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NEW BOOK: MONETARY BAMBOOS OF SUZHOU (1875-1949)Craig Greenbaum and John Madlon kindly responded to Ted Puls' inquiry about F. Thierry's book on Chinese bamboo money. It turns out the title is Les Bambous Monétaires de Suzhou (1875-1949) and it's available for sale on the site linked below. Thanks, everyone! -Editor
We know, since Marco Polo, that the Chinese invented paper money, but we know less that they also used other supports for money, such as fabric, wood, rubber and bamboo. Bamboo coins mainly circulated in the lower Blue River valley at the end of the Empire and the beginning of the Republic, and particularly in the Suzhou region in Jiangsu province. Until now, these bamboo coins had hardly attracted the attention of historians and numismatists, even in China where there is little work on the subject. This work, the first in a Western language devoted to these objects and their history, therefore fills a void: it is a synthesis which reveals the circumstances of their appearance and the reasons for their success, explains the monetary system in which they are inserted, describes the environment of traders and entrepreneurs who issued them, and studies the different types. Accompanied by a rich, largely unpublished iconography, this book studies in detail more than 350 monetary bamboos preserved in public and private collections in Europe and China and thus immerses the reader in the daily life of a Chinese province. François Thierry is an associate professor of the University, historian and numismatist, honorary general curator in the Department of Coins, Medals and Antiques of the National Library of France where he was in charge of the collections of oriental coins from 1989 to 2015. He is the recipient of the medal from the Royal Numismatic Society 2006 and the Hirayama Prize from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres 2018. 152 pages. 37 black and white photos and 16 color photo pages
Year of publication: 2023
John adds: "This only covers Suzhou tallies - it is a narrow slice of a larger topic." Ted Puls writes: "Google couldn't find it, Bing couldn't find it, AbeBooks, Amazon books, Worldcat.org couldn't find it, and ChatGPT couldn't find it but wrote very poetic excuses for not finding it, The E-Sylum found it. "Now I am noting some hesitation about the book as it is limited in scope and I don't have a Euro account. Scott Semans sent a reference for an unobtainable Chinese volume, also with a limited scope of 100 tokens, on Zeno.ru." I suspect that upon ordering, customers would have the option of using a credit card, which would convert the price from Euros. -Editor
For more information, or to order, see:
To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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