Hello all, I bought this Guang Xu tongbao as part of a lot. These coins were apparently glued to wood for the last decade.
It is very crude; measures about 19mm in diameter, half a mm in width and is non-magnetic. It does not appear in either Hartill Cast Chinese Coins or Hartill Qing Cash under any mintmark (though I did see similar private cast examples in Cast Chinese Coins from different reign titles)
Looking on zeno.ru I found a coin almost identical to mine. One commenter claims it's a contemporary counterfeit. Hartill himself says that its unlikely to be a contemporary counterfeit, implying it's just a poor minting. Others online disagree with this, saying it still would be valuable for forgers to cast 1 cash coins even at this time.
If not a contemporary counterfeit but also not a documented mint variety, I'm leaning towards it being a modern fake. If it's indeed a contemporary counterfeit I'm considering adding this to the numisa database but I wanna get my facts right before I upload, and I'd like to know for my own collection. What do you guys think?
