Ancient Chinese coins dug up in central Vietnam

Thanh Nien ^ | July 2007 | Nguyen Cong Khe, editor

[SunkenCiv]

Three refuse collectors found five jars July 11 containing the coins and weighing around 30 kilograms in Ham Ninh commune. At the same place a week earlier a local farmer named Nguyen Duc Dung found a pot weighing 20 kilograms containing copper coins while digging on a rice paddy. On all the coins one side has four Chinese characters while the other is plain. Tran Anh Tuan, director of the Quang Binh Museum, said the coins were rare and valuable and had appeared in Vietnam at the peak of the Tang Dynasty's rule. "The money was circulated in Vietnam for trading during the heyday of the Tang Dynasty," he added[.] Dung sold the coins for VND200,000 (US $12.5) per kilo. The other three men spirited the hoard out of the village.

[SunkenCiv]

The Tang Dynasty coins -- Thousands of coins from China's Tang Dynasty era, believed to date back to the 8th or 9th century, have been found in Vietnam's central Quang Binh province.

[SunkenCiv]

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[CarrotAndStick]

Will this finding be enough for China to declare Vietnam a renegade province? The last time the Chinese tried(1979), they lost to the Vietnamese.

[battlegearboat]

Must be Chinese MPC.

[Monkey Face]

I thought I told the gardener to bury them where no one would ever find them....

[Daffynition]

[SunkenCiv]

Vietnam emerged as an independent state (or rather, reemerged) in the Middle Ages, it was a Chinese conquest. :’)

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-52725/Vietnam

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9054731/Nam-Viet

[SunkenCiv]

Salt water very bad for glass.

[Monkey Face]

I noticed...darn...just can’t trust the hired help any more.

[CarrotAndStick]

Thanks!

The Chinese had tried again in the early 80s. They suffered badly at the hands of the Vietnamese.

[freedomson]

Ancient Chinese secret, huh?

[cmdjing]

Leave it to the Bhindians... I suppose this is why China presently controls all of the contested territory on the Sino-Vietnamese border which Vietnam surrendered in the 1989 peace treaty as well as the Paracel islands.

[CarrotAndStick]

In February 1979 China attacked along virtually the entire Sino-Vietnamese border in a brief, limited campaign that involved ground forces only. The Chinese attack came at dawn on the morning of 17 February 1979, and employed infantry, armor, and artillery. Air power was not employed then or at any time during the war. Within a day, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) had advanced some eight kilometers into Vietnam along a broad front. It then slowed and nearly stalled because of heavy Vietnamese resistance and difficulties within the Chinese supply system. On February 21, the advance resumed against Cao Bang in the far north and against the all-important regional hub of Lang Son. Chinese troops entered Cao Bang on February 27, but the city was not secured completely until March 2. Lang Son fell two days later. On March 5, the Chinese, saying Vietnam had been sufficiently chastised, announced that the campaign was over. Beijing declared its "lesson" finished and the PLA withdrawal was completed on March 16.

Hanoi's post-incursion depiction of the border war was that Beijing had sustained a military setback if not an outright defeat. Most observers doubted that China would risk another war with Vietnam in the near future. Gerald Segal, in his 1985 book Defending China, concluded that China's 1979 war against Vietnam was a complete failure: "China failed to force a Vietnamese withdrawal from [Cambodia], failed to end border clashes, failed to cast doubt on the strength of the Soviet power, failed to dispel the image of China as a paper tiger, and failed to draw the United States into an anti-Soviet coalition."