Chopmarked Coins Chapter 3 - Understanding Chopmarks Colin James Gullberg – Taipei Followed by No.15 Issue
Fake Chops on a Real Coin The third, and most difficult type for the collector to identify, are the fake chops on real coins. Counterfeit chops are done to boost the price of a common low-value coin to a specialty chopmark collector. For example, this might be done to a wellworn English shilling or crown, a junk- box Chinese one cash, an old French 5 francs, or a low-grade American Barber half dollar. Here the seller has a low value item that perhaps would only sell for its melt value and by the simple stamping of the coin with a steel punch (or even a screwdriver) can pass it off as a “rare” chopmarked coin. These are the hardest to judge and only by comparing thousands of chopmarked coins can a collector begin to have a feel for these. There will be disputes and disagreements over what constitutes a real chopmark and what does not; I believe even Frank Rose was fooled by a couple of these items. In one infamous case, a well-established dealer chopmarked a large number of coins over a decade in order to increase their value. Hans Schulman, originally from Holland, was a coin dealer in New York City who was in business from at least 1940 into the 1970s. He was quite famous in his day having been involved in the Howard Gibbs and King Farouk sales. Sometime in the 1960s he purchased a set of two assay chop dies from the nephew of a silver merchant, Mr. Yong Kim Hong, in Bangkok, Thailand. These chopping tools were genuine and had been used by the original owner to chop silver in the early twentieth century. According to the nephew, Mr. Kosol M. Udom, the two chops were made around 1930.239 The chops were the name of the silversmith; one of the chops was his name in Thai and the other was his name in Chinese [ 永 金 豐 - Yung Chin-feng, or Yong Kim Hong in Cantonese].
239 See the summary: E. Murphy; Chopmark News, vol. 6, no. 3, (July 2000), p. 14. 240 See Chopmark News, vol. 6, no. 3, (July 2000) for a reprint of the lots and prices.
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Mr. Schulman realized that common coins “chopped” with the Thai and/or Chinese names of Mr. Yung could fetch a much better price in the market than coins without such chops. It seems that Mr. Schulman chopped at least several hundred coins – mostly coins that would not have circulated in the Orient – including U.S. Peace dollars, various twentieth-century Chinese, Latin American, Siamese, Dutch and other coins. The fraud was carried out for quite a few years. Even the Money Company, a leading auction house of the 1970s and 1980s was duped as they included 50 lots of (genuine) coins with these counterfeit chops in their May 20, 1985 sale.240 Schulman coins are easy to spot; there are only the two varieties (the Chinese 永金豐 and the Thai). Usually the chop is located in the field beside the principal icon, usually a bust, on the obverse of the coin. The chops are complete (90-100%), well-struck and were not done in a rushed way a real shroff might have done and will either have the Thai language chop on one side of the portrait and the Chinese on the other or both sides will be the same language. Prudence dictates that all of the coins with these two chops should be considered fakes. There may well be genuine Yung Chin-feng [Yong Kim Hong] chopmarked coins out there, however; it is impossible to tell which ones are genuine and which ones are Schulman’s. And since Mr. Schulman only used those two relief assay chop punches, we can surmise if you have a coin with such a chop, and only that chop, it is almost certainly a “Schulman restrike.” But if you do own one of these relax – prices of these pieces have consistently been strong, often far above genuine chopmarked coins!