The Discovery of Spanish Colonial Coins from the Sixteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries in the Southeast Coast of China

The southeast coast of China played a key role in the ancient maritime history of East Asia. During the tenth to sixteenth centuries there was a common local maritime cultural community inside the South China Sea. Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, the maritime trading contact with Europeans had emerged, with Portuguese and Spanish navigation to eastern Asia, showing the new era of maritime history of early globalization. Since the Spanish conquest of America, European settlers mined and transported silver abundantly into Asia for trade. In the last 50 years, Chinese archaeologists have discovered hundreds of historical silver coins—which were originally from Spain and Spanish colonial settlements in the Americas and thus related to this globalizing trade—in the southeast coast of China. This chapter puts together a description of these materials, and so, for the first time, sheds a light to the early maritime trade between East and West.