China Taels (General Values) (Counterfeit) 1880 to 1940

A tael is a denomination of Chinese coins that is larger than one dollar. A few Chinese provinces have minted taels since about 1900, but most of these coins you see today are fakes. The polite name is 'Fantasy Coin' but I prefer 'counterfeit.' Unsuspecting people have purchased these large coins for large sums of money, only to find out later that they are not genuine. Bummer. Never buy an expensive coin from someone you don't know and trust.

The coin in our main picture is from this thread on Coin Community forum (click here) about Chinese fakes, and CoinQuest thanks CC member dans3kgt for use of his coin photo.

Just about all genuine Chinese tael coins show only Chinese logogram characters; very few have English words in Latin letters. For those with English writing:

PROBABLE FAKE TAELS:
Kwang Si
Yun Nan
He Nan
Fen Tien
Kuang Shu
Sungarei

POSSIBLY GENUINE TAELS:
Shanghai
Tai Ching
Kuang Hsu
Hu Peh

CoinQuest has a decent run-down of Chinese taels with the real/fake status. Click to this page.

In the 1970s the US passed a law called the Hobby Protection Act which required all coin replicas to carry the inscription COPY on one side or the other (not the edge). This went a long way toward stopping counterfeit operations in the US. Unfortunately, China has no such law, and counterfeiting houses are in full swing, flooding the market with fake rare coins. It is a BUYER BEWARE time in coin collecting.

If you want to buy rare coins, especially Chinese rare coins, PLEASE deal only with people you know and trust. The counterfeiters are making lots of money and they put some of that money back into making better counterfeits, so coin authentication is more important than ever. Fakes are worth zero.

As a coin collector, it is important to build up a relationship of trust with several dealers by buying low-end coins slowly at first.
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