAGER foreign coin collection. My grandmother moved to San Francisco as an 18 year old in 1906 (same year as the great earthquake) and it may have been something she picked up there. She was a great saver of odds and ends. I remember she used to harague me about washing my hands after touching money because, “you never know where it has been.”
She often told me a story about when she first came to SF that she saw a “Chinaman with a long braid down his back and long, curving fingernails take a coin out of his ear to pay for his fare on the streetcar.” She’d follow up with a lecture about library books and doorknobs.