Watch List notes:

JAPAN: RYUKYUS: Sho Tai, 1848-1879, AE 125 mon (33.43g), Isinohama mint, H-6.29, JNDA-138.2, han shu on reverse, seal script, cast 1862-65, ex Karl Adolphson Collection. Karl Adolphson (1884-1971) was born in Silvberg, Säter, Dalarnas County, Sweden on July 30, 1884. He was a lawyer (advokat) and operated his own law firm in Helsingborg, Skåne County, Sweden. He was married to Märta Maria Pettersson and together they had one son, Svante Ullvius who was born on April 26, 1925. Karl was an avid collector and assembled a vast collection of antiquities and coins. After he died in 1971, his widow and son sold many coins to a local coin dealer in Helsingborg. This firm continued to purchase coins from his son Svante until the 1990s. The half shu denomination was a round coin with a square hole introduced alongside the oblong 100 mon by Satsuma, which ordered it to circulate at the value of 248 mon despite it weighing only 10 to 12 times the weight of a single mon coin. The word shu is a Japanese unit of measurement used with gold currency, indicating that the Satsuma government was trying to fix the exchange rate between the copper mon coins and gold currency such as the Koban. Officially, one half shu would mean 32 coins would have the value of one ryo, though this conversion rate seems unlikely to have occurred in practice. The production of these coins was set up by Daimyo Shimazu Nariakira in order to rebuild Satsuma's economy; in total, around one million ryo worth of Ryukyuan coins were minted from 1862 to 1865.

Estimate: 100-150 USD