Chinese Ancient Coin

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development of society. Back to thousands of years ago, we can imagine in the merchandise street, people were using coins to buy necessities, such as meat, vegetables, rice or alcohols. Imagine in the fish market, the customer handed the coin to the merchant who just caught a fish and later the merchant placed the coin into his stained pocket. The coin, as a trading exchange, saw everything happened and was not capable to reject its destination. What it could do was just yield to its fate. This tragedy happened years and years, and is still going on even though these ancient coins are no longer used. These poor creatures could not escape, so they were observing. They noticed the sadness behind the happiness, the paleness behind the excitement. Coins are the witness.

Coins examined the birth and death of nations. Nobody is able to say I know exactly what happened since ancient times till now, as no one could live such long. People, such as sociologists or historians, can predict what happened based on all the written documents what our ancestor left for us. But no one can be assured that they are truly authentic. Coins, being silent, noticed all the facts, even those already being falsified. Humans love to perfect everything to enjoy the visual achievement, which is driven by one of the humans’ drawbacks, vanity, so that fake facts came around. I call coins is both the witness or the innocent, and one of the origins of vanity as people’s vanity came from the desire of coins. Being wanted, coins was and is and will be observing people’s love, hatred, hypocrisy when people chase for fortune, from ancient time to now, and will definitely be the same in the future. This chief culprit, coin, is the one of the few could not lie to the past. But it just keeps quiet, as a wiser, who knows everything, but either chooses to ignore everything or just does not say anything.

Chinese ancient coins had been used for more than two thousand years, but no more in these days. Coins are little pieces of history. They proclaim the triumphs and collapses of past nations and civilizations, yet as historical objects come and go, they are relatively inexpensive and unimportant now. As technology updates so fast and people start to use online payment more often, one day, coins might just disappear in the market. It will be really sad if people will eventually forget coins, especially as coins have been accompanied with human civilization for such a long period and have been going through with humans so much. But, one day, Coins might be just a thing of the past.