I decided to make today’s Silver History Sunday on my favorite piece of silver in my stack.
This piece here is the 2017 Chiwoo Cheonwang Silver Medal from South Korea.
This silver medal is stuck from three nines fine silver, and weighs in at one troy ounce. It was created at the KOMSCO mint in South Korea with a mintage of 50,000!
KOMSCO stands for the Korea Minting and Security Printing Corporation. As you can tell by the name, they are responsible for the minting of currency in South Korea, as well as their stamps, passports, and many other government documents.
We can see the Korean god of war- Otherwise known as Chiwoo Cheonwang. The god of war uses magic and weather manipulation to defeat his enemies, and is depicted here with a long glaive and a huge shield. I love the way his cape reaches the far edge of the medal - the design on this coin is brilliant. No pun intended.
This piece is technically a Medal and not a coin. The reason this piece is not a coin, is because the term “clay” is not a real currency. So this medal contains no real tradable value. The currency of South Korea is called the Won. Had this said 1 Won, then absolutely this would be considered a coin, however - 1 clay is actually a term that was created by the KOMSCO Mint, it was used to describe a "value amount depicting the amount of land the medal could buy".
It is also argued that the 1 Clay is just a made-up unit to match similar units used to count medals in the past. Regardless of the actual meaning of the word clay - the unit is not meant to describe anything in a monetary sense, and therefore cannot be called a coin! (I’ll still slip up and call it a coin, because anything that is round and shiny is a coin to me.)
Lets take a closer look at the shield he is wielding. The shield is meant to represent the Dokkaebi. These were mythological creatures, much like goblins, in Korean folklore. They would play tricks on humans using magic. The Dokkaebi were the spirits of inanimate objects like plants and brooms, they would manifest themselves into a monster like appearance and then would behave mischievously and prank people (similar to faeries). There are opposing beliefs on how the Dokkaebi affect a community in ancient Korean culture - some believed they would bring good fortune and good harvests, while others chased them away and blamed them for their bad-luck such as fires and disease. I think it is from the latter interpretation that Chiwoo, the god of war, is depicted with this monstrous shield - to bring fear into the enemy.
