The item in the last E-Sylum about Daniel K.E. Ching and Rev. Arthur B. Coole by Bruce W. Smith brought back a lot of good old memories about those two men!

I started collecting Vietnamese cash coins in 1964 along with other Southeast Asia financial instruments. There were not many collectors, and even fewer researchers, in 1964, I could correspond with about my new addiction. And I had no time when I started six years of service in the Vietnam war and also being in other overseas assignments. But when I returned to the USA in 1973 for three years, I started some serious correspondence with anyone I could discover who had even the slightest interest in my collecting and research areas.

One of those people I contacted was the Rev. Arthur B. Coole. He was becoming quite fragile when we first started corresponding and I could easily tell by his wiggly writing. Within a couple of years he passed away. But in those few years, he got my head straight in many areas, and I acquired all of his books for my library.

Then I found Daniel K.E. Ching. Daniel and I probably corresponded for fifteen years and traded pieces back and forth about quarterly. When I got discouraged in a particular area, he would "kick my butt" in a letter and get me started again. He was a great help to me over many years. When my wife discovered he was a single man, she started scheming to set him up with one of our nieces in Viet Nam. He declined many times but Phung never gave up. We was very sad to learn of his passing. We had never met Daniel but he was like a brother to us.

Bruce was also one of those "early" correspondents with me and he has also been a big help to me, even as recently as last year when I visited him and his wife in Sheboygan, WI. He allowed me to dig through his folders and scan what I could find of interest about Southeast Asia. We thought I might find a dozen pages or so but I scanned over fifty.

There are many other "old" guys I could mention like Dr. Alan Barker and Mr. Hung who I can write about in the future, but the small "crowd" of us is thinning down in the West. And the great number of fakes coming onto the market is driving some "young" people who start to be interested in them away to other areas. The one good thing I see are more collectors and researchers in Viet Nam, but they are mostly working alone and not sharing their knowledge. Part of the reason is the distance between them and that they do not know each other. There is no national numismatic organization in Viet Nam at this time because the government has not yet authorized it. Once it is authorized, I am hoping it will bring everyone in Viet Nam and elsewhere together to create a new "crowd" of researchers working with each other.

MC-2 Part of a clay mold for a spade coin from the Wang Mang period (AD 9-23). The mold was formerly in the collection of the famous Ch'ing dynasty collector, Li Tso-hsien, who published it in 1875.

MS-7 A mold for a Ch'i state knife coin, from around 500-300 BC).

P2 Bronze printing plate for a Yuan Dynasty 2 String note of the Chih Yuan period (1264-1294), one of eight excavated at a former mint sight in north China during the Japanese occupation (1930's). This is the only one I know of which is privately owned; the 8 or 10 others known to exist are in museums in China, the USA and Europe. This plate was used a hundred years before the well known Ming note.

PP8 Ch'ing Dynasty printing plate from the Yung Te Hsin Chi Bank in Peking, denominated in silver taels, dated to 1870-1912.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:COOLE CHINESE COINS TO BE OFFERED(www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v14n18a07.html)