The minting of Spanish pesos reached its peak by the 1790s, producing 24 million pieces a year. These coins with the face of Charles III or Charles IV were widely known as bust or head dollars, and in Asia as the Carolus, old or ‘Buddha Heads.’ These were also known as ‘long robes’ or sikong-yin in China, or sangong (three gongs) and singong (four gongs) in reference to the Roman numerals III and IIII that followed ‘Carolus’. This specie was the forerunner of the American silver dollar designed by Alexander Hamilton in 1791, which replicated the dimension, purity and weight of the Piece of Eight.
Piece of Eight Buddha heads
The obverse of a 1797 Piece of Eight of Charles IV with Chinese chop marks (left); the obverse of a 1810 Ferdinand VII coin with Chinese chop marks (courtesy of the collection of the author).
Alejandra Irigoin and Bridget Millmore
Further reading
- Flynn, D. (1996) World Silver and Monetary History in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Aldershot: Variorum).
- Irigoin, A. (2018) ‘The rise and demise of the global silver standard’, Handbook of the History of Money and Currency (Singapore: Springer).
- Lin, M.H. (2006) China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center).
- TePaske, J., and K. Brown (2010) A New World of Gold and Silver (Leiden: Brill).
- Von Glahn, R. (1996) Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
