It is necessary to explore the recently discovered one-yuan cloth coin of the first farmer's bank in Chaishanzhou Special Zone, Hunan Province in 1926. This coin was only recorded in writing before, but it was found in the ruins of the local area according to the owner's statement. However, it is strange that after 65 years, it is still as impressive as new, brightly printed and made of poplin with high count, not white bamboo cloth as mentioned in the records. Therefore, most of the opinions in the spring coin industry think that it is a newly made counterfeit.
besides mastering the above-mentioned basic knowledge, we must also know the three factors that determine the authenticity of banknotes.
1. qualitative research
the paper quality of paper money is often different in different times, so it is necessary to study the paper quality to study the authenticity of paper money. Because paper money should be circulated for a long time, the paper must have considerable toughness. In ancient times, mulberry bark was generally used as raw material, and the thickness of paper was increased. At present, all yuan banknotes are of this kind. Due to the erosion of years, their colors are different, including dark gray, gray-green or grayish yellow, but their thickness and toughness are consistent. The paper quality of Ming banknotes is poor. Generally, official documents, test papers and other waste paper are used to print banknotes after regeneration. Because there was no bleaching treatment at that time, the ink remained, which was mostly cyan-black, darker than yuan banknotes, and the texture was not tight enough, which made it feel rough and loose, and the folds were often damaged. In the Qing Dynasty, the official tickets of the household department were made of light beige or white thick paper, which was tough in texture, while the banknotes of the Qing dynasty were made of thick paper and thin paper. One kind of thin paper was of poor quality, which was a shoddy product in the late Xianfeng period, and a small number of counterfeit banknotes were privately made at that time. When real tickets are printed and distributed, they are usually nailed into a stack every hundred sheets, so there is often a small hole in the middle of the paper money.
When people forge ancient banknotes, they usually can't find suitable paper, or replace it with rice paper, and then manually make it old, such as smoking and dyeing, adding water stains, etc., but the thinness and fragility of paper is very obvious. Once this rice paper is circulated, it will be damaged immediately, so it won't be genuine. Some people take mulberry paper and forge it, but now mulberry paper is very thin and translucent, or it is forged by folding several pieces of mulberry paper, which can show the problem, because the real ancient banknotes are made of single thick paper. However, this rule does not apply to modern times. For example, in the late Qing Dynasty, all kinds of banknotes issued by public and private money bureaus were made of thin paper, but the area was small. A silver ticket with a face value of 1,2 yuan was often only half of the official ticket of the household department, so it did not need to be folded when used, which solved the problem of fragile paper. Generally speaking, during Tongzhi and Guangxu years, copper yuan coupons were mostly made of leather paper with darker colors, or yellow yuan book paper and edged paper, while silver tickets were mostly made of white single announcement and double announcement. During Guangxu and Xuantong years, machine-made forest paper was adopted and printed with copper plate or steel plate. At that time, Wanyichuan Bank in Beijing and Tianjin had both horizontal tickets of Taoist paper and red one-yuan and five-yuan tickets of traditional paper. This paper was white, delicate, elastic and as thick as lambskin, and it was a special cotton brochure. It was not found anywhere, so it could not be forged. At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, British businessmen set up Macquarie Bank in China, and issued paper money in its own form. Each paper money was printed from a small whole piece of paper, and the rough edges around it were not trimmed, so it was generally impossible to forge it. After the Republic of China, the traditional domestic paper was basically no longer used, but machine-made paper was used, and the requirements for them became higher and higher. Now, all countries in the world make paper by special methods. In addition to the advantages of wear resistance, folding resistance and toughness, Japanese currency paper adopts the unique plant fiber raw materials in China, and American currency paper is sandwiched with irregular red and blue colored fibers. Swiss francs, pounds and Hong Kong dollars have a safety line made of metal or plastic in the center of the paper, facing the light. Such banknote printing paper is difficult to forge.
In recent years, counterfeit banknotes in Soviet base areas can usually be found to have problems on paper. Since the counterfeiters can't find the paper of that year, they use other papers instead, such as the two-string vouchers of the head office in eastern Hubei, the two-string vouchers in windy areas, the propaganda vouchers of the farmers' bank in eastern Hubei, the one-corner vouchers and the two-corner vouchers of the production cooperatives in Tonggu County, etc., which are made of two pieces of light brown earthenware paper, which is different from the genuine ones. Because Tonggu in eastern Hubei and Jiangxi belong to two provinces, how can So it is a counterfeit currency made in recent years.
