Silver Ounce 2019 Japanese Trade Dollar, Coin from Niue - detailed information

Niue, a sovereign state in free association with New Zealand, uses two official legal tender currencies. The New Zealand Dollar is the circulation currency for daily transactions, while the government also authorises legal tender coins in the Niue Dollar currency for collector's purposes.

A number of mints issue a large variety of commemorative, bullion and collector coins under the authority of Niue. These coins are dedicated to historical or general popular culture themes not related to Niue itself. Many of them are in standard bullion sizes - typically, one ounce of silver (abbreviated as 1 oz Ag, where "Ag" comes from the Latin word for silver, Argentum).

The 2019 1 oz Niue Japanese Trade Dollar Silver Coin is part of a range dedicated to "trade dollars" and is inspired by the Japanese Trade Dollar of the 19th century.

The Mint says about this coin:
The Japanese trade dollar was, for the most part, an experiment to enter the lucrative markets of Chinese trade and in order to encourage Japanese merchants to increase their own economic activity. The coins were equivalent to the Trade Dollars introduced two years earlier from the United States. The first coins issued in 1875 included the regnal year of 8 and the last were denoted as 10 although they may have been struck in the 11th year of the Emperor’s reign referred to as the Meiji era.

The design for Japan’s Trade Dollar carried over from the first silver Yen coins struck in 1870. The obverse side of these exceptional coins portrayed a traditional depiction of a coiled dragon holding a tamashi which is an orb or treasure sphere regarded as a special jewel said to contain supernatural power. According to myth, if a dragon loses its tamashi, it will lose its own supernatural power. The Dragon and orb were enclosed in a circle of dots and around which are inscribed the date of the coin in Kanji, the adopted logographic Chinese characters used in the Japanese writing system.