Nanmutang Coin Casting Site

Nanmutang Coin Casting Site

The Nanmutang site is located in Xuyuzhuang, Lingyan Township, about 2.5 kilometers east of Luhe County. It was discovered in 1965 during an archaeological survey conducted by the Nanjing Museum. The Nanmutang pond is roughly rectangular in shape, slightly lower than the surrounding ground. More than 30 nanmu (a type of wood) piles are preserved, vertically inserted into the silt at the bottom of the pond. They are oriented north-south, arranged in three rows, facing 350 degrees. The current area covered by the remaining wooden piles is 17 meters long from north to south and 13 meters wide from east to west, totaling an area of 221 square meters. The spacing between the three rows is approximately 6 meters each, and the distance between individual piles is around 1 meter. Aside from some localized decay due to surface erosion, most of the piles are intact. Their lower ends are shaped differently—some are tapered into a cone, others into a triangular pyramid, and some have flat tops. The soil layers within the pond contain numerous artifacts from the Han Dynasty, as well as fragments of bricks and tiles. Excavated items include pottery jars, pottery dou (a type of vessel), pottery bowls, pottery yu (a kind of basin), iron adzes, iron axes, iron chisels, iron arrowheads, as well as “ban liang” and “wu zhu” coins. In addition, there are also copper ingots and copper chunks. The Nanmutang site has previously yielded a large number of Han Dynasty relics. Within a 1 to 1.5 kilometer radius around the site, the surface has also revealed numerous Han Dynasty rope-patterned tiles and pottery fragments. The architectural remains at Nanmutang represent a type of “stilt house” structure, where the building was elevated above the ground with nanmu piles used underground.

Based on the characteristics of the excavated relics—especially the large quantity of coins, primarily discarded and waste coins, along with the discovery of copper ingots and copper chunks used in coin casting—it is suggested that this site may have been a coin minting facility from that time. During the Han Dynasty, Luhe was within the fiefdom of the King of Wu, Liu Pi. In the fifth year of Emperor Wen’s reign (175 BCE), “the people were allowed to cast coins freely.” Leveraging his regional power, the King of Wu produced a large number of privately cast “si zhu” (four zhu) half-liang coins. The si zhu half-liang coins unearthed at Nanmutang were cast during the reign of the King of Wu. During Emperor Wu’s rule, this site was still being used to secretly produce “wu zhu” coins. The destruction and abandonment of the Nanmutang coin casting site likely occurred in 113 BCE, in the fourth year of Emperor Wu’s Yuanding era, when “all commanderies and kingdoms were prohibited from minting coins.” Therefore, the construction of the site dates back to the Western Han Dynasty, with its latest use occurring in the mid-Western Han period.