Zhou Xicheng's “Guizhou Auto Dollar”: Commemorating the Building of Roads for Famine Relief

Abstract

AbstractIn 1926 Zhou Xicheng, Governor of Guizhou, China, obtained a new car from an American Motor Company, the first car ever to find its way to this remote Chinese province. Road construction in Guizhou was well underway when the American engineer O. J. Todd, a member of the China International Famine Relief Committee, was invited that year to assist in its continued development. Governor Zhou had his own methods for the speedy and effective building of roads and recruited local people, the army, and even large teams of school children to assist in construction. It is likely that his work methods had taken their inspiration from Sun Yat-sen's plans as outlined in his book The International Development of China of 1920; plans that Sun Yat-sen further promoted in the writing of a letter to Henry Ford in which he requested the industrialist's assistance in the improvement of the motor industry in China. In 1928, in an effort to commemorate his own role in China's road construction projects, Zhou Xicheng had a coin struck. Instead of showing an image of his own head or that of another luminary such as Sun Yat-sen or Yuan Shikai - as had been common with coins of the first decades of the twentieth-century - this one yuan silver coin shows an image of his beloved motor car.