JAPANESE COIN COLLECTION AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

The initial collections of the British Museum, founded in 1753, were acquired under the provisions of Sir Hans Sloane’s will, and included over 20,000 coins and medals from all over the world. As inscribed objects, the coins and medals were regarded as ‘metal manuscripts’ and were housed within the Department of Manuscripts. In 1807, they were moved to the Department of Antiquities. In 1860, a separate Department of Coins and Medals was created, where the coins and medals have been ever since. The entire collection of coins and medals was removed for safekeeping during the second world war, but the Department was badly damaged and its gallery, offices and much archival material were destroyed.

Although there were probably a few East Asian coins in the founding collections of the British Museum in 1753, very little attention was paid to them at first. Indeed, the earliest mention of ‘Chinese coins’ (probably a catch-all term for any cast coins with a square hole in the middle and a Chinese-looking inscription) is associated with the employment in January 1836 of Samuel Birch (1813–85). Birch had studied Chinese at school with the hope of joining the diplomatic service, but when this did not materialise he joined the British Museum, where one of his first tasks was to work on the ‘Chinese coins’. East Asian coins were not well understood in Europe at that time, and Birch soon turned his attention to Egyptology, a field in which he became a very distinguished figure.

The development of British Museum’s collection of East Asian coins would take far longer. The history of the Japanese coin collection at the British Museum is part of the history of the East Asian coin collection. Unfortunately, this series is couched in imprecise terminology such as ‘Chinese coins’ (see above), and ‘Oriental coins’ used generally and inconsistently to refer to coins from almost anywhere east of Europe. For example, in a summary document of December 1870 entitled ‘The Department of Coins and Medals. II. Acquisitions’, it is recorded that 3,695 ‘Oriental coins’ were acquired that year, including ‘Twelve copper Chinese coins’ donated by Ernest Satow.

These were, in fact, Japanese coins. At the time, no one at the British Museum had a detailed knowledge of East Asian coins, and in 1880 Terriende Lacouperie was employed on a temporary basis to put the collection of ‘Chinese coins’ in order and record the new acquisitions (there was a backlog from 1865) in a newly created separate register for East Asian coins. The following account of the history of the Japanese coin collection is based on the archival records, and for the reasons given above, is a little inconsistent in places. The most important archival records are transcribed at the end of this chapter.

Today, the Japanese coin collection at the British Museum consists of over 1,500 Japanese coins, from the earliest issues to contemporary coins. This is the first catalogue of the Japanese coin collection at the British Museum to have been produced.

To read the complete article, see:
A History of the Japanese Coin Collection at the British Museum (https://www.academia.edu/1064185/A_History_of_the_
Japanese_Coin_Collection_at_the_British_Museum)

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