PHILIPPINES, silver 50 centimos, 1885

DescriptionThe islands that are now collectively the Republic of the Philippines are an extension of the archipelago of islands that drift away from eastern Asia. The ethnic variety of those islands is extreme. Before the arrival of the Europeans some of the Spanish the major eastern Philippine islands were part of the Indonesian based Srivijaya empire. The name of the country commemorates the king of Spain who sent the soldiers to conquer them.Coin collectors tend to be geographically oriented. If they are not patriotically collecting the coins of only their own country, or sentimentally some other country, then perhaps they will collect a region. The Pacific islands that start with Borneo and progress eastward to Hawaii and Easter Island are culturally very varied and spread across an expanse of water three times the size of Asia. Size of these islands ranges from Australia to Nauru. Population of Indonesia 1/4 billion, Tonga 100,000. Coins were made in Indonesia 1000 years ago if not earlier.By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.