People's Daily Online

Recently, Du Weishan, the son of Du Yuesheng and a cultural relic collector living in Canada, donated more than 400 pieces of gold, silver and copper coins from the Kushan Empire, Arab Sasanian Dynasty, the Umayyad Dynasty and the Abbasids Dynasty to the Shanghai Museum.

The most important feature of these donations is that the system is very complete, covering almost all kinds of coins issued by the kusana and Arabian Sassanids. Different from the square hole round copper coin produced by casting in ancient China, this kind of coins in the western regions were mostly rolled with precious metals such as gold and silver, and the design of patterns and inscriptions was emphasized. Almost every gold, silver and copper coin donated by Du Weishan this time is of high quality, with high clarity of patterns and characters, and extremely exquisite.

The kusana and Arabian Sassanian coins originated from Greek and Roman oppressive coins. Their patterns and inscriptions reveal the cultural and artistic characteristics of the interior of Asia. The cultural connotation of ancient coins is very rich, which condenses the history of a nation, including its origin, political system, inter state expedition interaction, economic trade, culture and religion, etc.

Du Weishan began to collect western region coins in the 1980s. After nearly 20 years of hard collection and research, western region coins have formed a large system in his collection. He paid attention to the collection of different kinds of coins in his early period. With the deepening of his research, he paid more attention to the appearance and academic research value of coins, and concentrated his collection on several representative currencies. The kusana and Arabian sassani coins donated this time are of this kind.

In 1991, Du Weishan donated more than 300 ancient Central Asian coins to Shanghai Museum for the first time. After that, he added his collection of ancient coins to Shanghai Museum for many times, with a total of more than 2000 coins, including some rare Genghis Khan gold coins and the coins of Queen Musa during the Sabbath Dynasty of ancient Persia. Few museums in China have collected foreign cultural relics. Du Weishan's donation of coin relics to Shanghai Museum over the years has made Shanghai Museum initially establish a relatively complete collection and display system of foreign ancient coins and cultural relics.

At present, there are more than 40 types of nearly 3000 coins in the western regions collected by Shanghai Museum, all of which are used by ancient countries in Western Asia, Central Asia and South Asia. The times are mostly concentrated in the 5th century BC to the 5th century AD, showing the unique monetary and cultural features of Eurasia inland and South Asia in 1000 years before and after the ad, which can greatly expand the academic research in related fields view.

Together with the ancient coins, 33 volumes (sets) of English and French monographs or reports on numismatics in foreign countries were donated, which provided valuable materials for the academic research in related fields of Shanghai Museum.