I have had the opportunity to take numerous tours of the official government-run Shanghai Mint through the years. The following photos were taken during these tours.





The front of the Shanghai Mint building is a replica of the U.S. Philadelphia Mint. Around 1923, minting equipment from the Philadelphia Mint that was no longer needed was brought to the Shanghai Mint. To honor the Americans who were so helpful in modernizing the Chinese Shanghai Mint, the Chinese built the front of their Mint building to emulate the classic Philadelphia facade!




A worker at the Shanghai Mint in China holds a strip of solid gold from which Chinese Panda coin blanks was punched.




A Master Hub is being made from the original galvano for the Chinese Panda silver one ounce bullion coins. The machine traces the galvano image to produce the main die hub from which all Silver Panda dies are made.






Here I am, holding a tray of major mint error coins collected by the workers at the Chinese government Mint at Shanghai. The coins are all aluminum, and look to be of the 1 or 2 Fen (or perhaps 5 Fen) denomination, none of which have been produced for more than 15 years now because they have become so small. There are a variety of major minting errors represented here, including severely off-center strikes, and multi-struck coins. I did my best to try to get permission to take a few of them home with him, but like most official government minting authorities, the Shanghai Mint wasn’t about to let these fantastic errors out the door easily!




Here is a worker at the Shanghai Mint in China checking out the U.S. errors in my 1983 error coin catalog. My 25-30 year old major mint error catalogs are featured in each issue of Mint Error News Magazine and on minterrornews.com.