NEW BOOK: TAIWAN'S TOKENS

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V20 2017 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 20, Number 31, July 30, 2017, Article 7

E-Sylum reader James Contursi lives in Taiwan and a friend of his wrote and published a new book on Taiwan tokens. I learned about it from a review James wrote in the July/August 2017 issue of the TAMS Journal, the official publication of the Token and Medal Society. Below is an excerpt of that review. -Editor

臺灣的代用幣 : Taiwan’s tokens[sic].
By 袁明達 ; YUAN Mingda. Taibei shi : by the author, 2016.
ISBN 978-986-94062- 0-8. Soft cover, 207 pages, color photographs. Price : 600NTD(1).

Although Taiwan has a long-established history of numismatic scholarship, I have been unable to find any domestically researched or published information about Taiwanese tokens, other than the odd listing in an East Asian auction catalogue.

That paragraph was written in September, 2016, as I was preparing an article on the chronology of Taiwanese tokens. Three months later, the Taiwan token-collecting community was surprised and delighted by the publication of YUAN Mingda’s Taiwan’s tokens[sic].

This book publishes the token collection that Yuan has dedicated more than twenty years to build, and it provides the distilled research findings that he has managed to ferret out from various corners during the same time frame. Paging through this volume is equivalent to taking a voyage through the erstwhile uncharted waters of Taiwan tokens, and with Yuan at the helm, a uniquely informative journey ensues.

Yuan archives nearly 700 Taiwan tokens – metal, plastic and paper – in a quarto-sized tome, printed on glossy paper, and divided into nine main headings. I list these because their format and composition may vary from the chapter titles usually encountered in the west. They include: 1) United States military; 2) the public sector, comprised of public park, telephone, transportation and government-issued tokens; 3) children’s playgrounds; 4) department stores; 5) zoos; 6) amusement parks; 7) hotels; 8) industrial enterprises, which encompasses banking, cruise ship, bowling alley, golf and batting range, and restaurant tokens; and 9) early video arcade tokens. These are followed by three pages of early Republic tokens, with an emphasis on Shanghai; seven pages of miscellaneous world tokens; and four pages of Taiwanese paper tokens.

Copies of the book are available, given current exchange rates, at US$20, plus shipping. I'll forward requests to James. -Editor