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Samantha Kierath

Singaporean George Lim began collecting coins in the early 1990s and initially focused his attention on coins and banknotes from the Straits Settlements, Malaya and Singapore.
Lim started taking a serious interest in Chinese coins in the early 2000s, and around 2004, when a number of bigger Taiwanese collectors started putting some of their rarer items on the market, Lim got the chance to buy in.
'Some of the big collectors, due to old age and maybe some other reasons, started selling off their collections of famous and rare coins ... They had been collecting for the past 30, 40 years and they kept it for their lifetime. People knew that these are the few [coins] that survived. All were well known,' he said.
Champion Auction president Michael Chou says Westerners were the main buyers of Chinese coins from the 1930s until the 1990s, when Taiwanese collectors began to dominate.
'Taiwanese buyers had been collecting from the '70s but in the early '90s they became the main buyers of all the big items,' he said. 'Then, starting around 2003-2004, the Taiwanese collectors started selling off their collections and a lot of coins went to the mainland, Singapore and Hong Kong.
'A lot of the main rarities came from the West, were repatriated to Hong Kong and now for the first time mainlanders have the opportunity to acquire these very rare items.'



Coins come full circle