The “Evil-Warding Sword”
a Numismatic or Religious Artefact?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35469/poligrafi.2022.350Keywords:
Chinese cash-coins, coin-sword , bixie jian, numismatics, religious and superstitious practices, Ivan Skušek Jr., Peter Baptist TurkAbstract
China boasts a long and rich tradition of using money and numismatic objects as part of popular religious and superstitious practices. Chinese coin-swords, the so-called bixie jian (避邪劍) or “evil-warding swords,” certainly represent some of the most curious objects of the kind. They enjoyed great popularity during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), toward the end of which they also found their way into the possessions of European collectors and individuals who visited China at the time.
The Slovene Ethnographic Museum in Ljubljana holds two specimens of Chinese coin-swords – one is believed to have belonged to Ivan Skušek Jr., an Austro- -Hungarian naval officer as well as an enthusiastic collector of Chinese antiques and cash-coins, and the other to Peter Baptist Turk, a Christian missionary who saw Chinese society of the time mainly through the prism of local religions and superstitions. How did each of them view their sword? And, speaking from a broader perspective, how did the role and identity of Chinese coin-swords change after they had been transferred into a secondary, European environment? In other words, how were they understood by their new owners? How do European museums categorise them today? Do they belong to the domain of numismatics or religion? Or do “evil-warding swords” fall into the category of those objects whose specific nature makes them defy all kinds of museum classification?stract
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