2. Watermarking and steganography on paper money
In order to prevent counterfeiting, watermarks are often prepared in advance on banknote printing paper. Watermark is rolled by two metal rollers engraved with characters and patterns, which makes it feel bright under light. For example, there are many different watermarks on RMB, such as square foot cloth, five-pointed star, Mao Zedong head, Tiananmen Square and so on. The counterfeit banknotes copied by the color copier have no watermark, and there is only a pale gray outline at the position of the watermark, which has no transparency. The counterfeit banknotes printed by photographic plate making are also the same as above.
In the process of engraving banknotes, some secret notes are often placed in inconspicuous places. For example, in the textile drawings printed by the banknote company of China Agricultural and Industrial Bank in 1932, there are English letters: A, B, N and Co. It means American banknote company. China Bank's 1941 Dadong version of the Second Corner Voucher has the words China Bank and Tang Linkun carved on the front of the Great Wall. There is a word "Zhuo" in the forest on the right side of Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum on the front of the Central Reserve Bank's 194 Erjiao Voucher, which refers to Wang Daiqing, the public works chief in charge of plate making at that time. In the same year, the 5-cent coupon has the word "Central Horse" written in secret, where the central refers to the name of the bank and the horse refers to Ma Kuoyan, the head of public works. In 1944, there were four English words "US-AC" on the front and back of the 2-yuan certificate of the Central Reserve Bank, which was then passed down as the meaning of "America is coming". In fact, it reflects the broad masses of people's hatred of the Japanese aggressors. The steganography on this kind of banknotes did play a certain role in the era when the early printing and forgery technology was underdeveloped. Because the patterns on the early counterfeit banknotes were always not as clear as the real ones, this kind of steganography would become analog or disappear during the copying process, but its anti-counterfeiting function has been weakened today with the development of science and technology.
3. Numbers and signatures on banknotes
Numbering banknotes one by one is also an important means of anti-counterfeiting. In the early days, the circulation of banknotes was not too large. Some banks with good reputation had to recycle old banknotes every few years and replace them with new ones. The recycled old banknotes were arranged in the order of the original numbers, tied into a stack every 1 numbers, cut off half and destroyed. Once the old ones with the same numbers were found, they could be traced in time until. In order to reduce the number of numbers, which is more conducive to checking, there are generally one to several crown characters before the number, and the crown characters have certain internal relations with the year and quantity of issuance, so as to prevent the coinage of the crown number. According to the report in Jiangsu Yancheng Coin Newsletter in July, 1991, two coupons of Yanfu Bank with the same size, face value, design and serial number were found, presumably due to the failure of numbering machine in printing, so they were both 5264132, which was produced in the special environment of that year. If this situation is found in modern banknotes, one of them will be counterfeit.
The signature on paper money is an early anti-counterfeiting measure. For example, before the 193s, many foreign bank notes in China were signed by the person in charge of the bank, which was difficult to imitate. Later, due to the large circulation of banknotes, the signature had to be printed. Sometimes banknote printing and signature printing are carried out in two places to prevent omissions. In 1934, Denaro Company, a British merchant, printed two kinds of tickets for China Bank in Tianjin, one yuan and ten yuan, which were originally intended to be printed after arriving in Tianjin. However, during the transportation, all the one yuan tickets were taken away by unidentified people. The front of the department was a pattern of farmers driving cattle to plow the fields, so the money snatchers forged their signatures to mix them up, which was easy to be seen through because of the dim ink color and poor handwriting. The Bank of China was eager to put a large number of one-dollar tickets printed with horse ploughing patterns on the market the next year, but the one-dollar tickets printed with cow ploughing fields in 1934 lost their value and were destroyed. So far, not many tickets have been found, but they have become treasures in old paper money.
In the future, X-ray fluorescence analysis can be used to identify paper money, and the composition of paper, ink and inkpad of a certain kind of paper money can be determined non-destructively. This method has been tried in the identification of ancient paintings and calligraphy, and the effect is satisfactory. Generally, the main component of inkpad is mercury sulfide (cinnabar). However, some people made a composition analysis of inkpad on Daming Tongtong banknotes, but the result was a big surprise. There was no mercury element but only lead element, indicating that this Daming banknote used lead sulfide inkpad. Because only one piece was used for the test, it is not certain that all Daming banknotes use this printing color at present. The disadvantage of fluorescence analysis is that it is expensive. If it can be popularized, it will certainly bring great help to the identification of paper money.