amuletsChinese charm coin厭勝錢

They start as coins going strange. Yansheng coins first appear in the Western Han as a variant of the Ban Liang and Wu Zhu cash then in circulation, used to speak to the dead, to pray for a favourable outcome, to terrify ghosts, or as lucky money. From the start of the Han to the end of the Northern and Southern dynasties, 206 BCE to 589 CE, most of them look like the circulating coinage; the difference is on the reverse — tortoises, snakes, double-edged swords, sun, moon, stars, famous people, the twelve zodiac animals. They were mostly privately funded and cast by wealthy families for their own ceremonies, though governments and religious orders cast some, and they circulated alongside real money because a copper-alloy disc was worth its metal.

The typologies are published and large. In Cast Chinese Amulets, 2020, the British numismatist David Hartill documented over 5,000 different types. Catalogues sort them by shape, by size, by meaning, by an emperor's name, or by any other shared feature; some deliberately refuse those categories, on the grounds that a novice cannot tell whether a given amulet is a lucky, religious, family or coin type. The standing classes run by function — good luck, safe journey, peace, burial, marriage and sex education, house, palace; by shape and design — gourd, vault protector, open-work, 24-character, spade, lock, nine-fold seal script, fish, peach, little shoe, pendant, palindrome, Ming cloisonné, money tree; and by theme — astronomy, zodiac, Eight Treasures, the Book of Changes and Bagua, five poisons, Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist temple coins, horse coins, even xiangqi pieces.

Some classes are exact enough to identify by measurement. "Laid to Rest" burial charms are bronze, 2.4 to 2.45 cm across and 1.3 to 1.4 mm thick, with the obverse inscription rù tǔ wéi ān, 'to be laid to rest', and a blank reverse; they turn up mostly in late Qing graves. They are often left out of reference books on Chinese coins and charms, because they were placed in the mouths of the dead and are considered unlucky and disturbing, and most collectors do not want them.

The five poisons charms are dated to a day: the fifth day of the fifth month, the most inauspicious in the calendar, when summer opened with dangerous animals, infectious disease and, in the account, evil spirits. The five poisons are snakes, scorpions, centipedes, toads and spiders, sometimes with lizards, the three-legged toad or the tiger, and the reasoning given is that poison can only be thwarted with poison. One example carries the legend 五日午时, 'noon of the 5th day', and the charms were worn on that day.

Peace charms have an archaeology. A find of the 1980s established that the tài píng bǎi qián was first cast by the Kingdom of Shu after the collapse of the Han, worth a hundred cash and cut in a calligraphic style closer to a charm than to the coinage of its day. Under the Qing, charms reading tiān xià tài píng — peace under heaven — became a common sight.

Cast in moulds, privately and in temples, then carried, hung, sewn on or buried. Open-work charms of the Tang and Song were used as clothing accessories, as ornament, and to decorate horses; fish charms meant to be worn at the waist come in under the Khitan Liao. House charms were set into buildings during construction, and into temples; Bagua charms decorate ridgepoles alongside red paper and cloth banners. Palace cash, which David Hartill notes were only produced at the establishment of a new reign era title, were wrapped in a rectangular cloth and given at New Year to imperial guards and eunuchs, who hung them below lamps, and were replaced with new reign titles each time an emperor died.

Collected, catalogued and reproduced. Use was revitalised in the Republic of China era, and the charms remain the best-catalogued class of amulet in this atlas — Hartill's 5,000-odd types are a finding aid a reader can actually use, which is a thing almost no other tradition here has. Feng shui coins on red cord are sold worldwide as of 2026; whether a modern cast disc is the same object as a Qing one is the same argument the dzi market has.