Conservation Showcase: China 1934 Silver Dollar

BEFORE CONSERVATION
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AFTER CONSERVATION
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Some coins arrive for conservation causing an instant visceral reaction. Whatever happened to this coin was most certainly not good. In many cases, coins that cause those reactions can be improved at best but not made to be truly beautiful. In some cases, however, such as with this 1934 China Silver Dollar, what at first appears to be an awful state of affairs turns out to be not so damaging after all.

It is not uncommon to see Chinese coins of this era in a sorry state. Many coins were buried in the middle of the 20th Century in the midst of political and social upheaval in China. Today many of those coins are being rediscovered. To remove many decades of poor treatment more extreme conservation techniques are required. This coin was able to be brought back to a beautiful and desirable state and was able to be graded numerically with NGC following the conservation.