Template talk:Nguyễn dynasty medals

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@唐吉訶德的侍從: (Sancho Panza), first of all, excuse me for including so many red links, I was planning on writing these articles but every pirate website I know of doesn't seem to carry any books about French Indo-Chinese medals, awards, and orders, nor of the Nguyễn Dynasty's. So I was planning on writing articles about these pieces when I purchase these books (unfortunately, you can't pirate everything).

Anyhow, there are clear distinctions between Vietnamese cash coins and the various orders derived from them, a lot of people (including a number of scholars) made the mistake of including Presentation coins as "precious metal cash coins", while the Nguyễn Empire did issue some silver and gold coinages most of these were all presentation coins and not circulation coins (similarly Liao Dynasty cash coins with Traditional Chinese inscriptions were circulation cash coins and those with Khitan inscriptions were presentation coins). Presentation coins were the "non-European-style awards, orders, and medals" of the Chinese cultural countries (China, Japan, Korea, the Ryukyu islands, and Vietnam), while all others abolished them in favour of European-style medals, the Nguyễn Dynasty actually kept them, but they combined them with the European-styles and formed the Sapèques d'Honneur.

Sapèques d'Honneur are different from Presentation coins in that they have ribbons and classes like European medals, awards, and orders. The problem here arises is that ALL of the above are known in Classical Chinese simply as "Tiền" (a term that also includes a currency unit, a weight unit, and a silver coinage). Which is why I plan on writing separate articles for the European-style Sapèques d'Honneur and the original Chinese Presentation coins. --Donald Trung (talk) 19:12, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If you happen to have a book about these please start making some of these links blue. ;-)

The largest difference between Sapèques d'Honneur and presentation coins is this:

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  A Sapèque d'Honneur is often elaborate with a ribbon and other paraphernalia like this.
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  A presentation coin is only a coin, it doesn't have any drilled holes for hanging (though most do have a centre square hole like a cash coin, just not the one pictured here), and it's not included with any ribbons.

So the Sapèques d'Honneur are essentially just "European-style presentation coins", but they are different are were treated differently, Sapèques d'Honneur have various classes and tend to be uniform in design, many presentation coins just have random Confucian sayings on them and various forms of traditional Chinese symbolism. Of course, this would've all been self-evident if I had actually managed to get the books to write separate articles on these topics...

Also note that Sapèque d'Honneur just means "Cash coin of Honour" in French, but the decoration isn't an actual cash coin. Likewise most European medals are shaped like coins but aren't actually coins but exonumia ("Outside coins", or essentially "Fake coins" or "Decorative coins" depending on your perspective). --Donald Trung (talk) 19:46, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]